Creating diversity creates creativity

Diversity is a loaded term that carries with it enormous baggage and has much emotion attached to it. Yet it is essential for many aspects of competitive advantage in the 21st century that we build a passion for differences into our corporate cultures.

This is part of ensuring organisations are ready to respond to challenges and take advantage of opportunity. Organisations that value difference at every level will have an increasing advantage in the connection economy.

To build a culture that values difference requires an understanding of existing paradigms, as well as the emerging theory of conducting business. We need to create a new lexicon of 'important' words that have until now been frowned upon by our paradigm. We need to move from:

Harmony towards disruption (and reframe disruption as conflict which is "not destructive")
Certainty towards paradox (and reframe paradox as "not wishy-washy")
Homogenous towards heterogeneous (and reframe heterogeneous as "not selling out")
Alignment towards creativity (and reframe creativity as "not chaos")

From a business point of view, diversity presents itself in two broad guises. The first being that of a threat, impeding the efficiency and progress of a business and the other as opportunity; opportunity that enhances the creative ability of a group of people approaching old and current paradigms with a new instant competency.

In the early 1900's Henry Ford reached the pinnacle of the Industrial Era with the quantum leap that his assembly line represented. His was a world of efficiency which was attained through people. He is remembered for saying: "All I need is a good pair of hands. It's a pity they come attached to a human being."

Machines were not able to run the lines on their own. People in this environment had no ability to be creative, think outside of the box, nor make fine adjustments to meet deadlines. People were critical to the process, and we've kept this paradigm close to how we view the people within our business today.

This view of the relationship between people and efficiency has pervaded our approach to management - top down; hierarchical; command and control and some. However we are no longer as reliant on people for efficiency as in the past. Certainly people can slow down our operations, but our systems, machines, and IT infrastructure is far more capable than it used to be.
Therein lies the opportunity. We now have the luxury of re-deploying our people into more creative roles, where they can think more freely about our business, choose opportunities to interact with our customers, assist our machines and systems to find better, more efficient ways of doing things.

In order to do this we need to move away from the efficiency/people paradigm of the Industrial Era toward a people/creativity paradigm of the Connection Era.

This shift has not been driven by diversity, but diversity plays an important role in enabling us to create thoughts and ideas we've not been able to before. It is also a pre-requisite for resilience in the world of rapid and continuous change.

If business is able to move to a new paradigm - one that accepts diversity as a key component of our society, and sees people less as 'machine like', therefore not needing to be controlled, and more as creative resources with the capacity to innovate - one can only imagine the potential that can be un-locked as we re-deploy our people into new areas of responsibility.