If you’re looking to find ways to improve your bottom line or are facing complex problems within your organization, it may be worth looking first at the diversity of your workplace. Workplace diversity is more than just the right thing to do to make society more integrated and just. It can also produce bonuses. What follows will be a look into what a diversity bonus is, how your business can identify where these bonuses might exist, and how to leverage a diverse team of thinkers to increase the potential for bonuses.
What is a Diversity Bonus?
A diversity bonus (a term used by Scott E. Page, author of The Diversity Bonus) is the increase in performance that results from cognitive diversity. When we think of the individual members that comprise a team, they each bring tools; different frameworks, heuristics, models, categories, and representations. Each tool no matter the size contributes to the project. The team’s collective performance includes a quantifiable, measurable diversity bonus.
Examples of diversity bonuses abound:
When multiple people make predictions, their collective error (the error of their average guess) depends in equal amounts on their average error and the diversity of their predictions. If everyone makes the same prediction, the group would be as accurate as the average person. If they make different predictions, the crowd is more accurate than the average person. In one study involving thousands of predictions by professional economists, the crowd was better than the average economist by 21%. That 21% is the diversity bonus.[1]
Being stuck on a problem can be frustrating. Having employees with diverse representations create what Stuart Kauffman called different adjacent possibles. When someone else presents a new adjacent possibility and helps get you unstuck, it has created a diversity bonus.
Creative tasks also produce similar bonuses. A creative team requires creative people; it also requires diversity. Think about it, if a creative team consists of only people who have the same ideas, then the whole only equal the parts. However, differing ideas will produce a diversity bonus!
Interwoven diversities
This argument of diversity bonuses rests on cognitive diversity, e.g. knowledge bases, categories, heuristics, causal models and frameworks. Though when most people refer to diversity, they mean identity diversity, e.g. race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
While identity diversity matters, it is also not the only contributor to cognitive diversity. Our social networks, personal preferences, work activities, formal training, and experiences all contribute to our mode of thinking. How much identity interacts with and contributes in any one instance will vary. Discussions in policymaking, healthcare, and the judicial system will likely hold more weight towards identity than, say, assembling engines in an automotive plant.
Producing diversity bonuses for your business
As a consultancy, Campfire has operated in large part around providing effective solutions through working in teams. Being a still-relatively small company has allowed us to pull ideas from our collective pool to accomplish complex tasks. We have also made strides to improve as a company through the creation of a Diversity Forum; where we discuss topics related to our industry as well as the current affairs in the U.S. and abroad. Lastly, Campfire has recognized the need to level-up our knowledge base around diversity and inclusion. As such, we have participated in implicit bias training to help round us out.
Campfire recognizes this as a complex and ongoing initiative to better our company and surrounding communities. We’re striving to create diversity bonuses within our doors, as well as exhibiting the potential benefits to our clients. The real bonus comes from the connections you build with your team and that can’t be measured.
[1] Scott E. Page on The Diversity Bonus; Oct. 2nd, 2017; https://web.archive.org/web/20180713122348/http://blog.press.princeton.edu/2017/10/02/scott-e-page-on-the-diversity-bonus/