Like many other professional advisers in business, Lucent talks a lot about diversity. We sometimes think that some of you think we talk about it too much. Yet this past week has presented some good examples of why diversity is important and that things are more likely to go wrong without it. The first is the rather sad case of an arrest of one of David Cameron’s senior Downing Street advisers, allegedly for child pornography offences. While we clearly can’t make any judgements specifically about this case, it did remind me of an observation someone made to me recently. This was that when making new appointments, the scrutiny of candidates tends to diminish at senior levels, when knowledge of reputation and experience often become substitutes for a thoughtful selection process. If you add to this an operating context where most people are from similar backgrounds, are aware of each other and many are personal friends and contacts, the opportunities for challenge can be even fewer. The lack of diversity can conspire to unwittingly trip us up.
The second reminder came to me by way of the Horizon programme called ‘’How You Really Make Decisions’’ (available on iPlayer and well worth watching). The programme talked about and demonstrated through experiments some of the different biases that humans are prey to. Anyone who’s read even a basic psychology textbook will probably know about some of these biases. They, like us, will also be familiar with the tendency to shrug biases off and think that knowing about them means that we will not be fooled by them. But what this particular programme did beautifully was show just how hard wired they are and how we are fooling ourselves if we think we can evade them. And again, this is where diversity is so important. If organisations are populated by similar sorts of people from similar backgrounds, they are much more likely to be subject to poor decision making and Groupthink. Returning to Downing Street for a moment, this is perfectly illustrated by the run to the war in Iraq where confirmatory bias was widely displayed. And there are lots of other examples of this on a less grand scale. Diversity is a very important weapon in helping organisations get to the top of their game.
