score one for the bleeding heart liberals

[miriamjoyce]

Diversity is not just a feel good thing. It makes organizations more productive. Like even more productive than just putting all the smartest/best at whatever you're doing people together.

"What the model showed was that diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving problems. The reason: the diverse

Comments

[bmenyuk]

placeholder is in my living room at the moment. I should be asleep. And, yet, I should respond to this post, so, I will. The phenomenon you and the New York Times describe has been known at least since the early 1960's and the Kennedy Administration. The Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco is known as a glaring example of Groupthink. When I arrived at my current position, a Caucasian Male educated at an Upstate New York technical University surrounded by Caucasian Males educated at Upstate New York technical Universities, I could not help but think that something might, possibly, be amiss. As a creative person, we are taught to look at different ways of solving a problem, yet here I was with a dozen folks showing me the same solution to any given problem 12 times over

[chezjake]

Good article. Of course, it's necessary for the organization/group to enable its diverse members to speak up and offer their opinions.

I also think that just exposing kids to a wide diversity of people, social and economic groups, and living styles as they grow up can help them more easily see the problems they face with multiple points of view.

Diversity book

[iccubis]

I am actuly reading this book called "The trubble with diversity: How we learned to love identity and ignore inequality".
I'm only about halfway through the book right now, but he brings up a lot of interesting points on what right now we are thinking of as diversity is of cultures and not economic status. For instance even though Harvard has done a good job at getting more people that have different cultural backgrounds, inequality is still there because a disproportionate number of people that go to Harvard are coming from backgrounds that are considered upper middle class and above.
The writer works at University of Illinois in Chicago in the English department. He talks about the diversity of the students in his department and also talks about how they have more in common with each other because of their economic level than they do with somebody at Harvard that shares their same skin tone or culture.

Re: Diversity book

[miriamjoyce]

Yeah, you will note that I said nothing about racial diversity in particular, and in fact if you read the NYT article, the guy who did the research specifically acknowledges this point, and says the idea is to have people who *think differently* from each other. You can't predict that by identity groups necessarily, especially as compared to class, but identity also does affect it.