The Power of Diversity
Nurturing diversity can prevent groupthink
"Diversity Clucks" by chrisjfry is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
In June 2017, a fire in Grenfell Tower in West London killed 72 people and injured 70 more. It was the worst residential fire in the UK since World War II and led to an investigation into the building’s cladding. Efforts are being made to replace the cladding on similar towers across the UK.
The fire broke out at night and the tower didn’t have a central fire alarm. Luckily, it was during Ramadam. Many Muslim residents were awake for suhur, the pre-dawn meal. They were able to alert their neighbours. In total, 223 residents managed to escape from the fire.
While there is obviously much to criticize about the Grenfell Tower tragedy, there is also an upbeat lesson. Many lives were saved by the fact that some residents were awake while others slept. This is the power of diversity. The world is unpredictable, so letting some people live their lives differently from the majority can yield unexpected benefits.
The great liberal philosopher Karl Popper taught us that a free society will always be a diverse society. However, diversity makes some people uncomfortable. They will often form political movements or recruitment structures that value homogeneity above all else.
Journalist Simon Kuper has written an excellent book called Chums about the clique of former public schoolboys and Oxford graduates around Boris Johnson, who plotted Brexit. One of the quotes that stuck in my mind from the book came from Johnson’s sister, Rachel, who said that the prizes were handed out “in a ceremony that 99% of the population didn’t know was even taking place.”
It should be obvious that attracting talent from such a narrow pool can quickly lead to groupthink and poor decisions. In this case, the decision-makers behind Leave came from highly privileged backgrounds. This made them too blasé about the impact of macro-economic shocks on ordinary people. Inviting a few people who had grown up in poverty and attended university later in life might well have changed the mood as the politicians crafted their narratives.
Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a resident of Barcelona and a critic of the Catalan independence movement, which is often characterized by homogeneity and groupthink. We can see an example of the extreme lack of diversity in nationalist ranks from 2015, when the two main separatist parties joined forces in the regional elections in a new temporary platform called Junts pel Sí. Out of the top 40 candidates for Junts, only two of them had surnames which are commonly found in the rest of Spain.
This is particularly shocking because the 33 most common surnames in Barcelona are standard Spanish ones, with García, Martínez, López, Sánchez and Rodríguez in the top five places. The surnames are so common that up to 9% of the Catalan population has one of them in first place (Spaniards have two surnames). In 2015, none of the 102 people who had served as regional ministers during democracy had one of these surnames. The chances of this happening without discrimination would be less than 0.02%.
The movement’s groupthink is almost certainly a direct result of its hostility to diversity. It is difficult to imagine the movement making Quim Torra regional president if its leadership included more people who had grown up in Spanish-speaking homes. These people would have been able to tell the native speakers of Catalan who form the base of the movement just how offensive Torra’s comments about it being “unnatural” to speak Spanish in Barcelona really were.
Both the examples we have looked at so far come from the hard right. However, the left can be just as guilty of shallow talent pools. For example, let’s look at the the left-wing coalition government formed by Spanish Socialist Pedro Sánchez in 2019. At the time, only one member of his 17-strong cabinet had ever worked in the private sector. The situation has barely improved since.
Drawing talent from such a shallow pool has made it much harder for Sánchez’s government to resist anti-business narratives from populist-left members of the coalition, as well as raising the risks of groupthink. If a handful of ministers had experience as self-employed workers before entering government, they would be able to push back against a controversial proposal to ramp up taxes on successful freelancers.
The lessons of this week’s post should be clear: Build diverse teams; encourage dissent; and have vigorous debates about controversial issues; but don’t expect easy answers to these debates. Welcome polite criticism. Don’t over-react on social media if you find out that your friends disagree with you on core issues. There is no need to form a mob!
This week’s column mentions Catalan nationalism, so the comments are closed for the week. True believers in the movement often see critics of independence as a threat to be converted or silenced. This is no fun at all for people who believe in fact-checking their narratives. A little friendly feedback is clearly good, but mobs abuse the spirit of openness that I am defending in this post. If you are a Catalan nationalist and you think I am wrong, why not open a Substack and write a post linking to and engaging with my criticism? See you next week!
Further Reading
Chums by Simon Kuper
Identity and Violence by Amartya Sen
An article on diversity in mergers and acquisitions
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Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.