How does diversity help a project?
Whether we are talking about the evolution of finches in the Galápagos Islands or the evolution of the software projects that we work on, my sense is that diversity offers its greatest benefit during a crisis. The worst thing about monoculture is the powerful reward it offers to pathogens. Or, as Wikipedia says:
The dependence on monoculture crops can lead to large scale failures when the single genetic variant or cultivar becomes susceptible to a pathogen or when a change in weather patterns occur.
Extending that as a metaphor for business, groupthink (a monoculture of thought) can lead to catastrophic failure when some foundational assumption of the group is proven wrong. A monoculture of thought offers a powerful reward to pathogenic behavior. Consider the meltdown at Enron, where top executives all agreed on the profitability of reckless energy trades, and they continued to agree with each other almost till the very moment company declared bankruptcy. Likewise, the top executives at AIG were certain that they had distributed risk in a such a way that the downside of that risk would never catch up with them. – people with dissident viewpoints were squeezed out of their jobs. Or consider the 40 year decline of the United States auto industry, an industry that has suffered more than most from groupthink and inaccurate assumptions. The executives of the 1970s and 1980s felt, despite the gathering evidence, that price was more important to Americans than quality, and that quality automatically meant expensive, and so they lost a generation of car buyers.
A corporate culture that values homogeneity is at grave risk of punishing non-conformists. A good manager is always on guard against the kinds of social bullying, however subtle, that can cause people to censor their opinions. This is a basic task of risk management: reduce risk by challenging core assumptions. Make sure divergent view points are heard.
I should add, if you are working at a new start-up, struggling to find its place in the world, you should treat every day as a crisis.
Genetic diversity allows a population multiple avenues to move forward when a radical change in the external environment dooms the existing species, in their current forms. Genetic diversity helps facilitate the transformation of sub-sections of those populations to evolve into new forms. Likewise, when a corporation faces a crisis, having a diverse range of opinions is healthy, and the more those differences of opinions reach down to core assumptions, the healthier. In boom times, such diversity of opinion could potentially be viewed as annoyingly disruptive of the good times, but in a crisis, what’s needed is the maximum of diversity: in viewpoint, in history, in current circumstances, in goals, in future expectations, etc.
In theory, a genius of a manager could possibly assemble a team made up solely of white males, which still had enough diversity of opinion to perform well in a crisis, but as a practical matter, the most reliable way to put together a diverse team is to recruit people from different backgrounds, different genders, different races and, where possible, different countries.
I regard the cultivation of diversity on a project as a fundamental survival technique, so I devote a lot of time to recruiting newcomers to the field of programming. And so, I read with interest Kirrily Robert’s discussion of recruiting women to work on an open source project (what follows is from Robert’s blog post):
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I surveyed women on the Dreamwidth and AO3 projects and asked them about their experiences. You can read a fuller report of their responses on my earlier blog post, Dispatches from the revolution.
One of the first things I asked them was whether they had previously been involved in open source projects. They gave answers like:
I’d never contributed to an open source project before, or even considered that I could.
I didn’t feel like I was wanted.
I never got the impression that outsiders were welcome.
I considered getting involved in Debian, but the barriers to entry seemed high.
Those who got a little further along still found it hard to become productive on those projects:
It’s kind of like being handed a box full of random bicycle parts: it doesn’t help when you don’t know how they go together and just want to learn how to ride a bike.
People without a ton of experience get shunted off to side areas like docs and support, and those areas end up as the ladies’ auxiliary.
But on Dreamwidth and AO3…
What I like most is that there isn’t any attitude of “stand aside and leave the code to the grown-ups”. If there’s something that I’m able to contribute, however small, then the contribution is welcome.
And this one, which is my favourite:
Deep down, I had always assumed coding required this kind of special aptitude, something that I just didn’t have and never would. It lost its forbidding mystique when I learned that people I had assumed to be super-coders (surely born with keyboard attached!) had only started training a year ago. People without any prior experience! Women! Like me! Jesus! It’s like a barrier broke down in my mind.
So, what can we learn from this? Well, one thing I’ve learnt is that if anyone says, “Women just aren’t interested in technology” or “Women aren’t interested in open source,” it’s just not true. Women are interested, willing, able, and competent. They’re just not contributing to existing, dare I say “mainstream”, open source projects.
And this is great news! It’s great news for new projects. If you are starting up a new open source project, you have the opportunity to recruit these women.