The Stagnant Winds of Change

While we try to maintain an optimistic tone on this blog with regards to enacting change, we occasionally come across areas within our culture and society that are simply lagging- and must be discussed. This week, I was sent a news article and watched a short movie that was just stunning. The film, A Girl Like Me, is a 2006 recreation of the famous experiments run by Dr. Kenneth Clarke in 1939. The filmmaker is a talented 17 year-old named Kiri Davis. In the movie, black children are asked their preference between black and white dolls. The findings of this movie, echo the findings of Clarke’s experiment and expose that little has changed over time. The filmmaker becomes a change agent as she is looking at the problem horizontally and hoping to find a new conclusion. Sadly she did not.

Rather than recap what the movie states, watch the two short clips below. They speak for themselves. They speak volumes.

• The KOMO-TV news report.
• The full 8-Minute Kiri Davis short film.

I will leave you with this quote from my friend Darryl Poole who alerted me to this story and offered a summary of his feelings and analysis of the movie:

“This particularly upsetting video-clip both reflects nascent attitudes being transmitted in the society and a powerful indicator of inevitable hostilities between races that tend to result from the cumulative effect of such knowledge. Repeating the Kenneth Clarke studies with such profoundly similarly conclusions indicates that all policies from all points of view and all levels of participation have failed. From the Far Right to the Far Left, no approach has worked that can produce this type of result (over 75 years after Dr. Kenneth B. Clark’s landmark “doll test” that led directly to the 1954 Supreme Court’s permanently overturning of institutional segregation). Time to rethink everything. Not least, at 60+ years of age, this breaks my heart.”

Darryl Vernon Poole Institute Chief Executive Cambridge Institute For Applied Research
Visiting Associate Professor of Managing School of Business & Public Administration, University of the District of Columbia

Changing the Constitution?

In recent months, some Texas lawmakers have been attempting to change their state’s stance on immigration by proposing legislation that will challenge the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Numerous bills have been proposed, denying children of illegal residents born inside the United States access to state sponsored programs such as food stamps and in-state tuition. Legislators expect for lawsuits springing from this new legislation to test the 14th Amendment in federal court.

Change often comes in response to a need or problem, and in the matter of immigration reform, there are many possible directions this change could take. In the whitepaper, The Government’s New Breed of Change Agents, Forrester refers to Transformational Leaders as “bold visionaries”, and suggests that in times like these, a Change Agent’s mission is to justify the direction that changes should take. It is still uncertain whether the Texas legislation will be passed, and the impact it may have on the way the United States handles immigration. I have little doubt, however, that these bold statements by vocal Texan lawmakers will certainly inspire change.

Diversity or Talent? Change Agents Need Both

“As individuals we can accomplish only so much. We’re limited in our abilities. Our heads contain only so many neurons and axons. Collectively, we face no such constraints. We possess incredible capacity to think differently. These differences can provide the seeds of innovation, progress, and understanding.”
- Scott Page

Contemporary American society often uses meritocracy to determine an individual’s worth. Companies and Universities regularly use objective methods such as IQ tests and SAT scores to determine ones perceived value. It’s no wonder, then, that common sense points to ability as the best indicator of success – not diversity.

Scott Page, author of the book The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Teams, Schools, and Societies, contends that an average team made up of a diverse set of individuals will consistently out-perform a team of the brightest and best-performing individuals. Using frameworks and mathematical models as proof, Mr. Page adds that it is the individual’s unique set of perceptions, interpretations, heuristics, and predictive models that makes his “Diversity Conjecture” a reality. Jim Surowiecki calls this “the wisdom of crowds.”

Mr. Page mentions randomness as a best practice towards achieving diversity, and if true, his findings could prove useful for leaders trying to put together the most successful teams possible. Think about the amount of time and money it takes to find, hire, and staff a team of the most talented individuals, and then consider - What if talent could be replaced with diversity at no extra risk to the project? Obviously, more technical and specialized fields such as information technology and medicine need subject matter expertise, but it is the job of leaders to figure out how diversity can be incorporated into different situations.

Leaders in the business world today seem to be making this shift towards pro-diversity. In part, this is the result of globalization, but it can also be linked to the ever-increasing complexity of business problems, along with the desire for team-focused working groups. I have no doubt that diversity has been the gateway to many of our most groundbreaking solutions and ideas. Take a look at Wikipedia – the free, multilingual encyclopedia written and constantly modified by collaborators located all across the world. In only five years, Wikipedia is regarded by many as the most up-to-date and accurate source of information on the internet; possibly even more accurate than the dictionaries and encyclopedias that precede it. In addition, consider the powers of open-sourcing and the stock market. In both examples, diversification has led to the creation of better products and portfolios when compared to those produced by so called ‘experts’.

As the whitepaper states, one of the six key attributes of a change agent is the ability to pinpoint talent and create the right teams. Having read Mr. Page’s position, is pinpointing talent the most important criteria towards forming the right team? Or is diversity more important? I believe that both are critical for any change agent to consider. Talented individuals can provide stability, low-risk, and experience to a team, while diversity can lead to new outcomes, better vision, and a comprehensive approach towards any solution. Diversity doesn’t have to be incorporated into every scenario that a change agent encounters, but it certainly deserves some serious contextual consideration.

Can Change Agents Embrace Diversity?

I was tipped off yesterday by a very cool blog called Egonomics about a forthcoming book which could provide a nice follow up to The Wisdom of the Crowd.  University of Michigan professor Scott Page’s book, THE DIFFERENCE: How The Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Teams, Schools, and Societies, purports that crowd wisdom must feature diverse perspectives in order for the collective logic to create innovative breakthroughs. As change agents are increasingly called to lead diverse groups, and the government’s diversity levels match most companies, it bespeaks an great viewpoint of harnessing innovation that the government considers outsourcing to third parties. There is much for change agents to consider here.

I have not yet read the book, but I like what Page has to say. Here are two excepts from chapters that are avalible on the web:

“The existence of smart mobs like those created by InnoCentive and of wise crowds like those described by Surowiecki is not in dispute. Without collective intelligence, decentralized markets and democracies would have little hope of functioning effectively. Yet we do not fully understand the causes of successful collective performance. We tend to think that it rests in ability, that if we make the individuals smarter, we make the group (or mob) smarter, the crowd wiser, and the team more effective. That logic certainly holds true (with some caveats). But here I show that if we make the individuals more diverse, we get the same effects: better teams, smarter groups, wiser crowds. Unpacking this second, subtler logic takes up the bulk of what follows.”

“Our investigation of how individual diversity aggregates culminates in the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem. This theorem provides conditions under which collections of diverse individuals outperform collections of more individually capable individuals. As mentioned in the prologue, this result was not something expected or desired. It just popped out of some experiments with agent-based models that I ran as an assistant professor at Caltech.”

Change Agents Be Warned – Don’t be “Overachievers”

I am a big fan of a very good book written a few years back by one of Malcolm Gladwell’s colleagues at the New Yorker, James Surowiecki. Surowiecki’s book, called “The Wisdom of Crowds,” argues that the logic of the few (the experts) is often derailed by the overwhelming logic that a “crowd” brings to any problem. If the book is right, then, the frequency that articles are downloaded might offer some valuable insight about “wisdom.”

In that spirit, consider the best selling Harvard Business Review article of 2006: “Leadership Run Amok: The Destructive Potential of Overachievers.” The authors of this paper from the Hay Group issued a press release today celebrating their achievement, and offer some excellent insights that summarize the paper and its key points.

“High achievers have driven increased productivity and innovation over the past decade. Yet organizations and high achievers can suffer if overachieving leaders demand results regardless of how they are achieved, write three Hay Group authors in ‘Leadership Run Amok: The Destructive Potential of Overachievers,’ just announced as the 2006 best selling Harvard Business Review article.

“In the short term, through sheer drive and determination, overachieving leaders may be very successful,” write authors Scott Spreier, Mary Fontaine, and Ruth Malloy, “but there is a dark side…Overachievers tend to command and coerce rather than coach and collaborate, thus stifling subordinates.”

Eventually, the authors say, “their teams’ performance begins to suffer and they risk missing the very goals that initially triggered the achievement-oriented behavior… At the extreme are leaders like Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling, a classic overachiever…driven by results regardless of how achieved. He pitted manager against manager and once even praised a subordinate who went behind his back to create a service he had forbidden her to develop.”

There is good news, write the Hay Group authors, drawing on a database of 4.8 million assessments of 471,544 employees at 4,279 organizations, including over 38,000 executives.

The authors continue, “Companies can redirect their focus and still achieve good numbers. When Lou Gerstner set out to regain IBM’s market dominance by transforming the organization…he sought managers who would orchestrate and enable rather than command and control. He knew IBM needed to move away from its culture of personal heroics and individual achievement and begin valuing socialized power and managers who pay attention to the greater needs of the company.”

More details, including a link to download the complete article, are available at their website.