I think the core of our disagreement here stems from the fact that you are treating diversity considerations and meeting the objectives of the organization as separate, e.g.:
My sense is that any time spent on doing this would pretty directly trade off against the time used to drive the core organizational objective forward.
Throughout this thread, I’ve been trying to make the point that time spent on doing this sometimes IS time to drive the core organizational objective forward, and in such cases a statement like yours makes no more sense than saying that spending time finding investors for your project or developing technical infrastructure for it is time that detracts from organizational objectives. I’ll give you an example from my own past to illustrate the point. Many years ago, I embarked on a project to expand what had been a successful personal blog into a more formal think tank. I recruited the initial team from a set of trusted colleagues I’d previously worked with, all of whom happened to be white. This subsequently became a significant liability for our work when the field we were working in became increasingly focused on racial justice. This was because:
My own life experiences and biases led me to underestimate the degree to which my colleagues cared about racial justice and fail to see certain ways in which it was relevant to our core mission, which in turn led me to make different choices about what we covered and prioritized than I would have if the team had been more diverse from the beginning.
It was difficult to publish content that would carry credibility on that topic without including perspectives from people of color, and simultaneously difficult to recruit highly qualified candidates of color to our team because we were seen (correctly) as a predominantly white institution. Overcoming those barriers required a ton of time and emotional energy on the part of me and everyone on the team, but without it, we wouldn’t have been able to create what ended up being probably the most impactful and enduring content we ever produced.
It’s not just me: I’ve seen the story above unfold over and over again with dozens of other organizations that I’ve had nothing to do with. E.g., social sector consulting firms whose entire business model is now upside down because for a long time they were a collection of white people getting paid to be the “brains” behind strategies to address issues in communities of color, and now foundations and other clients would prefer to pay people who have directly experienced those issues to develop those strategies. In both their case and mine, it would have been so much easier to just attend to this from the beginning rather than let it play out and clean up the mess later on, and more than likely it would have improved the quality of the products and services that we were able to offer our constituencies.
I’m going to make this my last comment because I find this format rather difficult to engage in, so in closing I’ll just say that my only agenda here is to help people in this community, which I care about a lot, avoid the mistakes that I made. Your argument is that founders don’t have spare time to think about diversity, but most founders are going to have to spend time thinking about diversity at some point in an organization’s life if it gets big and high-profile enough, and if the intention from the beginning is for an organization to get big and high-profile, then it makes sense to think about diversity from the beginning too.
Yep, I agree that for some organizations, optimizing for effectiveness will at certain times also mean that it’s right to optimize at least partially for diversity as an instrumental goal. I think that is true. If you set it yourself as a bottom-line for your organization, as a terminal goal that has to be achieved independently of the specific problems you face, it will of course trade off against your other goals. But it will not necessarily do so if you just uncover it as part of optimizing for your other goals, as a useful instrumental/intermediary goal, and it can of course be useful advice to make people aware of that.
I disagree that it would be good advice for most organizations to follow, but I think we’ve reached the part where I no longer have definite takes, but more guesses and hunches and models with large inferential distance, such that it isn’t obviously worth going into.
I think the core of our disagreement here stems from the fact that you are treating diversity considerations and meeting the objectives of the organization as separate, e.g.:
Throughout this thread, I’ve been trying to make the point that time spent on doing this sometimes IS time to drive the core organizational objective forward, and in such cases a statement like yours makes no more sense than saying that spending time finding investors for your project or developing technical infrastructure for it is time that detracts from organizational objectives. I’ll give you an example from my own past to illustrate the point. Many years ago, I embarked on a project to expand what had been a successful personal blog into a more formal think tank. I recruited the initial team from a set of trusted colleagues I’d previously worked with, all of whom happened to be white. This subsequently became a significant liability for our work when the field we were working in became increasingly focused on racial justice. This was because:
My own life experiences and biases led me to underestimate the degree to which my colleagues cared about racial justice and fail to see certain ways in which it was relevant to our core mission, which in turn led me to make different choices about what we covered and prioritized than I would have if the team had been more diverse from the beginning.
It was difficult to publish content that would carry credibility on that topic without including perspectives from people of color, and simultaneously difficult to recruit highly qualified candidates of color to our team because we were seen (correctly) as a predominantly white institution. Overcoming those barriers required a ton of time and emotional energy on the part of me and everyone on the team, but without it, we wouldn’t have been able to create what ended up being probably the most impactful and enduring content we ever produced.
It’s not just me: I’ve seen the story above unfold over and over again with dozens of other organizations that I’ve had nothing to do with. E.g., social sector consulting firms whose entire business model is now upside down because for a long time they were a collection of white people getting paid to be the “brains” behind strategies to address issues in communities of color, and now foundations and other clients would prefer to pay people who have directly experienced those issues to develop those strategies. In both their case and mine, it would have been so much easier to just attend to this from the beginning rather than let it play out and clean up the mess later on, and more than likely it would have improved the quality of the products and services that we were able to offer our constituencies.
I’m going to make this my last comment because I find this format rather difficult to engage in, so in closing I’ll just say that my only agenda here is to help people in this community, which I care about a lot, avoid the mistakes that I made. Your argument is that founders don’t have spare time to think about diversity, but most founders are going to have to spend time thinking about diversity at some point in an organization’s life if it gets big and high-profile enough, and if the intention from the beginning is for an organization to get big and high-profile, then it makes sense to think about diversity from the beginning too.
Yep, I agree that for some organizations, optimizing for effectiveness will at certain times also mean that it’s right to optimize at least partially for diversity as an instrumental goal. I think that is true. If you set it yourself as a bottom-line for your organization, as a terminal goal that has to be achieved independently of the specific problems you face, it will of course trade off against your other goals. But it will not necessarily do so if you just uncover it as part of optimizing for your other goals, as a useful instrumental/intermediary goal, and it can of course be useful advice to make people aware of that.
I disagree that it would be good advice for most organizations to follow, but I think we’ve reached the part where I no longer have definite takes, but more guesses and hunches and models with large inferential distance, such that it isn’t obviously worth going into.