I don’t think anyone’s suggesting optimizing for demographic diversity. I’m advocating for satisficing, which is a much weaker constraint. And while I understand the mathematical argument that you’re making, in practice I reject the premise that including demographic diversity in one’s recruitment calculus will always harm team effectiveness (even if only a little bit). If it spurs a founder to widen their search, broaden their network, and consider more options than they would have otherwise, in some cases it could result in increased effectiveness vs. the counterfactual.
Sure, the same basic argument applies to satisficing (which is just a limited form of optimizing, so it really doesn’t change my argument). I find the assertion that this would not trade off at all against effectiveness highly dubious.
I think it’s pretty reasonable to argue that the impact would be small, but saying that it is non-existent just seems really unlikely to me. It implies that if the funder was completely aware of the same information, but just wouldn’t treat it as a strict target to meet, they would not be able to make any better tradeoffs favoring effectiveness in any practical situation.
in practice I reject the premise that including demographic diversity in one’s recruitment calculus will always harm team effectiveness
Maybe this is what you meant, but of course it will not always harm team effectiveness, the same way as playing the lottery will not always lose you money. On expectation it sure seems like it will though, if only a little.
It’s been a while, but I wanted to come back to this since it seemed like the nuance I was trying to convey with my last comment wasn’t coming through.
You’re correct, of course, that any time you elevate a consideration up the priority chain, it will necessarily result in deprioritizing something else. What I was trying to say is that team effectiveness, whether we define it as the ease with which the team works together or as the overall impact they’re able to collectively create, does not have to be the victim of that tradeoff. Specifically, I can think of two ways in which diversity could be prioritized by trading off against other considerations besides effectiveness:
Time. For a founder or founders without a very diverse network, assembling a more diverse team that’s as good or better than a non-diverse team will likely require additional calendar time and effort. Perhaps the project is a very time-sensitive one that hinges on getting up and running quickly, and putting in that effort doesn’t make sense. But in a lot of cases, it might—plus then they have a more diverse network for anything else they might need it for later.
Personal involvement. In some cases, founders might be so excited about an idea that they overestimate their personal fit for bringing it to fruition. Depending on the specifics of the project, it might be better for it to be led forward by someone who does have a diverse network they can bring to bear right away. This is potentially quite relevant, for example, in situations where most of the intended beneficiaries of the product or service have backgrounds that are very unlike the founder’s.
It’s easy (for me, at least) to imagine situations in which making either of these tradeoffs would be net neutral or positive to team effectiveness in expectation. As I mentioned, though, this will depend on a lot on the goals and target audience of the initiative.
Huh, I am very surprised that you expect that there is just unused time lying around for founders that would not alternatively be used for improving the organization. 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. Though of course this might not literally hold for all founders (some founders might find additional pockets of motivation that they find they cannot use on anything related to their organizational priorities, but could use it for diversity-related recruiting), but I would expect it holds for the vast majority of founders at some rate.
Separately, I am even more surprised that you think a founder will so frequently overestimate their personal fit that it is better for them to hand off the project to someone else! I’ve literally never seen this go well, ever, even for considerations that strike me as much much more strongly related to the success of a project, and any founder making this choice would seem to be making a terrible mistake to me.
But again, the question here is not whether diversity is important. If the project were to just succeed better if they gave the project to someone else they should choose whoever else would be best suited to them. Their diverse network would be one consideration here, but it would be a consideration in-service of seeing the project succeed. I don’t see how optimizing for diversity would not somehow trade off against the person you would hand off the project to. If you have one person with slightly more diverse network but overall very low competence, and another person with a slightly less diverse network but being overall much more competent and established than you are, you should very likely choose the person who is much more competent.
The same argument as I made above applies to this tradeoff of who to hand it off to, applies to all other organizational tradeoffs, and both of these domains strike me as domains where the argument for them trading off directly against organizational success strike me as particularly strong!
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 don’t think anyone’s suggesting optimizing for demographic diversity. I’m advocating for satisficing, which is a much weaker constraint. And while I understand the mathematical argument that you’re making, in practice I reject the premise that including demographic diversity in one’s recruitment calculus will always harm team effectiveness (even if only a little bit). If it spurs a founder to widen their search, broaden their network, and consider more options than they would have otherwise, in some cases it could result in increased effectiveness vs. the counterfactual.
Sure, the same basic argument applies to satisficing (which is just a limited form of optimizing, so it really doesn’t change my argument). I find the assertion that this would not trade off at all against effectiveness highly dubious.
I think it’s pretty reasonable to argue that the impact would be small, but saying that it is non-existent just seems really unlikely to me. It implies that if the funder was completely aware of the same information, but just wouldn’t treat it as a strict target to meet, they would not be able to make any better tradeoffs favoring effectiveness in any practical situation.
Maybe this is what you meant, but of course it will not always harm team effectiveness, the same way as playing the lottery will not always lose you money. On expectation it sure seems like it will though, if only a little.
It’s been a while, but I wanted to come back to this since it seemed like the nuance I was trying to convey with my last comment wasn’t coming through.
You’re correct, of course, that any time you elevate a consideration up the priority chain, it will necessarily result in deprioritizing something else. What I was trying to say is that team effectiveness, whether we define it as the ease with which the team works together or as the overall impact they’re able to collectively create, does not have to be the victim of that tradeoff. Specifically, I can think of two ways in which diversity could be prioritized by trading off against other considerations besides effectiveness:
Time. For a founder or founders without a very diverse network, assembling a more diverse team that’s as good or better than a non-diverse team will likely require additional calendar time and effort. Perhaps the project is a very time-sensitive one that hinges on getting up and running quickly, and putting in that effort doesn’t make sense. But in a lot of cases, it might—plus then they have a more diverse network for anything else they might need it for later.
Personal involvement. In some cases, founders might be so excited about an idea that they overestimate their personal fit for bringing it to fruition. Depending on the specifics of the project, it might be better for it to be led forward by someone who does have a diverse network they can bring to bear right away. This is potentially quite relevant, for example, in situations where most of the intended beneficiaries of the product or service have backgrounds that are very unlike the founder’s.
It’s easy (for me, at least) to imagine situations in which making either of these tradeoffs would be net neutral or positive to team effectiveness in expectation. As I mentioned, though, this will depend on a lot on the goals and target audience of the initiative.
Huh, I am very surprised that you expect that there is just unused time lying around for founders that would not alternatively be used for improving the organization. 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. Though of course this might not literally hold for all founders (some founders might find additional pockets of motivation that they find they cannot use on anything related to their organizational priorities, but could use it for diversity-related recruiting), but I would expect it holds for the vast majority of founders at some rate.
Separately, I am even more surprised that you think a founder will so frequently overestimate their personal fit that it is better for them to hand off the project to someone else! I’ve literally never seen this go well, ever, even for considerations that strike me as much much more strongly related to the success of a project, and any founder making this choice would seem to be making a terrible mistake to me.
But again, the question here is not whether diversity is important. If the project were to just succeed better if they gave the project to someone else they should choose whoever else would be best suited to them. Their diverse network would be one consideration here, but it would be a consideration in-service of seeing the project succeed. I don’t see how optimizing for diversity would not somehow trade off against the person you would hand off the project to. If you have one person with slightly more diverse network but overall very low competence, and another person with a slightly less diverse network but being overall much more competent and established than you are, you should very likely choose the person who is much more competent.
The same argument as I made above applies to this tradeoff of who to hand it off to, applies to all other organizational tradeoffs, and both of these domains strike me as domains where the argument for them trading off directly against organizational success strike me as particularly strong!
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.