←Diversity

The conversation around diversity in our industry is an important one to keep revisiting. Seeing some horrific treatment of women online lately has got me thinking about this.

For 10 years starting in my mid teens I was a strong church goer. In that time I attended around 6 churches for more than a few services. Every time you I got into a conversation about the church on a macro level I would always end up discussing a very pertinent question: “What makes a good church”?

It felt like the holy grail of growth. If you could just work out what it is that kept people coming back to a certain church over another, you could expand your congregation, and with greater numbers would come greater power to make change.

There will of course be many who disagree with me. But my experience across those different churches showed me that I was most comfortable and most engaged when there was a huge diversity in the congregation. From very old to very young, families of all types, people of every financial background and people from a wide range of ethnicities. When you surround yourself with too many people who are too like yourself, you start to lose the ability to empathize.

And empathy is your compass in the world. If you spend time with an older person on a regular basis, and then out in the wild you see an older person in a supermarket walking slowly down the aisle you really want to rush down, you are going to be more understanding.

Starting out at a design school is like coming into a religion. Everything you hold true is taken from you and flipped on it’s head. My first year involved writing a story using nails and string on the university’s lawn, spending too much time getting to know a set of historical mental patients and spitting on my graphic designs to unlearn the necessity for perfection.

I, being my arrogant first year self, had an argument with a tutor over a group assignment after I was put into a team with people who shared nothing in common with me. They sent me away to go and watch a documentary on the company IDEO. The tutor said ‘they make some of the worlds best products, go and learn how they do it’.

You can read a tonne about the company around the web, but the thing the tutor was getting at was who was on the team. Engineers, architects, teachers, philosophers, psychologists and more. In the documentary they talk about having voices from every walk of life in the room, and they all contribute to an important part the final product.

In Startups we talk about growth as the holy grail. If you could just work out what it is that keeps users coming back to one product over another you can prove traction and get more investment to grow your product further.

To me, what appears to be true in the church and true in design is applicable no matter what you’re doing or who you’re working with. Being around people who are different to you, who provide different perspectives and bring different baggage to the table is how you grow personally, how you grow as a team and how you improve on your craft.

For every startup Techcrunch refers to as disruptive there’s someone in the industry writing about the lack of diversity in technology and the tone can vary widely.

“More Women In IT” is a catch cry you hear too often — the fact that you hear it at all is an indictment on the industry itself — but it can veer into condescension very quickly.

This is something I struggle with as a white man in the tech industry. I want employ every tool at my disposal to make our company a great place for anyone to work, no matter what their walk of life. But I don’t want to talk down to anyone implying they need my hand to pull themselves up. My job is to clear what paths I can so anyone can reach us, and that means speaking out when something is wrong.

I hear arguments as to why we should encourage more diversity in tech. They range from the economic to the ethical to the practical. For me it’s simple. Without diversity, there can’t be empathy. And without empathy, you become an asshole.