17 – The Embracing Diversity Principle

[00:00:00] Lily: Hello and welcome to the IDEMS Principle. I’m Lily Clements, an Impact Activation Fellow. I’m here with David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS.

Hi David.

[00:00:15] David: Hi Lily. I’m looking forward to our principle discussion again today.

[00:00:19] Lily: Yes, and today is on Embracing Diversity.

[00:00:23] David: Oh nice. Yes, very good. Shall I read that out?

[00:00:27] Lily: Yes, please.

[00:00:29] David: So as a company principle, Embracing Diversity, we’ve got this down as “this principle expresses the company’s approach to complex problems. It emphasises the value placed on diversity in building stable solutions.”

[00:00:44] Lily: Interesting. This is one that I would say on the surface, when you hear Embracing Diversity you think, you know what it’s going to be. You think it’s going to be okay, we hire diverse people, we work with, diverse people all over. And we do that just naturally by, the nature of the work being international. But when you read out that kind of embracing diversity tag line, it actually is related to something completely different, or maybe not completely different.

[00:01:11] David: It should be inclusive of diversity of staff and diversity of perspectives, but embracing diversity is really more than that. It falls under the systems thinking more generally. But it’s really about how we take on working in complexity, that as an organisation, from year one, when we started out, we’ve had a diverse portfolio of areas we work in of work we do, of types of work we do, and of partners we engage with.

And the importance of this was highlighted in 2020 when COVID hit, where, actually, before COVID, I particularly was travelling two to three weeks out of four, giving workshops all over the place, and a lot of our funding was related to those individual pieces of work we did. The most profitable time we had for IDEMS in those early days was when I was on the road, because mostly those weeks were paid weeks, where I was giving a workshop, doing something. That was the essence of how we worked as an organisation.

But it wasn’t all we did. And what was really interesting, of course, is that diversity of things that we did is what really enabled us, through COVID, to be where I then suddenly didn’t travel for 18 months, all those trainings got cancelled, nobody could meet. And it wasn’t just trainings we were doing, it was community meetings in different ways. And we reinvented ourselves in many ways, but it wasn’t really about reinventing ourselves because we were already doing elements which were different. It was just that different things got prioritised and the diversity of what we did came to the forefront as a strength then, enabling other elements of the organisation to grow. And me and others to put time into them. Time is our most precious resource.

[00:03:15] Lily: Sure. So that’s a huge kind of benefit to having this Embracing Diversity principle.

[00:03:20] David: Absolutely. And it’s so extremely opposite from all the recommendations we’re given, as an organisation, the standard narrative is very simple. Focus. Find a niche. Find something which is needed. Do it, put all your efforts into making that succeed. And I absolutely understand that. That is exactly how you can scale, you can grow. If you don’t do that, then you’re going to be, especially as a small organisation, you’re going to be overtaken by somebody else, being able to put more resources in than you in different ways or get things faster than you.

This is also why you need to protect yourself in different ways, you know, your IP and your software. So embracing diversity for a small organisation, remember when COVID hit, we were still very much a micro organisation. We’d just employed our first staff. There were now four full time people, this is a tiny organisation.

So for a tiny organisation to be working across basically climate, agriculture, agroecology, education. And we’d just taken on our work related to parenting and sort of social services and public health, and to be doing so where we were building apps, we were building software for data analysis. We were actually doing data analysis. We were doing research methods. We were doing lots of training. To have that huge wide spectrum for such a small organisation with so few people, most people looked at us and said, this is just insane. And in many ways they were right.

But that idea of embracing diversity in the sort of set of things we could do was fundamental from day one. And this was a conscious choice not to focus so that we could allow things to grow naturally. And it’s happened naturally most of the time that one thing has grown and then another thing has grown and then something else has grown.

And so, actually, the diversity has led to sort of ride the ebbs and flows related to any individual part of what we do better, because something’s normally been growing. And that’s been a really important part of what we’re doing, to allow that natural growth.

[00:05:46] Lily: Sure. And I might be wrong here, but it feels like the other IDEMS principles are about a bigger picture than just IDEMS itself. Whereas the way you’re describing this at the moment to me sounds like it’s about, okay, this is a huge benefit to IDEMS and this is why. So where’s the kind of bigger picture in this?

[00:06:02] David: You know, embracing diversity is also thought of in so many other contexts. As you mentioned, most people would think of it in terms of actually recognising recruitment. I believe that everybody’s favourite example for this is the CIA that was at some point really blind sided that their intelligence was so far out of whack. And when they looked into it, it was because everybody they had employed thought the same way. They were getting this sort of reinforcement bias because they didn’t have diversity in their teams to understand, to be able to challenge them and to be able to challenge their thinking, to think differently. Everybody was thinking the same way and they’d been recruited because they were the best at thinking in that particular way.

I’m paraphrasing and I apologise if there’s anyone from the CIA who feels I got this wrong. It is no offence intended but this is my understanding of one of the best examples which is really easy for people to understand, of why, in organisations, if you only have people thinking in one way, you can suddenly get surprised that actually you’re out of touch with how other people think. So diversity within organisations, especially big organisations, that is incredibly recognised and that’s incredibly valued.

[00:07:18] David: But it’s not only in that context. Of course, biodiversity is a whole other big thing. More and more people are recognising that a more biodiverse system is more stable. The more biodiversity you have within systems, the more stable that system can be to shocks, to changes, to the pressures from outside. If you have a system which is really monoculture, then one of the problems with that system is that if there are shocks in a particular way, you can lose everything. And so you don’t have that stability because of a lack of biodiversity.

If you want to think about stable, long term systems, people talk about and embrace biodiversity as a way of doing that, as a way of building more sustainable systems. For complex problems in general, whether it’s the complex problems of actually in the intelligence world or the complex problems of the agricultural world, there is growing recognition of the value of diversity.

We shouldn’t forget that, of course, a good principle always has two sides to it. The alternative is good as well. Over the last 150 years or more, actually, it is specialisation, and it is actually not just specialisation, but if you think about the single mindedness, focus on one thing has been the correct successful business approach. Not just business approach, but in many different ways. Most businesses who are successful and who have been successful recently, have become successful not because of their diversity, they become successful for one thing. They become known for that one thing, and then if they’ve got big enough, they’ve almost always diversified afterwards.

That diversification for stability, this is something which has been understood for a long time. But for success, for growth, the idea that you get growth by focusing, by being really focused, not worrying about diversity, that’s been the model of operation for a long time. And it’s correct that actually, if you are small and you want to succeed and you want to become big, focus is the obvious way to do that. And it might be the only way to do that. We’re trying to do something here, which is quite hard, I think.

[00:09:47] Lily: I guess this kind of feeds in a bit to that kind of Systems Thinking, which it comes under. You still need to have those people that are looking at this component really deeply.

[00:09:55] David: Absolutely. And Embracing Diversity doesn’t mean that you can’t have people who are just doing something well. And so at what level are we embracing diversity? Now, this is the company’s approach to complex problems. There’s other things that relate to this, of course, but within that, as a company, we’re embracing diversity. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t employ specialists, and we can’t get specialists who are really good at what they do.

You fit into a bit of that role in many ways for many people within the organisation. When Lucie wants any help on data, she immediately comes to you. She knows you have some skills on this and others do as well. Esmee and Chiara, they all go to you when there’s a data problem. And that element of having a specialisation, having specialists within, is to be encouraged as part of embracing diversity.

[00:10:53] Lily: Yes. And I guess this is what I was going to say when you were saying about embracing diversity earlier and about how you now fork out into all of these different areas because you’re trying to embrace that diversity. Then that means that you now, firstly, people that join the company, you don’t have to fit the task around them.

[00:11:12] David: We can fit people into tasks in interesting ways which enables that diversity to come in in different ways, but it does make recruiting much harder because we’re embracing diversity, but it allows us to recruit in a very different way. So I think you’re right. Maybe you haven’t got that the right way around. So basically, the point is your normal approach, if you don’t embrace diversity to your work streams, would be that you have very well defined work streams. If our specialisation is data and offering good data services, then, you would be a sort of data expert. And then when we recruited someone else, we’d want to recruit someone like you, because we’ve got more work than you can do.

I mean we’ve expanded quite a lot since they were just the two directors. But we’ve not yet tried to recruit anyone like anyone else. Everybody we’ve recruited has added diversity to the team in terms of the skills and the expertise they bring in. And it’s really interesting to see that. I suppose it’s also comes back to the level at which we’re recruiting people. We’re often recruiting people at the level we recruited you, at postdoctoral level, where people have already got an expertise, become a specialist in certain ways. Not everybody we have is in that way, so some people we are trying to help them to grow, we have recruited people who are not at that level, but many people we’ve recruited come with a unique skill set.

And so we’re trying to then help them to grow into a set of skills which serves the organisation. And this is where our Impact Activation Postdoctoral Fellowship has been so important, which you went through and you’re still going through and has been stretching you and testing you, but you don’t have a well defined set of tasks, that role is something which is evolving around you and your interests and we’re able to adapt to that. It enables us to have some of our staffing principles where we’re enabling individual initiative, for example, and we’re able to support that because that diversity can fit in. If you were to, as you came to me fairly recently, and you said, I’m quite keen to go and give this course in Ghana.

[00:13:26] Lily: Yes.

[00:13:27] David: It’s something I’d like to do. And I was able to say, yeah, great. If that’s what you would take the initiative, do it, and we’ll support you. You’re not getting teaching experience within most of the work you’re doing in IDEMS, and this was an opportunity where you could go and actually teach and have that extra experience.

And enabling people to take the initiative and do things like this is exactly part of this Embracing Diversity. We are happy to employ individuals for who they are. If we were a different sort of company, which didn’t have this as a core principle, it would be more, we have tasks we want to do and we employ people who we think fit the tasks.

[00:14:07] Lily: Which I think is a really very unique aspect.

[00:14:10] David: Can’t be very unique, you’re either unique or you’re not. Very unusual, I would absolutely agree. I don’t think this is unique, I’m sure others do this.

[00:14:22] Lily: And then I guess one of the final things I wanted to touch on is that kind of, that you use the word embracing. Not accepting, not welcoming, but embracing, so it’s saying you’re accepting and welcoming and allowing it. But it’s not that you’re just accepting it, it’s that you’re…

[00:14:39] David: We’re going out of our way to embrace it. We want this. We’re looking for this. We’re not shying away, we’re recognising. We embrace it despite the challenges it poses. But it really is taking that extra step that we need to embrace diversity in lots of different ways, despite the challenges it poses. And I’ll give one more example of that, that I would argue is really about embracing diversity. And this has been, Danny and I have had this a number of different times.

[00:15:09] Lily: The other director.

[00:15:10] David: My co founder Dani and myself have had this a number of different times where an opportunity which has arisen, which is out of our comfort zone, it’s out of what we’re currently doing. And we ask ourselves, is this the right step to take or not? And this has happened when we’ve been recruiting people. This has happened when we’ve been offered work. And what I can say is that the times when we’ve been most challenged by this, we’ve come back to this principle and we’ve said, look we need to do this.

Bringing an anthropologist into our team, in the form of Lucie, who’s been an incredible asset and bringing us forward in many different ways. We had our Impact Activation Postdoctoral Fellowships, which were intended really for mathematical scientists. And she applied for a totally different position, but we took that application and we said, look, it doesn’t fit where she’s applied, but in terms of an Impact Activation Postdoctoral Fellowship this is an incredible candidate who is totally different to how we imagined it, to what we imagined, but it seems to fit. And so that idea of then embracing that change into what our preconceptions were to have that more diverse set of fellowships. That’s one example.

And another one, the parenting work. When we took on the work with Oxford University related to building apps to support reduction of violence against children through parenting programs, this was really a big challenging sort of question. This was totally apart from all our main streams of work at that point in time. This was clearly going to stretch and challenge us. We knew that from day one, and it was just not aligned at all with the contracts that we already had coming in. It had come because of some of the other work we’d done, but it was now taking it into a totally different direction.

And Danny and I spent a long time discussing, can we afford to embrace diversity this much and really run the risk of not delivering well on the work we’re doing or not pushing forward on the work we’re doing in other areas as well? But that task of taking that on, it’s led to the most exciting parts of IDEMS’ work.

And so actually embracing that diversity right now, if anything, that’s too much of our work proportionately. We would, of course, like more of it, but proportionally to other pieces of work, we’re in risk now of being not diverse enough because we’ve got so much work in that area.

[00:17:57] Lily: I guess that kind of brings a question, can you always embrace more diversity? I guess diversity doesn’t have a limit.

[00:18:03] David: Exactly. And it does mean that we need to be continually embracing it and looking for it and open to it. If people push us and say, we want to work with you, but we want to work with you on, I don’t know, this area where, you know, health, we don’t do much in health yet. We want to work with you in health and we feel that you’re able to do this, you’re the right people first for whatever reasons, we’d like to work with you in this area where we’re not currently working. Chances are, we will say yes. If we believe we can deliver well, we will say yes.

And the reason is, because we want to embrace that diversity, even if it scares us, even if it challenges us, even if it pushes us way out of our comfort zone. If we believe we can contribute based on our expertise, we will say yes, because we want to embrace that diversity. Despite the fact that we know it’s going to make our lives harder. And that’s central to who we are. It’s part of our great strength. We can do this partly, I believe, because of our background, our core skills cut across disciplines very well, and so therefore the area of application is maybe less important.

But I think one of the things which Lucie demonstrates is that our core skills include anthropology now, which is rather a long way from the mathematical sciences as most people perceive it. But that is central because that’s part of the diverse core skills we need to bring to the table because we recognise the value that brings. So that to me is, this is, this highlights the value I believe that we can get in embracing diversity.

It is an incredible challenge for a company, for an organisation trying to grow as we are. Our life would be so much simpler if we were going for a narrow vision of growth. And I want to say one other thing related to that, which is that actually embracing diversity means that although we have pursued rapid growth in the past, we grew at 60 percent a year for five years on average, we don’t want to have really explosive growth because explosive growth would actually mean that we lose quite a lot of diversity.

Inherently, if you grow, our rapid growth, we’ve been able to do while continuing to embrace diversity. But at some point, we’ve been at that borderline place where we’ve actually just needed a whole load of programmers. And so the question was, should we just have employed a whole load of programmers then? Because that’s what we needed, the same skill sets, the same things, because we have people to contribute to them. We have work for them to do.

And, actually, part of our principles, again, led us to say no. This would unbalance us as an organisation. We do want programmers as part of our diversity. But right now we have these specific tasks. Let’s subcontract. Let’s find others who are doing that, who have that specialisation. And so we subcontracted quite substantially a few years back. And what we’re doing is because we want to have that balance. That was the one year where we grew by over a hundred percent.

It was a real learning experience in terms of actually, what sort of growth can we actually stay on top of and what can’t we? And really it is extremely challenging. We want to continue to grow, but we don’t want the 100, 200 percent growth a year that startup tech are looking for.

[00:21:37] David: We feel that would lose our principles, some of them like Embracing Diversity. We couldn’t continue to do that at that level of growth. So we can grow in really exciting, interesting ways. But this is all tied in to the fact that Embracing Diversity is a principle which is very positive in many ways. It makes us much more stable, but it also is very challenging because it’s actually put brakes on our growth in interesting ways. It slows us down in ways which I believe are related to the fact that we’re building more stably.

All of these principles are, they’re not for everyone. I can’t repeat this enough that all of our principles are for us, they’re decisions we’ve made, not because embracing diversity is better than, having clear focus. You can have that as a sort of opposite. Clear focus is really the opposite of embracing diversity. It’s a positive thing. Clear focus is great. You get a long way if you have clear focus. It’s not us. And we deliberately have made the choice to embrace diversity over having a clear focus. And that principle is hard and it’s central to who we are.

[00:23:00] Lily: Great. Thank you very much. Is there anything that you wanted to add before we finish, otherwise that’s a great way to end.

[00:23:06] David: No, I really appreciate the way you’ve helped me to describe this principle because it’s one I care about very deeply and it’s one, as you said right at the beginning, we interpret it in ways which are much more diverse than the standard way we would expect people to interpret Embracing Diversity on first read.

It includes that, but we expect people to think way beyond that. And so Embracing Diversity is deliberately phrased and framed at a sort of, at a company level. This is really a, it’s nature of the company.

[00:23:48] Lily: Great. Thank you very much, David. It was very interesting to hear about the Embracing Diversity principle.

[00:23:53] David: Thank you very much.