226 – Is Diversity Always Good?

[00:00:07] Lily: Hello and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m Lily Clements, a Data Scientist, and I’m here with David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS.

Hi David.

[00:00:14] David: Hi Lily. Really keen to do an episode, I believe, which relates to your ankle.

[00:00:21] Lily: Yes, yes, my ankle. We’ve actually already done another episode on my ankle a year ago nearly, which was the episode about the Google AI summary. I think it said I fell off a 25 meter wall.

[00:00:34] David: Something like that. It was certainly much, much larger than a boulder wall should be because of an April fools joke.

[00:00:40] Lily: Yes. Because of an April fools joke, it took that and put it in the Google summary. Anyway, there’s another podcast on that coming up to the year anniversary. The ankle’s getting better, I’m able to move and run and things, but it does get me thinking, the reason why I went out that day, the reason why I went bouldering that day was to be more diverse in my sports, because I knew that if I ran that day, funnily enough, I would get injured because I was coming off a different injury. And so I felt, let’s be diverse. Let’s try something else.

[00:01:11] David: And we’ve got a principle in IDEMS which is Embracing Diversity, and so you were really living it.

[00:01:17] Lily: I was trying to bring IDEMS into my everyday life, and live by the principles, and it has turned into a year long pretty much ankle being one of my most commonly used words in 2025, probably.

Anyway, brings me to the question, Embracing Diversity, is diversity always good? Because we also have Options by Context. I don’t know.

[00:01:41] David: But more than that, if you remember, principles as an approach, guiding principles, they’re not value statements, we are not saying that embracing diversity is any better than focusing on something specific. There is no judgment on value of embracing diversity being good or bad.

It is just stating a choice, a principle, a guiding principle, where when we are making decisions, we use the guiding principles to inform our decision making to be more coherent as an organisation. So I would like to be very clear that no, embracing diversity is not always good. There’s many, many contexts in which this is known to be problematic in different ways.

And I’ll just be very clear on this. A normal tech startup is encouraged to be extremely focused, this is a really good way. If you are an academic and you are going into any discipline, as a PhD, you are encouraged to be really narrowly focused. You’re not encouraged to embrace diversity as you become a specialist, you are encouraged to become a specialist.

Embracing specialism is also good. We are not saying that embracing diversity is better or worse than embracing specialism. What we are saying is that IDEMS as an organisation has a guiding principle, which is Embracing Diversity, and that that principle is a conscious choice, that when we are presented with the choice of do we specialise or do we embrace diversity, our principles guide us towards embracing diversity, even if there’s a cost associated.

That’s how we as an organisation remain coherent. It is not that embracing diversity is universally better or worse. It’s just there are choices we make, both of which could be good, and we as an organisation are choosing to prioritise one, to have coherence as an organisation in how we work and in what we do, even though we recognise it is not always the best.

Also, there is no problem in a principled organisation to have certain activities that don’t follow all of our principles. It’s just that when we come up with that choice, our principles should guide us. And if we don’t have a good reason to be specialists, we should embrace diversity in this particular case.

[00:04:37] Lily: I see. Okay. That does make sense. So I guess that then makes me wonder, how does something become a principle then? So generally we want to embrace diversity, is that then why it’s a principle or, like, we want that to be something that we’re aware of?

[00:04:52] David: This is a very good question, really, we should make sure our IDEMS principle podcasts are out there and that they’re more widely available, because the idea of principles, I’m very lucky that I got immersed in principles before IDEMS existed and I saw the power that they can play at bringing a community together.

And so what I recognised, which Danny and I instigated from day one of IDEMS, is that for the organisation to have a coherence beyond individuals or an individual leadership, the principles are a way of doing this, where if it was values, then anyone who doesn’t agree with our values, is not values aligned, we then, oh, we don’t like you, you don’t believe in our values.

That’s not what we are doing here, it’s not values. Everybody’s allowed to have their own values, their own value system, and we encourage that. The principles are about the organisation itself having structural coherence. So if in our decision making everyone is aware of the principles, the principles are there to help guide us when, otherwise we might say, well, we could do this or we could do that. You know, there’s a choice, there’s a recognition, either of these could be good, but if the principles help to guide that decision making, then we are going to have more coherence.

So how did we choose which principles do we care about, what do we want coherence on? That was deep discussions that Danny and I had about the vision of what we’re trying to build and why, and what are the guiding principles that will help us to get there. And to come back to the diversity question, we recognise that embracing diversity, especially when we are small, we’ve paid a pretty heavy cost for it because many people would say we are spread too thin.

[00:06:59] Lily: Yeah.

[00:07:00] David: We are not able to see through and really make any individual part of what we’re doing work as it should, because our efforts are dissipated across many different things. If we were specialists in this, we would only do that one thing, but we do it really well and it would help us to grow at being the best at doing that one thing.

So when we were small, actually that Embracing Diversity, the cost has been pretty high. But it is something which we believed in and what we believe, and we’ve seen this play out in some specific cases. During COVID, as an organisation, we had to reinvent ourselves. And what our Embracing Diversity gave us is actually the things that were the biggest things we were doing before COVID, and the things that became the biggest things were different.

And so it enabled us as an organisation, without changing totally, it enabled us to be more stable, to be more sustainable. So that diversity gave us a different type of strength than being a specialist where, you know, if we had been a specialist before, it would’ve been to go and travel and give trainings and so on, and that part of the work dropped off, there was nothing for 18 months, I didn’t get on a plane.

And so if that had been the only thing we’d done, if we hadn’t embraced diversity before that, then we would’ve had a real problem in the transition to actually the different role which emerged for us.

And so I suppose that’s sort of something where for us, there’s been a heavy price to pay, but there’s already been payoffs in terms of our sustainability, in terms of our flexibility as an organisation, in terms of the way we have been able to adapt. And more than anything else, what we have learned.

The range of things that we have learned, that what we can do as an organisation, where we are positioned now is only possible because we’ve had this amazing diversity, which is feeding in these different learnings and where we’ve got those cross learnings coming, which is deepening our understanding and enabling us to, I believe, take on the true underlying challenges rather than being stuck in a narrow area.

[00:09:21] Lily: But interestingly, I mean, with this diversity and with, I guess all these diverse things that we do, they still link together in a kind of coherent ecosystem.

[00:09:35] David: However we want to call it, you are absolutely right. And this is what I believe most common knowledge about, you know, be specialist, focus, do just your one thing, you miss out on. Actually, what we have really learned quite deeply is that any one of our projects that we are actually supporting on the ground, they don’t just need what we are doing for them. Actually, what we are doing for all the different things are all needed everywhere.

So that diversity that we’ve had about the roles we’ve played, the ways we’re working, the people we’re working with, what it’s helped us to see is the same common underlying trends. This is what’s so exciting, it’s been quite a journey, we just had our eighth year birthday, you know, year anniversary as IDEMS. And so it’s been quite a journey already.

But what I would say is that what I’m seeing is that I’m really excited about the next steps because what I’m seeing is that that deep learning, which we could only have got through all the different elements of diversity, the diverse people we’ve had in certain ways, although it’s not been as diverse as I would like, the diverse roles we’ve taken, the diverse topics we are working on, be it agroecology, parenting, education, climate, so many different areas. All of these elements of diversity have put us in a position where we’ve now got some insights about that underlying coherence that we are able to start communicating.

This is something which once we can communicate those elements, that coherence underlying all of that together well, then the hope is that will enable us to actually do the roles we are doing so much better because we can build out the tools that are needed to do this.

We have this tension between, you know, are we building technology, are we tech developers, are we a startup, or are we a service provider? We want to be both in this coherent way and that coherence is only possible because of that diversity.

So is diversity in this context always good? No. But it’s a choice. And by consistently making that choice, we’ve positioned ourself so that it’s actually part of what distinguishes us and makes us strong, and what is hopefully positioning us to be able to do things in a way that nobody else could because they don’t have that underlying coherence of experience within a relatively small team.

[00:12:21] Lily: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so that answers the question. It’s a high price to pay, but IDEMS was very much aware of that cost and knew that it was a kind of high reward and made that choice consciously.

[00:12:34] David: I think the only part of that which I’m certain of is made that choice consciously.

[00:12:38] Lily: Okay.

[00:12:38] David: Whether the reward’s gonna be there, you know, we knew there was a price to pay, did we know it was gonna be as high as it actually was? I don’t know.

[00:12:45] Lily: That’s what I was about to ask, you know, were there any unexpected costs from being so diverse?

[00:12:51] David: I think the big unexpected, and it’s not that it was, we expected things to be challenging with the choices we were making, but I don’t think we expected things to be quite so stacked against us. I guess going into this, I felt that, okay, we’re able to do things you know, on a level playing field, we should be able to succeed even if we don’t try to make our life as easy as possible.

I didn’t quite realise how far we are from a level playing field. This is the thing, you know, we can’t get an overdraft, this is a basic business service. We can’t get an overdraft because the playing field is stacked against us. So I think that’s what I don’t quite think I realised, on a level of playing field this would be easy in comparison.

We are not on a level playing field. Really things are stacked against us in ways that are worse than I imagined. Does it make me regret the choices we’ve made? No. I still believe we can succeed despite being on a playing field, which is stacked against us. Maybe I’m too much of an optimist, but there are signs that we are succeeding in some really powerful ways, despite having things stacked against us.

And so I’m optimistic still. I remain optimistic. But it’s been much harder than I expected.

[00:14:18] Lily: Yeah, okay, well, that’s interesting. That’s good to know, I think. 

[00:14:23] David: And this is exactly where as an organisation, I guess, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger in some ways. I do think the challenges we’ve been through have at this point strengthened us as an organisation. We are a much stronger organisation, partly because of some of the challenges we’ve gone through than I think we would have been, if we had had it easier.

So, having the deck stacked against you, of course this isn’t nice, but might it be good in the long term? I have no idea. The future is unknown, this is the thing, you can only deal with the hand you’re dealt.

[00:15:02] Lily: Well, and to come back to the initial start of this podcast, my ankle, of course, well, it doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger, I would say is not true for my ankle it is going to be weaker.

[00:15:14] David: Let me now challenge you on this. So it is true that your body is going to be physically weaker. Might you, as an individual, be mentally stronger? Might you have grown from it? And I’m not saying you will, I’m saying you could. 

[00:15:30] Lily: Yeah.

[00:15:31] David: That’s the key point. And I feel that’s the same for an organisation like IDEMS. The challenges we are going through, it’s not because we’ve gone through challenges that we will be stronger. But if we respond to those challenges in the right way, and I think we are doing pretty well on it, and we go through them and we grow from them and we learn from them, then it actually is an opportunity to learn.

And so I’m not saying that we will, it will make you stronger. So that’s the wrong wording, could make you stronger. This is the challenge for us as an organisation to actually take the challenges that are put in front of us and use them to strengthen the organisation as a whole.

[00:16:11] Lily: No, excellent. And I think that that’s a perfect way to end this podcast.

[00:16:15] David: Thank you. It’s been a nice, interesting discussion. Thank you for, again, bringing another interesting topic to the table.

[00:16:22] Lily: No, thank you very much.