When talking about the potential benefits of diversity, Chief Diversity Officers often cite diversity of thought as one of the most promising. President Barack Obama’s efforts to achieve thought diversity in his cabinet provide an evolving case study on the requirements for realizing this benefit. The analysis below suggests that accessing the advantages of thought diversity may be easier said than done.
Requirement 1: Specify your Diversity Mission (what you seek to achieve thorough diversity) and your Diversity Vision (what will constitute success).
The President has often clarified his Diversity Mission—to deal with complex problems through diversity of thought. On numerous occasions, he also has stated his Diversity Vision—that this diversity of thought would result in dissent, vigorous debate, tension, and conflict, which would, in turn, produce complex, innovative, creative decisions capable of handling complex problems.
As part of this requirement, care must be taken to speak definitively about motive (the reason thought diversity is important). In the corporate community, this is the business case. More broadly, it is the viability case.
Requirement 2: Determine whether your organization/community culture will support your Diversity Mission and your Diversity Vision. In declaring his intent with respect to diversity of thought, President Obama implicitly repudiated the Washington “oppositional”, “perpetual campaign”, partisan political model that has been prevalent in recent decades. This traditional cultural does not easily support bipartisanship.
Some observers, indeed, did perceive the new president’s bipartisan aspirations for thought diversity as evidence that he was naïve and did not understand the nation’s capitol and its partisan ways. As if to prove the skeptics correct, one potential cabinet member withdrew his name; apparently, in part, because, he could not support the bipartisanship that would be required. Also, the struggle to enact the stimulus legislation has proved that partisan politics are alive and kicking.
If your culture does not support your diversity aspirations, one option is to go around it. President Obama has been seeking to get around Washington’s traditionally partisan culture by repeatedly reminding everyone, “These are not normal times.” He is hoping that the current situation will be viewed as a crisis, and thus, facilitate at least a temporary departure from a constraining, partisan environment. This may well be his major diversity challenge.
Requirement 3: Recruit people with the potential to contribute to the thought diversity you are seeking.
Collectively, the recruits must be representative of a broad range of thought, while individually, they must be open-minded, receptive to criticism, and comfortable with the tensions of vigorous debate. As events have shown, not all candidates who meet the representation criterion have the necessary personal characteristics to satisfy the thought diversity requirement.
Most observers give President Obama high marks for assembling a group of people with diverse thought –even to the point of having Republican participation in his cabinet. Not only does the group have diverse perspectives, but also present are strong personalities prepared to advocate for their view. Further, seeded among the appointees are individuals with proven track records of working across party lines. Without a doubt, the potential for diversity of thought appears to be significant.
Requirement 4: Unleash the potential for diversity of thought. Often overlooked, this step is based on the recognition that assembling potential for thought diversity is not the same as actually generating thought diversity.
We cannot yet know whether the potential President Obama is bringing together will be actualized. A few Washington veterans are worried that some of the strong-willed personalities will dominate and stifle thought diversity; specifically, they fear that a rigorous process has not been established for soliciting and hearing ideas.
Requirement 5: Channel the unleashed diversity of thought toward the end of effective, quality decision making. In this regard, the President has insisted that his cabinet member choices share a core vision of the country’s needs. This shared vision will help to channel diverse thoughts. Further, he has stated that after all considerations and deliberations; he will make the final decisions, thus placing himself squarely in the middle of the channeling process.
To this pursuit of thought diversity, the President brings a strong desire for quality decisions in the country’s best interests, and an understanding that without diversity of thought, his administration will not realize its full potential. In this context, the evolution of the Obama Cabinet will provide Chief Diversity Officers with an instructive case study on the do’s and don’ts of achieving diversity of thought.
Dr. R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr., is the CEO of Roosevelt Thomas Consulting & Training (RTCT) and the founder of the American Institute for Managing Diversity. He has been at the forefront of developing and implementing innovative concepts and strategies for maximizing organizational and individual potential through Diversity Management. He is the author of Building a House for Diversity; Beyond Race and Gender; Redefining Diversity; and Building on the Promise of Diversity.
