The Discomfort of Diversity
Want to bring a boardroom to a screeching halt? Be the white guy who brings up diversity. There’s something about the word that makes people instantly tighten their sphincters. Suddenly everyone’s fascinated by their notebook, their coffee, or that one fascinating mark on the ceiling.
But I can tell you this: being in a room full of decision-makers that are predominantly privileged middle-aged white guys? That’s far more uncomfortable for work. Because you get a symphony of sameness. Sure, there might be some mild disagreement over golf handicaps or whose kid got into a better private school, but it’s still one long echo chamber – a conference call where everyone agrees with themselves.
And if everyone in the room looks, lives, and thinks the same way, then the decisions they make will be the same too – carbon copies of every other company run by the same demographic. That’s the real risk: when sameness becomes your business diversity strategy, you lose the very thing that makes you special. It’s not the similarities that make you unique; it’s the differences that do.
And if anyone in that room still thinks diversity is some “woke nonsense,” then, honestly, they shouldn’t be allowed near a decision of any importance – or a keyboard. Because that mindset limits ideas to the size of a teabag. And even if the idea’s decent, it’ll die alone because no one else was invited to help build it. And I’ve seen it up close.
The Room That Missed the Point
A few years back, I worked for a big South African retailer whose target market was the country’s mass market – households typically earning under R22 000 a month. The irony? The people making the decisions about how to reach that market hadn’t seen a pay slip like that since varsity.
So there we were, a group of clever people in a boardroom trying to understand a customer whose lived experience was galaxies away from ours. And every now and then, I’d lob a grenade of truth across the table:
“What do a group of us, all from fairly privileged backgrounds, really know about how this market lives, feels, and makes decisions? And how much of this is just our version of their story?”
Cue the sound of invisible tumbleweed.
It wasn’t meant to provoke – it was meant to pause. Because that’s how easily good people, with good intentions, build entire strategies on assumptions dressed up as insights. What struck me most was how much real knowledge existed right under our noses – in the call centre, with the people who actually spoke to customers daily. Turns out the people closest to the work often have the clearest view of reality.
It taught me something big: innovation and empathy don’t always come from the top floor. They often come from the people standing at the coalface.
What Cambridge Taught Me
A few years ago, I was privileged enough to study with the Institute for Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cambridge – so much so that I went back for seconds. It was during the High Impact Leadership course that one module properly rewired me. If you’re in any kind of leadership position, do yourself a favour and take it. It’s one of those rare courses that doesn’t just give you information – it changes how you think about inclusive leadership and innovation through inclusion.
One topic in particular hit hard: diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. The theory was simple. The reality? Transformational. What stuck with me wasn’t the HR-speak, but the framing:
- Diversity = Innovation – because different brains make better ideas.
- Inclusion = Leadership – because leading isn’t about talking louder; it’s about making space.
- Equity = Principle – because fairness isn’t an afterthought; it’s the architecture.
That reframed everything for me. This wasn’t about politics or pandering – it was about diversity and problem-solving. And once that penny dropped, I couldn’t unsee it.
At the Core of Work Is a Problem
If you strip away all the meetings, PowerPoints, and fancy job titles, every job on Earth comes down to one thing: solving problems. That’s it. That’s the whole gig. And here’s the truth: if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Going alone means relying on what you already know – which, let’s be honest, is never quite as much as you think. It’s like trying to assemble IKEA furniture without the instructions because you’ve got a degree. Sure, you’ll move fast – right up until the shelf collapses and you’re left holding three screws and a grudge.
Going together, though? That’s where it gets interesting. It means practising diverse thinking – drawing on colleagues with different skills, experiences, and opinions. And candidly, sometimes those opinions will make you want to chew the table. You’ll disagree, roll your eyes, and mutter things under your breath that would make HR twitch. But that’s the point.
Because real inclusion isn’t about agreeing on everything, it’s about being self-aware enough to admit that your brilliant idea might have a few blind spots, and someone else’s perspective could save it from spontaneous combustion. That’s what true innovation through inclusion looks like.
It’s not about holding hands and singing Kumbaya around a flip chart – it’s about curiosity. It’s about creating the conditions where ideas can bump into each other hard enough to spark something better. And yes, it can take longer. And yes, it can feel messier, like trying to bake a cake while ten people argue about the recipe. But it will always result in stronger, longer-lasting solutions. It will always deliver a better outcome than going at it alone. Because inclusion might feel like the slow lane, but it’s the one where the wheels don’t fall off halfway down the highway, and the cake actually comes out edible.
Blind Spots and Self-Awareness
Here’s the thing about blind spots – everyone has them, and they usually announce themselves right after you’ve done something stupid. You’ll be halfway through confidently explaining a “brilliant” idea when someone quietly points out that you’ve missed something obvious, and suddenly you can hear your ego deflating like a sad balloon.
That’s the cruel joke of experience: the more of it you have, the more you start believing your version of reality is the version. We get comfortable. We stop checking the mirrors. We treat our perspective like it’s a GPS, when really it’s more like an old paper map – full of coffee stains and missing half the roads.
Self-awareness, then, is the world’s most unglamorous superpower. It’s not loud. It’s not sexy. It’s the quiet skill of noticing when your own thinking might be steering into oncoming traffic and asking, “Who else can help me see what I can’t?”
That’s where inclusive leadership really starts, not with a workshop or a slogan, but with the humility to admit your brain isn’t Google Earth. Inviting different perspectives isn’t about being polite; it’s about avoiding professional face-plants. When you widen the lens, you don’t just see more – you understand more. The messy, inconvenient, human parts that make ideas stronger. Because the truth is, no one ever crashed from over-checking their blind spots.
The Power of Diverse Thinking
The best ideas rarely come from where you expect them. They don’t stroll out of brainstorms wearing lanyards. They sneak in from the edges – from people who see the problem differently, ask odd questions, and don’t care how it’s “always been done.” That’s the secret behind diverse thinking – it’s how you turn inclusion into innovation.
Here are a few examples that proved it for me:
- Reinvention Case Study: A petroleum company hired a marine biologist. Her research into how reefs absorb carbon gave the company new ways to rethink its emissions problem – a fresh perspective that no engineer in the room would’ve seen.
- Creative Reviews: I used to drag a lawyer into our marketing reviews. Marketers thought in headlines, designers thought in colours, and she thought in loopholes. She didn’t care about the idea; she cared about how it landed with normal people. And nine times out of ten, she was right – a masterclass in creative collaboration.
- Challengers: The people who challenge you are the ones who keep you sharp. They’re not your critics; they’re your safety net.
That’s the real value of diverse thinking: it doesn’t protect your ego – it protects the work.
But it goes further than teams; it’s personal too. Stay in the same environment long enough, and you start thinking like everyone else. It’s comfortable, it’s safe, and it’s also the beginning of creative retirement. You slowly trade curiosity for compliance.
When I notice that happening to me – when the things I say start sounding suspiciously like what everyone else would say – that’s my signal to move. Not because the place is broken, but because my perspective has gone soft. The value I bring has always come from seeing things differently – from asking the odd questions, the awkward ones, and joining dots that don’t look like they belong on the same page.
That’s diversity at its core – not a policy, not a poster, but a personal responsibility: to keep your mind diverse, stay curious, and never confuse comfort with clarity.
How to Bulletproof Ideas with Diverse Thinking
If you lead anything – a project, a team, a bake sale – this is where diversity really earns its keep. It’s how you bulletproof your work before the world takes its first shot. When you’re too close to a project, it’s easy to fall in love with your own brilliance. You stop spotting the cracks because, well, you made them. That’s why you need people who think differently – people who’ll happily tell you your baby’s ugly before you launch it to the public.
To pressure-test your ideas:
- Invite friction early. Don’t wait for launch day to find out what’s wrong.
- Ask, “Who could break this for me?” It’s not about validation – it’s about survival.
- Fix quietly before it breaks loudly. Because Twitter doesn’t do mercy.
It’s not about diluting your vision; it’s about stress-testing it. Confidence isn’t presenting perfect work – it’s knowing your idea’s been drop-kicked from every angle and still stands. Diverse thinking isn’t just good ethics – it’s good engineering.
Case Study: Google and Beyond
Google gets this better than anyone. They introduced “20% time,” where employees could spend part of their week working on projects they believed in – even if they had nothing to do with their job. That little experiment birthed Gmail, AdSense, and Google Maps. You know, the small stuff.
Then came Project Aristotle, where they studied 180 + teams to find what made the best ones tick. The answer wasn’t talent or leadership. It was psychological safety at work – the freedom to speak up, screw up, and still belong.
And they’re not alone:
- SAP & Deloitte turned DEI into a core productivity engine.
- Unilever tapped local insights to make global products that actually worked.
- Biogen used employee networks to redesign R&D.
- Marriott built multicultural teams that made customers feel seen.
The message is clear: diversity drives innovation – and in today’s economy, that’s commercial survival.
Safety, Trust, and Culture
Personal growth only happens when you feel safe enough to be wrong. Organisations are the same. Without psychological safety at work, diverse thinking doesn’t stand a chance – it just dies in drafts and deleted slides. When colleagues pull you in to help solve their problems, that’s inclusion in motion. It’s not a memo. It’s a culture.
The Inclusion Loop
Think of inclusion as a loop, not a list:
- Include early – before the decisions are already tattooed in stone.
- Build safety – make it okay to challenge ideas, not people.
- Integrate feedback – don’t defend the work, improve it.
- Share credit – because no one likes a hog.
Repeat. Forever.
The Individual Challenge
Inclusion isn’t HR’s job. It’s yours. Every day, you’re solving problems. The question is whether you’ll go alone or go together. So here’s the challenge:
- In your next meeting, invite someone who wouldn’t usually be there – and ask them first.
- When you’re stuck, ask: who would see this differently?
- And before you hit send, ask: has this idea been punched hard enough to survive the real world?
Because diverse thinking doesn’t just solve problems. It builds better ones, the kind worth solving. And yes, diversity might make the room a little more uncomfortable. But that’s where the best work starts – in the discomfort, the debate, and the glorious mess of difference.
Because comfort builds routines. Discomfort builds revolutions.
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