On 2018-09-28 04:11, Christian Huitema wrote:
>
>
> On 9/27/2018 8:36 AM, Mallory Knodel wrote:
>> On 27/09/2018 16:01, Joel Halpern wrote:
>>> If I am reading that article correctly, he is referring to diversity as
>>> a core competency of his (and other) organizations. That is an odd
>>> linguistic use, but one I can understand.
>>> From an individuals perspective (or equally from the perspective of
>>> evaluating individuals for something) diversity is a property but not a
>>> competency. A person can change their receptivity to diversity in
>>> others, but can not change their own diversity. Going further, as far
>>> as I can tell it is not meaningful to ask "is this individual diverse?"
>> Hi Joel,
>>
>> Yes that's very close. She is writing specifically to flip this notion
>> that diversity is not a property, but a competency. It's exactly trying
>> to challenge the existing notion and create space to discuss it in terms
>> of competency.
>
> I have heard that theory many times during various "diversity training"
> exercises. The proposition is that a product development team will not
> successfully address the needs of a specific class of customers if there
> are no members of that class of customers in the team. It is a theory
> that sounds appealing, but that does not necessarily make it true. To
> give two counter examples: Nintendo games are very successful with young
> children, yet I am pretty sure that there are very few young children if
> any in their development team; Toyota successfully developed the Lexus
> brand to sell luxury cars in America, yet the original development team
> was all Japanese. The common point in these two counter examples is that
> the development teams cared a lot about the population of customers that
> they were addressing, and went to great lengths to study their needs. It
> seems to me that as far as product development is concerned, the key to
> success is not so much who you are as who you care for.
>
> Of course, that does not mean that having multiple perspectives is not
> important. A team in which everybody thinks alike is very likely to
> engage in group-think and be blind to events. For example, if I had
> mostly nerds in a team, I would want to add artists. If my team members
> cared mostly about engineering and performance, I would want to add
> advocates for usability and design. We have many dimensions of that in
> the IETF, security, performance, privacy, ease of use, maintenance,
> operations, scaling, internationalization. Different people have
> different priorities. We should try to select for this kind of diversity
> in the leadership.
OK. I'd buy:
We expect our leaders to value and promote diversity of all kinds.
(We also expect NomCom to do the same, but since the NomCom is selected
at random from the existing active participants, on average NomCom will
be no more diverse than the IETF as a whole.)
Brian
