On 9/27/18 1:46 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
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.
No we don't. Many kinds of diversity have no bearing on the IETF.
And there are documented cases where people in high tech would like
less diversity.
Like what you ask? Well, Mozilla was doing OK under Brendan Eich. Then
it came out that he gave money to an anti-gay marriage campaign. Was
diversity of opinion on the topic of gay marriage important to Mozilla?
Apparently not. Even demonstrated competence at the CEO level was not
enough to counter-balance the mono-culture on opinion of gay marriage
that Mozilla wanted, so out he went.
Speaking for everyone, I think it's safe to say we don't want diversity
of all kinds (how many MAGA hat-wearing Trump supporters do *you* think the
IETF needs and do we need to ensure that number is reflected in
leadership?),
we want diversity of certain things that are important to make us operate
better and produce standards that are higher quality. Now, what are those
characteristics?
Or is the diversity being discussed here like that line from the
Blues Brothers, "oh we like all kinds of music here, both country AND
western." We want to promote all kinds of diversity here: race, gender,
sexual orientation, AND ethnicity.
regards,
Dan.
