When Quality Meets Diversity, Diversity Wins

Apparently, not many people wanted to admit that When Lean and Safety Meet, Lean Wins — but today many businesses are more cautious with Lean, thanks to Boeing.

And here’s more good news! Recently, we learned that When Diversity meets Quality, Diversity wins.

This time, it did not cost 346 lives, thanks to Boeing again!

But here’s what is still bothering me. Selecting the best in one subject based on their success in another will inevitably lower the overall quality of your team. It’s a math principle, kind of like a rule of nature, and we must follow those rules until we figure out how to change them.

If mathematics isn’t your strong suit, take a look at recent history. Just a hundred years ago, the Bolsheviks in Russia triumphed with their own version of DEI, and the USSR further refined this approach over several decades. Soviet ideology reached its zenith during Stalin’s purges, marking a point of no return for a sustainable human society, and we are all too familiar with the catastrophic outcome. The total cost of the Soviet DEI utopia stands at about 100,000 times more than the 346 lives that Boeing’s lesson has cost us so far.

Maybe it’s a good idea to start by learning basic stuff like math, history and other liberal arts and sciences, just as people did for a long time. After you’ve got that down, you can think about tackling the loftier, more soul-uplifting questions about justice, etc. Even the notions of diversity, equality, and inclusion – become more meaningful after you get better acquainted with history and social sciences.

Thinking before doing and learning even before that – might work better, as understanding the basic rules of nature can help you make better life choices.

And that will ensure greater safety, both for yourself and for the world.