How math, science, and Star Trek help us understand the value of team diversity

>> FREDRIC MITCHELL:  Thanks, Andrew, I really appreciate it.  Thank you to everyone who woke up this morning, a very creative format to have this conversation.  Yeah, this is one of those being human tracks.  I've been part of the Drupal community for 12 plus years.  Some of you may have seen this talk before.  I've continuously updated.  And, yeah, the goal today is really to share with you some of the research and experience that I've kind of gone through over the last maybe eight years talking about diversity, you know, being proud of the work, trying to have, you know, good faith conversations with folks.  

And the ultimate goal today is to share with all of you not only those findings, but hopefully you can pull some things away so that you can continue and further the conversation within your teams and within your environment.  

I put the slides up on the page, so if you want to download them via PDF, you can.  We can also go to this URL if you want to follow them live, but you can also grab it from the screen, too.  

All right.  So, we're going to start off with just a quick little game.  You don't necessarily need to jump in via mic, but maybe just kind of play this along in your head.  

A young woman was 3 years old when she started to read books.  So, start there.  So I ask you the question, what is her college GPA?  And you've got a variety of different options.  So just take ten seconds, kind of look at the options, kind of put a mental picture in your head, and think about how would you kind of come to the conclusion that you think would be the best guess answer?  

So you've got your answer.  The key is, it's a little bit of a gotcha question.  Basically, what I want to show here is that there really is no way to know.  But the way that we think about those shortcuts, how we take information from a small portion of a piece that we know about a person and try to extrapolate that over to a larger portion, that's technically what bias is.  It's obviously used in a negative context, but it also can be used positively, and it's one of those mechanisms biologically that we as human beings have in order to make sense of the world.  

So, in this case, the real thing I wanted you to take away with is that there really isn't a way to avoid bias or to be better at it than others.  I think sometimes as engineers and especially within a tech space, we try to convince ourselves that we're dispassionate and that we're fair because we have maybe a higher technical acuity, and so some of the things we may read about, our biases, our isisms, our stereotypes, maybe we're not subject to that because we're enlightened.  

And the key thing I want to take away from this is even in the most innocuous example where you're trying to guess what someone's GPS is based on the fact that they started reading at 3 years old, that's just a natural human tendency to create those biases.  

So the first hypothesis that I want to kind of start with, that I want you to think about as we're having our discussion today is this idea that within the world of tech, although we tend to focus a lot on technical ability, ultimately, what will make the world a better place is requiring that the folks who are building this technology not only do it in an equitable way, as many making it accessible to as many people as possible    whoops, sorry about that.  Let me go back.  But also the fact that we want to make sure that people develop what's called emotional intelligence.  And with those two things together, that's what's ultimately going to make technology work for everyone and make it as interoperable as possible, being able to connect, you know, disparate systems.  

What's interesting about this hypothesis is that I made this hypothesis probably six or seven years ago, maybe even eight years ago.  You know, we had it different    we lived in a different world.  We had different government institutions.  We have a different kind of stock market even to a certain degree.  

And obviously, with the continuation of all the things that we've seen, it's been interesting kind of seeing how this hypothesis a little bit comes into fruition.  But I'm hopeful that with our conversation today, you can kind of see how, you know, we can pull these ideas together and ultimately have this conversation amongst all of us, not just a few of us.  

All right.  Sorry, I'm using my phone here to navigate.  That's why it's a little bit awkward.  

All right.  So the first thing we want to talk about is we want to kind of establish some more definitions of terms.  That way, when I use these terms, and ultimately, when you can use these terms when you're talking amongst your teams in your network, we're all on the same page.  

The first is perspective.  Perspective is how you typically look at a problem, and common perspectives come from imitation.  So, this is    you can use an example as, you know, how would we solve this problem within Drupal.  Oh, we should use paragraphs module.  Why would you think that?  My perspective is I've seen other sides use that and it works pretty well.  

Perspective is really important because it helps you communicate, especially within a group, and it helps you make you feel comfortable.  

The next term we want to kind of focus on is something called heuristic.  And heuristic is how you typically search for a solution.  So while your perspective may be the information that you already have and things that you've experienced, things that you've been exposed to to kind of come to a conclusion, your heuristic is think about it as what are the tools or what are the mechanisms that I use to go and actually search for that solution.  

So, do I go into Google, do I just ask people that I really trust, do I, you know, go to a certain book, do I want to talk to a specific expert, that kind of thing.  

Let's kind of take these two things and go into a specific example.  In the 1930s, there was    a farmer found one of his calves was sick on his farm.  And what he ended up finding was that the calf had been eating clovers in the field, and it was ultimately kind of making the calf sick.  

And one of the by products of eating a clover is something called coumarin, which they found out was actually thinning the calf's blood.  And, you know, the idea was that, you know, how    how do we get rid of this and how can this be used moving forward.  

It just so happens that a scientist who was also working with this farmer happened to be doing some experiments with rat poison and going through all these kind of different scientific breakthroughs, and they ended up kind of repurposing that idea of something that was poisonous to animals and actually used it for one of the most biggest life saving drugs next to penicillin called coumadin.  This ultimately manufactured itself 40 years later, but it's actually a blood thinning agent.  It saved a lot of people's lives.  But it took a really long time for that type of innovation to happen mainly because the heuristic that came from a person trying to solve a different problem, the agricultural farmer, it didn't translate into the broader scientific community until a person with a different heuristic was able to repurpose that perspective for a different reason.  

So it's just one of those examples of how    different people's perspectives as farmers, had to be repurposed depending upon the different perspectives of the people that you're engaging with.  

One more quick example.  So, when scientists    it's back in the '20s and '30s when we would teach science of how eggs are fertilized and how the reproductive system worked, we would often use this image, this idea that when sperm fertilized the egg, it's, you know, battle of the fittest and one sperm kind of makes it and that's ultimately what happens.  

Well, as the scientific community matured and women were allowed to practice science and were more accepted in science, it turns out that that's not    this is not an accurate depiction of how the reproductive cycle actually works.  It's actually more something like this, where many sperm actually make it, I would say, or at least approach the egg for fertilization, and it ended up changing our entire understanding of the reproductive system in general.  

And again, the goal here is to reinforce specific examples of the difference and the importance of perspective in heuristic.  If you have an environment that it's not inclusive of a variety of different perspectives, then the heuristic that you use to kind of come to conclusions and come with solutions, you may miss bigger parts of, you know, the ultimate reality and what facts are, and even in the case of, you know, scientists and engineers who feel like they are emotionless or they don't, you know, have bias brought into them, these are two specific examples, and there are many others where the human race has actually jumped leaps and bounds because we've included a lot more perspectives into, you know, looking at the problem as well as the fact that we've included a lot more folks with different heuristics able to solve that problem.  

So now we can transition to a different concept of your team, a team you work with or a team you're building, especially if you're a business owner.  One of the things that's often    at least when I talk to team leads or business owners, is the idea that they believe the people that they've hired are probably the best, that their team is full of superheroes.  

And what's interesting about that particular perspective is, you know, when you talk about diversity or you ask them about diversity, you know, there's a lot of almost mental gymnastics that go into defining what diversity is.  

So you've got something called demographic diversity.  This is the things that we typically see.  Our gender, our race, our sexual orientation, things of that nature.  Things that are outwardly facing, things that people can typically kind of see or you've shared in an outward manner about, you know, who you are.  

You also have something called experiential diversity.  This is, again, thinking about to our different in addition of perspective and heuristic.  These are the things that we ultimately involve what we experience, right?  So these are our hobbies.  So, people who do different things in their own time.  These are maybe the groups or associations we decide to affiliate with.  These are our affinities.  And then also, our experience would also be based on our abilities, too.  

So if you have a lot of experience, if you maybe knew, if you maybe grew up English wasn't your first language, those are the kind of things that    those experiences are ultimately going to reflect your perspective and your heuristic.  

And then you've also got something called cognitive diversity, and this seems to be more of a popular and safer term when we talk about diversity, and ultimately this is, again, how we approach problems and how we think about things.  This is really kind of going deeper into perspective and heuristic.  

And a lot of times when we talk about diversity, we tend to shy away from demographic diversity.  We want to almost dismiss it to a certain degree.  I almost titled this talk, you know, how to answer the question of why should I care about race or why should I care about gender when hiring people.  

But as those conversations kind of blossom out, it typically kind of devolves into these cognitive diversity examples and why can't we just use that instead of the other one.  

I think the most important thing to take away from is that like many things in this world, this is a very fluid kind of concept, and this classification, these three classifications, again, it's just used so that we can have a conversation, but I think most important thing is to remember that oversimplifying either one of these or trying to pit one against each other is typically where you're going to run into trouble.  

But it's good to understand, you know, how they can be broken down.  

The parallel here, when we talk about the complexity of the idea of diversity, whether it's demographics, experiential, or cognitive, we see this in kind of biological terms all the time.  There's the idea that we live in a world that's full of biodiversity, and through the theory of evolution, we know that a lot of animals and species need to constantly change in order to survive, and one of the things that drives that change is the diversity of the biology and the ecosystems that we live in.  

The example that you're looking at is kind of a typical example of, you know, the slippery tongue of a frog, how slippery a frog's tongue is, and how slippery the body of maybe an insect.  So you can imagine within the evolutionary world, in the biological world, a particular bug or insect may develop a gene where their body is a lot more slippery, and therefore, they may not necessarily be caught as often as maybe some of their counterparts.  

As they continuously maybe thrive a little bit more, they end up reproducing a lot more, and the ones who don't develop that particular affinity end up dying off.  

The same is true for frogs and that balance, right?  If you're trying to catch prey that has a slippery body and you don't develop maybe a stickier tongue, then as you pass those genes down and as you engage more with different species, you know, you may not develop that particular affinity and your particular species or your particular kind of genealogical line may die off as compared to the other species of frogs who developed maybe a stickier tongue.  

And when you think about that holistically, what really is happening is this idea that in order for us to survive, in order for our teams and our companies and our people to survive, we have to be constantly in an ever changing environment.  We have to be presented with challenges so that we are constantly evolving and are able to adjust to those new realities as fast as possible.  

So that's kind of that parallel that I want to make sure that is kind of stuck in there, too, especially when we're trying to think of, you know, is this a real thing, and is this something that    you know, is the idea of diversity in this conversation just these human created concepts, psychological concepts, and basically what I'm positing here is if you really think about it in terms of biology and science, the value of diversity is definitely tied to survival to a certain degree.  

So now we end up moving into the allegory of "Star Trek."  I'm a big "Star Trek" fan.  And one of the things that I'm sure a lot of "Star Trek" fans probably notice is the fact that I didn't jump to "Star Trek" Next Generation, that I ended up going to Voyager.  For those who don't know, it was set in the 2730s, and what was interesting about the premise of this particular show was that it was made up of a hodgepodge crew that was ultimately thrown 70,000 light years away from Earth.  There's a lot of different factions from the crew.  You had people who were traditionally star fleet, you had those who were actually fighting Star Fleet, the rebels who were actually trying to declare some sort of independence, and because there were spies on the ship at the time when this whole kind of calamity ensued, you ended up having essentially a rag tag crew who had to adapt to a lot of challenging situations, ultimately going towards the same goal, which is how do we get back to the alpha quadrant and Earth in general.  

The other great thing in terms of the allegory is it was one of the first, if not the first "Star Trek," but even the scientific world to have a woman captain.  And at that time    and I know it seems kind of cliche, but this was about 30 years ago.  At that time, that was a very kind of groundbreaking kind of decision that was made by Gene Roddenberry and the rest of the production crew to move that forward, and I thought that was powerful.  

So as we go into this allegory, we talk about diversity, we put down some ideas with perspective and heuristic, we talked about evolution and biology, and we've talked about how we kind of have naturally these biases.  Now we're kind of moving into, you know, our different roles, and the first role that makes the most sense is the captain of the ship, the person who is maybe in charge of the team, the person who is leading the team, building a team, and the allegory here is Captain Janeway.  

For some of the younger folks who are listening to this, they are probably    well, isn't this the person from Orange is The New Black.  And the answer is yes.  Kate Mulgrew in her previous life was in "Star Trek" voyager for seven seasons.  She's a very powerful character.  

Again, as I mentioned before, her job within the show was to meld together a lot of different perspectives.  A lot of hostile perspectives together, again, to kind of go down and solve the problem of not only keeping the crew together and surviving, but making their way back.  

And one of her kind of endearing traits that was written into her character was the fact that she was extremely stubborn.  That as she was pursuant to ultimately getting her crew back, she was constantly curious because she had a scientific background, as kind of a researcher, and she ultimately knew that at the end of the day, she had to think out of the box and think about things differently in order to accomplish that, again, very complicated goal of kind of getting the crew back.  

One of the things she talked about, when you're building a team and trying to build a team from a lot of different perspectives, you want to make sure that you're constantly supporting those individuals.  So you want to keep your shirt tucked in and no matter what happens, you go down with the ship and you never abandon a member of your crew.  Again, the idea here is that in order to really bring everyone's perspective in and for everyone to feel valued, as the team lead, as the business owner, you have to be almost    think of it like an inverted pyramid, an inverted triangle.  The leader should be at the bottom and everyone else should be supported by their actions.  

So when you think about the fluidity of diversity and the things that we've kind of talked about, if you're ultimately making those decisions, the question you need to ask yourself is are you open to being unorthodox.  Here's where we kind of talk about, what do we mean by unorthodox and what are some of the things that I should be thinking about when evaluating these things.  

So let's go back into our kind of vocabulary world again and we'll talk about two concepts.  IQ, which I think most people have heard of, and we have EQ, emotional quotient or emotional intelligence.  One measures kind of our cognitive ability, another one measures our response and our perception of emotions.  

IQ is about mainly your ability to learn, not necessarily what you know.  So rapidity to pick up new concepts.  It's really about how quickly can they absorb new things.  Whereas EQ is really about what is your ability to recognize you're own emotions as well as others.  

So if we go back to that first slide, that little game that we played at the beginning, you'll remember that at the end of the day, you can't avoid emotion, you can't avoid bias.  It's not possible.  It's something that human beings have developed over time for our survival, for our fight and flight mechanism.  So they're equally important, but I just want to make sure that I know a lot of times when we talk about emotions, people think, I'm not emotional, I don't get emotional, things of that nature.  

But if you really think about it, it's really about, you know, do you have    have you developed a sense of perceiving what your emotions are and what other people's emotions are at that time, even if it's something you don't want to constantly be worried about.  

The other interesting thing to contrast about IQ and EQ is the fact that your IQ really doesn't change much after your childhood, whereas your EQ is something that constantly changes over time, something you can constantly be working on, you know, throughout your entire life.  And I find that really, really comforting when we think about adapting to new situations.  

So, one of the things that I'll be also sharing, because we talked about only math, science, and "Star Trek," but science in general, is research.  There's a lot of different studies that have shown that    and this one, I'm particularly focusing on is from Harvard business review from 2001, that when we talk about groups in general, you know, when you talk about creativity, and productivity, collaboration, cooperation, participation are really important, and to achieve those high levels of those particular things, a team has to have a greater emotional intelligence than necessarily individual intelligence.  

Ultimately, what they have found is that team members who have a high emotional intelligence amongst each other generally create a greater sense of trust.  There's a better sense of group identity, and ultimately, you know, the goal, again, when we think about a group performing together, you know, a group of team members creating a project, delivering something for a customer, that trust among members, that idea that we're in this together, and the fact that we can work well together, you know, ultimately is what created a top performing group.  And that kind of makes sense, right?  

And at the heart of those things, and you probably can all think of situations that, you know, reflect this, is the ability for it to be heard, the fact that you feel like other people are listening, and those technical abilities, while they're good, you know, if you have a bunch of people with technical abilities but they can't really engage and work with each other, then the efficacy of that group typically tends to suffer.  Again, this is just kind of some scientific psychological research that underpins this idea that emotional intelligence is really important in terms of, you know, having a high performing group.  

All right.  So we've planted the idea that as a leader I have to be unorthodox with new concepts.  We've introduced the concepts of IQ and EQ.  So now we're going to go to another character, one of my perm favorites, who's Tuvok.  Tuvok is from the Vulcan race.  Vulcans essentially    they're basically human beings at an extremely hyperevolved state.  They typically three 200 to 300 years.  They've removed emotions from their decision making.  They're extremely logical creatures.  They focus on peace through wisdom, experience, and vitality.  

What's interesting about Tuvok's character is that he would constantly reinforce, again within the show, that even though he may not have been emotional as the situation may have called for, you know, given the complexity of where the crew was during their journey, it doesn't mean that it wasn't difficult.  And having composure doesn't necessarily equivocate to the fact that something is easy.  And I think the lesson here is ultimately when we run into issues, when we have different perspectives, when we're trying to develop our emotional intelligence, when we're confronted with people from different heuristics, are we using a logical path to really kind of understand how to evaluate that and how to make, you know, our team higher performing.  

So we ask ourselves the question, what is the logical solution to move past this?  You know, I think this is something that we as a community tend to try to do our best at.  But, again, if we're not tied into our emotions, if we're not tied into the perception of other emotion, simply constantly reaffirming and reenforcing this idea that we need to be logical doesn't really get us too far.  

So, again, when we're thinking about working in groups, whether it's the Drupal community, whether it's, you know, a conference planning community, whether it's you're in a small team, or a larger team, you know, typically if you think about    especially if you work in different places, when you think about why you've left the place, why that wasn't a good fit, it's not necessarily because    most of the time it's not because you think you're smarter than everyone else, or, you know, those people were just incompetent or they didn't have a technical ability or they didn't know how to solve problems.  It was mainly because, you know, they felt like    people typically feel like, you know, was I heard?  Did I have the ability to grow?  If I had particular types of feedback or if I push back on things, was my team receptive to my perspective?  

So now we get into more research.  The headline here is there is some research that has a correlation, not necessarily causation.  We don't necessarily want to get into the correlation causation fallacy.  

The other thing I'll note is that this particular piece of research is just focused on people who identified as women, so it was a very binary type of research.  But I think the key here is there's some groundbreaking research that talked about having women as part of your team is key to having, quote unquote, smart teams.  This idea that, you know, that there's a high correlation between, if teams have more women members, and, you know, that group's emotional intelligence.  The idea is not to imply that women don't have high IQs, the idea that men don't have high EQs.  

As we're having this conversation, we want to be careful of jumping into our own biases and trying to read too much into what's going on.  

The idea really is just kind of saying, you know, based on this preliminary research, there's a high correlation between having kind of gender diversity, demographic diversity within a team, which could ultimately, again, going back to the fluidity of diversity, could have, you know, a high correlation to that particular group having a high emotional intelligence, people feeling like, you know, the group has a high satisfaction rate, higher set of cohesion, and they feel more motivated.  

So, again, this is kind of just placing this kind of, you know, mile marker here to say as we go deeper into understanding the importance of perspective and heuristic, as we go deeper into the science of, you know, what does diversity mean and what are the different types, and as we kind of look for, you know, what is the research saying in order to have these performance teams, you know, having some sort of gender diversity, you know, focusing on that demographic diversity does have some high correlations to high output.  

And what's interesting is that any time I bring this up, it's usually at a tech conference with a lot of guys.  And ultimately, whether it's during the talk or after the talk or even questions afterwards, there's this kind of conversation of, you know, why is this important, why is it that there's some sort of correlation between someone's gender and high efficacy of groups.  

And I just thought this comic was a good kind of representation of that.  You know, one of the things that's kind of obvious about this is the fact that, you know, in our biases, especially if you identify as a man, and if you're heterosexual cisgendered men, we tend to not necessarily be cognizant of our blind spots.  We tend to think that, again, that we are able to think logically and that we don't present emotion to anything and that, you know, our perspective and our world view ultimately has worked so far, and may not necessarily think that you can benefit from.  

This comic is just one of those kind of funny things where, you know, if you're not able to be cognizant of another person's perspective and heuristic, you'll just kind of miss the obvious answer of how that particular person's experience and diversity kind of can bring new perspective and new heuristics to our group, and ultimately make our group great.  

So then you ultimately ask the question, you know, if there's some kind of underlying research of, you know, these teams and how they compete against each other and this particular research that I pulled up was kind of, you know, just kind of mixing up the genders as necessary, the question becomes, why do diverse teams maybe outperform and what are those conditions that exist in order for that to happen.  

And there's a couple of things that kind of came out of this that I thought was really important to share with the group.  The first is that typically when you're around people who maybe not necessarily sharing the same affinities or have different experiences, you tend to want to focus on facts.  You don't jump to wanting to please that person so much.  You don't necessarily, you know, blend into the majority think.  And that idea of really focusing on facts and trying to have factual discussions tends to alter the behavior of the group, especially if there's a social majority.  If there's someone who's maybe    there's a lot of native English speakers, or from a particular school, or things of that nature.  

The other thing is, this is just kind of a natural thing that we do as human beings, is that when you're in a team that's surrounded by people who are a little bit different than you, you tend to be a little bit more careful in terms of what things are presented.  So you process those facts a little bit more carefully, because again, it's just a natural kind of bias that you have is that, you know, the information that you're receiving, you know, you may kind of, again, not in a negative sense, and maybe not in a malicious sense, but you tend to maybe give less benefit of the doubt, and so you tend to process those facts carefully, you may do your own research.  And again, that ultimately has kind of a good benefit to those teams overall.  

Because as ideas are turned over, as you talk a lot more, you end up getting more innovation and you dodge these costly pitfalls that come from kind of a group think, from not wanting to upset the apple cart, things of that nature.  

So that kind of leads me to my bold statement number one.  All of you folks who have braved my ramblings up to this point.  That's this idea that at the end of the day there's no such thing as common sense.  Common sense kind of implies that there's a common perspective, that we all kind of come from, you know, similar experiences.  

And I really would push back, you know, when you're in these conversations about the importance of diversity and trying to, you know, put value on these things, you know, the conversation tends to devolve into, that doesn't make sense, it doesn't make any common sense.  Why wouldn't we just kind of do this thing?  

And again, it kind of papers over this idea that there may be a blind spot there, that what you may find common is not necessarily something that I would find common, and do we have a team that can process those uncommon kind of perspectives.  

So now we go on to our next character.  This is B'Elanna Torres.  In other shows, the chief engineer was typically a man, so the fact that we had, you know, a woman playing this character was also really great and cool.  She was also half Hispanic in terms of, you know, her human side, and she was also half Klingon, so there were a lot of story lines that wrapped around her struggle with identity, which I thought was ground breaking.  Again, this was 30 years ago, so I thought this was really interesting.  

Because of that, she always kind of had this tough facade.  She always was trying to prove herself.  She was extremely knowledgeable and had a lot of talent.  But sometimes her perspective, her sense of honor and guilt and tenacity kind of threw people off.  And yet, despite that, you know, Captain Janeway made her the chief engineer.  She would say, if I sprain my ankle, at least I know I'm feeling something.  I'm not trying to kill myself, I'm just trying to see if I'm still alive.  

If you've ever kind of worked with folks who have had this type of zealot kind of nature, where they're super passionate about a particular project, super passionate about a particular subject, you can know that can kind of be offputting.  But at the same time, as a good leader, you want to bring that person in, you want to put them in a position where they can be successful.  So that ultimately, her character kind of ultimately asks the question, how am I evaluating talent?  How am I thinking about the people who I, quote unquote, would be good for this team or who would fit in our particular organization.  

One book that you can think about or look at, and one book that I kind of read and really kind of did a deep dive on is something Called the Difference, and it was written by Scott Page, and what's great about his book is that he really kind of unpacked this question that typically kind of comes up when we talk about diversity, which is, you know, well, I just want to hire the most qualified.  

Again, what's kind of implied, whether you see it or not in this kind of statement when these questions come up is, well, how do you define most qualified?  So when we think about the person in charge or that team, you're going to use natural biases because of what you're comfortable with.  Say, you know, based on my experience and based on what I've seen, most qualified to me means, you know, this particular perspective, or they talk this way, or they've done these X number of things.  

And again, when we think about a character like B'Elanna Torres, who not only was not part of star fleet at the time, you know, has a very brash personality, but was extremely talented, and we think about how we evaluate that talent, we have to be cognizant of what are those things that we're bringing with us to say this is how we think what most qualified is, right?  

The other thing you can do is almost invert the question, right?  If the criteria that I use to define most qualified is tried and true, let's just say that answer is how many Drupal modules has that person contributed.  Then it would beg the question, okay, so, are the people who have contributed lots of Drupal modules, have they never been fired?  Because if they're the ones who are most qualified, then ultimately, then those should be the best team members.  

And we can probably think of examples where that probably just isn't true.  

So, again, we have to be careful when we put too much weight on our specific biases, and again, how we bring our own kind of experience into how we evaluate and look at others.  

So this is going back to our vocabulary words.  What is the perspective that I use to kind of think about the problem and where are the answers that I go to find that problem.  Do I just go to the same two or three people to say what do you think, do I use that same sheet, do I use from that same school, do I compare them to the same things that I've always compared to.  And how do I make sure that I'm not introducing risk into my business, into my team by basically kind of going to the same well of logic when it comes to evaluating teams.  

So it goes to my next bold statement, which is, you must change your perspective to arrive at a new heuristic.  So in order to really kind of find new solutions and to pull in different people who have different perspectives, you have to almost change your perspective.  And when you do this, when you change your perspective, when you surround yourself and do unorthodox things to really think about how you're evaluating things, you arrive at heuristic, there's a word for that in our industry, and it's called innovation.  

When we think about the most innovative products, we think about it from the perspective of, wow, I didn't really think about that they could approach it that way.  When we think about, you know, new solutions, they're typically because new perspectives, diverse set of perspectives, maybe a new set of context was added, and a new way of thinking about the solution kind of came through.  

And what's interesting about this idea of innovation is that even the most innovative companies still have these blind spots where it's very obvious that even when they came out with something that was likely world changing, there were still some gaps.  So there are a couple of examples of this.  

When Ambien first kind of came out, the way that they actually tested Ambien during these trials, instead of testing it on women, they just decided, well, we don't need to diversify our testing pool, we'll just find other men who are just smaller in stature and that will be the same.  And they ended up having some issues when it came to dosing parameters and its effectiveness on women.  

When iPhone and Apple HealthKit first came out, it was deemed this really innovative thing, this idea that you could track your pulse and all these different aspects about your health, but when it was first launched, you know, it had no period tracking.  And it could be questioned to say, okay, how is it that something that's supposedly the most innovative health kind of technological revolution that came through, almost excluded half the world's population for something that not only happens to almost every person who identifies as a woman, but also something that's just very natural and very biological.  Like, how could that be skipped?  How innovative really is that?  

And that could lead to the questions of, well, you know, howdy verse was that team?  The same is true for Harvard, as you probably saw in the news last year, in terms of how they did they admission practices.  They try to tout themselves as, you know, bring on the best and the brightest, get 40% of the people that they actually accept are just legacy families.  

And even the same is true for maybe your Facebook news feed.  The fact that you have this kind of curated list of things, but we've seen the evidence of    even though this idea of the news feed was innovative and it changed the way people consume information, because it reinforced people's biases and their bubbles, you now have rampant misinformation, and obviously with the state of today that we live in, we can see how dangerous that actually is when you don't actually diversify your perspectives and actually don't bring in a lot of different perspectives and heuristic in terms of how you consume information.  

So again, this is something the question, how do you specifically define most qualified, what are the things you're bringing in, and how do you define what qualified is.  

Last but not least, in terms of the character we want to explore, is a character called Seven of Nine.  She was half human and half borg on the show.  So those who aren't familiar, borg was actually    was a very kind of interesting race of beings on the show.  I think they kind of, you know, spoke to kind of the larger    this larger context of a lot of the biases and blind spots that we have as human beings.  Essentially the board was this race of beings that assimilated other cultures.  Take the best and most qualified aspects of that culture and assimilate them into their collective and essentially be the superior race of all beings in the universe.  That was their philosophy, that they would come from a central hive mind, and as long as everyone did exactly what they were told and kind of plugged into the, quote unquote, matrix, that every time we assimilated new culture, that we would take the best of that culture, distribute it amongst all of our members, and essentially just kind of be the best race of beings in existence.  

What was interesting about Seven of Nine's character, because she was half Borg and half human, she was constantly battling these kind of two philosophies, this idea that I want to be the best and I want to use logic and, you know, the best mechanisms to solve every problem, but also her human side of being emotional, being    you know, trying to figure out more complex things, and when her character was introduced in the fourth season, you know, viewership skyrocketed.  It introduced kind of a new plot line and a new kind of tension on the show, which was really, really interesting.  

One of her favorite sayings, when the crew would try to solve the problem of returning to Earth, whether they would    especially when people get emotional about the various options, whether they should take this path or not this path, she would always chime in and say, well, emotion is irrelevant.  That's irrelevant.  I find that's something that tends to happen in these conversations about diversity that we tend to be more Borg like.  We typically and quickly dismiss things we don't understand, someone's demographic diversity.  We say, well, why is someone's race or their gender or the fact that they may speak a different    why does that matter?  That doesn't seem like that would make sense.  

What was really powerful about her character is that over time she realizes that discounting or dismissing or even discrediting these ideas about what make us human and not acknowledging them actually puts us off in a worse position, because ultimately, again, we live in a very complex and dynamic world, full of fluidity, things change all the time.  And if we're not constantly adapting and we're not constantly aware of all those different perspectives, then we'll ultimately    we won't be able to achieve, you know, our goal.  

And so that kind of leads to the question of, you know, Fredric, you're telling me all of these different things.  I understand these particular concepts.  But ultimately, why should I care?  It sounds like it's a good thing to have and maybe it's something that makes me feel good.  But if I don't do those things, why does that matter?  If our team, if our company, if we don't really, really bring into heart, you know, these concepts you're talking about, you know, what's the worst case that could happen?  

You know, six years ago, that was a really hard question to answer.  But as we've seen in this world, when you're surrounded by people who just want to think like you or are constantly from the same perspective, you can have dire consequences.  And typically people do things out of four different reasons, usually for vanity, they want to look good, virtue, they want to be morally kind of fulfilled, out of fear, they're afraid of, you know, giant risk, and then ultimately, kind of profit, how do we make money from it.  

I think the key that we need to focus on is this idea that fear and profit are very powerful motivators.  So when we talk about diversity, and if you're trying to push the idea of diversity, you know, be cognizant of those things.  Let's kind of go deeper into kind of a little bit of the science and the particular theorem posited by professor page, as I'm winding down on my ten minutes here and we'll kind of get through this.  There's this theorem of diversity trump ability.  But there's certain conditions in order for this theorem to be true.  

The problem must be very, very hard.  So it's not something that can be easily solved.  Each solver has a local optima to the problem.  So this idea that each individual person has their own unique ability how they can solve it.  So you might have the best farmer, the best scientist, the best actor, that kind of stuff.  

An improvement can be made to a nonoptimal solution.  So this is the idea that an improvement can always be made.  This problem can always be improved upon.  It doesn't have like a finite kind of solve in.  

When those conditions are met, in addition to the fact that there's a large pool of talent, or a large pool of solvers, then it posits that this theorem actually makes sense.  That diversity will trump individual ability.  

And when we think about that, again, we have these biological parallels, that if I'm constantly trying to eat better as a frog and I want to get better, the more experiences, the more kind of biodiversity that I'm in, the fact that there's a lot of different ways to do it, a lot of different kinds of tongues    I'm using this analogy kind of moving forward, right?  We can see how this theorem kind of sits.  

What's interesting about this theorem is that it can be expressed mathematically as well.  This can actually be modeled to be proven given certain conditions that diversity does actually trump ability.  And what you're actually looking at is the fact that the accuracy of predicting something, of predicting an outcome is the ability minus the difference in the categories that the individuals create in order to try to solve that particular, you know, problem.  

So this idea that we can mathematically model the fact that diversity will trump ability given certain conditions almost moves the needle past the idea of diversity being this kind of feel good thing and actually moves it into almost a mathematical type of certainty similar to Pythagoras on that note, if we're trying to profit, we need to be cognizant and take this almost as fact, because there's a lot of evidence around us as well as mathematical models that reinforce this idea that, you know, in order to get the most accurate kind of prediction, yeah, our ability to do those things is important, but it's going to be handicapped if everyone in our team is coming from the same perspective to kind of present that particular heuristic.  

Like any other scientific, you know, position, you want to obviously read kind of counter opinions, and there's also, you know, counter to those counter opinions.  And so I will encourage you, if you really want to get deep into the math and science, to kind of go deeper into those particular scientific papers.  

But I think the most important thing is that when we think about this conversation of diversity, we want to have these particular mental models in our head.  So that way we can have fruitful conversations with our teams.  We can talk about and maybe, you know, center this conversation on maybe some science and mathematical foundation.  But really kind of come down into this idea that, you know, we need to think of people as collections of tools.  A hammer and a screwdriver is not going to be able to solve everything.  

And when we think about it that way, someone's individual ability is actually a reflection of their applicability of those particular tools, which means that when we're solving very complex problems, like trying to build platforms for an entire department or trying to revamp the workflows of an internal tool set, all these things that Drupal is used for, whether it's trying to consume disparate types of information for public consumption, the unique abilities and perspectives of different types of people, you know, you want to collect as many tools as possible so that ultimately you can apply those tools to as many different situations as possible.  

And I think kind of adopting this model helps you kind of understand where diversity kind of meets the road past the kind of moral argument.  

Which leads me to my third bold statement.  At the end of the day, we have to, especially as a community, as an organization, you know, we hear this idea of pipeline problem.  It's not necessarily an issue, even the idea of a pipeline, this idea that there's some sort of    there's this log jam where there's not enough flowing through.  I think ultimately, what needs to happen is we need to really think about how we incentivize bringing in diversity, right?  

So what are some of the things that we can do?  As we think about that, here's an example of why this is so important.  What you're looking at is actually carabiner, the advice that you use to tie things down.  So if you're a rock climber and you're trying to connect, you know, your rope to your harness and connect it to another lever or pulley, use a carabiner to kind of do that.  

What's interesting about this picture is that all three of these things are actually carabiners.  The first one is designed by a human being, so you have the perspective of how a human would design a carabiner, it's very obvious.  

The second is actually designed by artificial intelligence, so they take all of the kind of perspectives of different human beings and decided this was the most efficient design.  

The third is 3 D printed.  Even though they all have the same purpose, the second one is 75% lighter than the first one, and the third one is actually 50% lighter than the second one.  

But as human beings, even though they logically all do the same thing, it may not be obvious based on how we think about what carabiners should look like, that these are all sufficient and great solutions to ultimately that problem.  

And so problem solvers with diverse perspectives, when we think about bringing in all those different perspectives and the idea that, you know, we have this kind of mathematic foundation of having different perspectives, the one thing you'll probably run into is this idea that when you have a lot of perspective, it's sometimes hard to understand where other people were coming from.  

And that's where the importance of EQ comes back into play.  This idea that when you're having trouble engaging with others, if you've never been around other people who have different perspectives, focusing on your EQ, focusing on your emotional intelligence is ultimately going to help you be aware of people's perspectives and ultimately, going to help you, you know, make the team more efficient.  And we've seen that in the correlative studies that I've showed earlier.  

And ultimately, what we're trying to do is we're trying to figure out how do we find those targets, how do we find those people, how can we become geniuses, how can we find things that we ultimately can't see, because from our perspective, we can only see so much.  

So some things that we can do.  So one thing we can kind of believe these perspectives.  It's not one of those things that would be nice to have.  We live in a diverse world, that's just a fact.  

How you choose to include those perspectives is a practice and requires practice.  But ultimately, the goal is to be equitable.  We want to create a society institution in your teams and all these different places where people can feel like they can contribute.  Because if everyone contributes, then we ultimately grow the pie, we ultimately have all these heuristics to solve a variety of different problems and we can be in a better place.  

So I want to quickly kind of slow this graph, because typically, this conversation when we talk about equity and we talk about kind of pushing this idea, folks typically kind of want to stay in the middle.  They want to be neutral.  The problem is we've seen in the past when you kind of split the line.  If you're not necessarily negative, you don't necessarily    aren't against it, but you're probably not going to do anything for it, but you're not really pushing towards integration.  Inertia will eventually kind of pull us into segregated spaces.  We're seeing that already, when fear is used to divide us and things of that nature, we typically kind of go back into our own little holes.  

Whereas if we push to grow, and we use our privilege to help others, we can avoid oppressive perspectives, we can avoid things like, not including different folks and their positions.  

So, how do we grow?  Make sure you have smart goals.  Connect your recruiting metrics to compensation when it comes to bringing in different people.  Maybe connect with diverse organizations like NSBE and Society of Women Engineers and send them the challenges that you've encountered each month or weekly so that those particular communities can know the kind of things that you're dealing with.  

Try to follow and engage with people who are not like you, people of color, you know, women, nonbinary folks, and really kind of listen and be a part of those discussions, maybe on a monthly basis.  

As an individual, things you can do.  Shift from saying this mentality of prove me wrong, to maybe asking the question of, what am I missing?  Ask more questions, right?  Instead of trying to constantly focus on being right and getting your ideas out there, maybe focus on the group being successful.  What are the things that we can do to say, okay, the goal is to solve this problem.  Instead of just doing what I say, how can we focus on being successful.  

I know we're running out of time.  

>> ANDREW OLSON:  All right.  Sorry.  I was going to say we're going to go five minutes past.  There's been great discussion in the chat.  I really want you to finish your slides here, so I'll give you five more minutes and then we'll probably wrap up and take the questions to, like, the Slack channel or just reach out individually.  

So, with that, we'll just go until 10:05.  

>> FREDRIC MITCHELL:  Okay, great.  

>> ANDREW OLSON:  And kind of have a lard stop and not questions, because I really want you to finish.  

>> FREDRIC MITCHELL:  No problem.  Yeah.  I'm on my last slides.  Thanks.  I appreciate that.  

So, in conclusion, this is ultimately what we're trying to do.  We want to solve difficult problems.  We want to think of people, you know, and their abilities as basically    we want a lot of people with a lot of different perspectives, and we want those diverse perspectives as distinct tools.  So we want to collect a lot of different tools.  

And ultimately, we want those team members to efficiently collaborate, right?  In order to do that, we have to constantly work on our emotional intelligence, we have to ask more questions versus making more statements in order to kind of get to that point, because it's very difficult to just flip the switch and say, okay, I can now work with people who are different than me, and value those differences and value those perspectives, value those experiences as necessary.  

There are some additional stories you can click and go through that I think was really helpful with me kind of understanding, especially when it comes to gender diversity.  My privilege is that I'm a cisgendered heterosexual man, so really kind of listening and going deeper into those to identify as women and really kind of listening to their stories was helpful, so I encourage those who may be similar to me to do that.  

And thank you, at the end of the day, for listening.  I really appreciate it.  The link to my slides are here.  And if you want to see kind of all the different, you know, research that I did, I provided links to all the different places that I looked at, so I definitely encourage you to kind of do your own research, you know, if you want to go deeper within that perspective.  

So I finished a little bit before five minutes, but I guess I'll    do we have a little bit of time for questions or thoughts, or should we go ahead and cut it off?  

>> ANDREW OLSON:  Well, I want to say two things.  One, excellent talk.  If you could also put the slides up, or at least the link to the slides on your session page on MidCamp, that would be great.  

>> FREDRIC MITCHELL:  Absolutely.  

>> ANDREW OLSON:  But it's great that we can get to them this way.  

And the second thing is, the reason I'm talking about the session page is, please, everybody that attended, go to the session page and rate this.  You can find it by going to the Friday MidCamp, the first session for Fredric Mitchell.  Yeah, right here.  

>> FREDRIC MITCHELL:  And I pasted the link to the PDF for the slides right here.  

>> ANDREW OLSON:  Oh.  There you go.  Thanks so much for doing this.  

With that, unfortunately, I'm going to stop the recording and we can continue the conversation for a bit.  But another session is going to be starting in about ten minutes.  

>> FREDRIC MITCHELL:  Sounds great.  

>> ANDREW OLSON:  Thanks so much, Fredric, and I'm going to stop the recording.  Great job.  

>> FREDRIC MITCHELL:  Thank you.  All right.  I'm trying to find questions.  Maybe we can unmute people, if they just want to shout it out, I guess.