Coaching Letter #209

On the enormous benefits of diversity

Happy Black History Month! This Coaching Letter doesn’t seem like it has anything to do with Black History Month, but it gets there… Thank you for subscribing to the Coaching Letter—you rock.

I happen to know quite a bit about airplane crashes. My husband studies what happens to places where something violent and tragic has happened—I commend to you his book, Shadowed Ground—and so tends to know the facts and circumstances of a lot of tragedies, including those involving airplanes. (As I mentioned in my last Coaching Letter, this means that we have been to a lot of really sad and poignant places.) One of my sons is studying airplane mechanics, and so knows a lot about what can go wrong with airplanes to cause crashes, and can speak to the technical details in ways that I have no hope of understanding. But included in his studies is how humans interact with technology, because that itself is a source of error and failure. And I, as part of my graduate program in Human and Organizational Systems, have researched failure as it exposes the workings of systems, and airplane crashes turn out to be instructive case studies.

Coincidentally, my husband and I were in Florida last weekend visiting my son, just a few days after the crash of American Eagle 5342, so a lot of the conversation was about airplane safety. Airplanes are, of course, inherently dangerous. They take you to a place where humans are not equipped to survive: the lower stratosphere. If something bad happens, there is no easy exit, and the number of adverse events that do not involve fatalities is very small—the landing of US Airways 1549, the “miracle on the Hudson”, is an inspiring but rare example.

Airplane travel has become remarkably safer over the last 20 years—the last mass casualty accident in the US involving a commercial airline was Colgan Air 3407 in 2009—and there are many reasons for that, including but not limited to advances in aircraft technology, better training for pilots, improvements in Air Traffic Control, stronger regulatory oversight, stronger safety culture, and learning from past incidents. (Here’s a brief YouTube clip that will give you a sense of the dramatic improvement.) There’s a lot to say about all of these, but for now I’m going to stick to the factors that will help me make the points I want to make.

First, your government has worked hard to improve the safety of air travel. Many of the improvements that have happened were instigated and implemented by the airlines—more on Charm School later. But many were not. My son is taking a class at the moment in which he is learning about US Air 427, which crashed on September 8, 1998, killing 132 passengers and crew. The Wikipedia entry on the crash makes for grim reading. The very short version is that there was a problem with the rudder. But this was a contentious finding, and was arrived at after the longest accident investigation in NTSB history—four and a half years—that not only found the true problem when Boeing and the FAA had argued that the cause was pilot error, but also linked the rudder problem to other incidents involving 737s, and caused the FAA to direct Boeing to change the design of the rudder in the 737. I know that bureaucracy gets a bad rap, and that it is frequently associated with government bloat, inefficiency, and drag on the economy. But government at its best is tenacious in service of the greater good, largely because it serves people not profit, but also because it is staffed by good and decent humans who are motivated to do what is right to make the world a better place, and I am grateful for them every time I get on a plane, watch the weather forecast, drive my car, get a vaccination, and walk into a school.

Second, the crash of AA 5342 and the military helicopter will trigger a long investigation and it may take years for a report to be issued that details the findings. But I will bet you any amount of money you like that it will not conclude that DEI was the problem. I am not making this bet for ideological reasons (although I have them). I am making this bet because we have so much research that suggests that diversity in organizations is a strength. For example, this article from the World Economic Forum summarizes the research that companies with more women on their boards outperform, by significant margins, boards with no gender diversity. Here’s an article from the Harvard Business Review about the relationship between diversity and profitability. Oh, you’re not interested in profit? Well, plenty of research to suggest that diverse teams are more creative, more innovative, make better decisions (often because they deal more with facts rather than assumptions), and are more aware of their blind spots. And the reason for that is simple. The more diverse perspectives that are brought to bear on a goal or challenge, the more the team as a unit knows and the more effective they are as a result, and the way to get those diverse perspectives is to get diversity of experience. And the way to get diversity of experience is to hire people from different backgrounds, however you can operationalize that, including but not limited to race, class, gender, age, dis/ability, and religion. There’s a very useful book on this called The Diversity Bonus, by Scott page—here’s a very short video of him making the case for diversity. We also have evidence that lack of diversity is a problem—see the classic work by Irving Janis, Groupthink.

Finally, there’s another key part to this. It’s not enough to have access to diverse perspectives. You also have to listen to them. I mentioned Charm School earlier—Charm School is an inside-baseball term for Crew Resource Management training, which was created to solve the problem that traditional power differentials (AKA rank) in teams led to sub-optimal and sometimes fatal performance of the team. I wrote about rank in CL #29, to make the point that, in the case of United 173 on December 28, 1978, the problem with the aircraft was known, and the solution was known, but the plane crashed anyway because the captain didn’t listen—literally did not listen—to the flight engineer and the plane ran out of fuel. Rydell and I included a chapter on power in Equitable School Improvement, including power as relational not positional, power through collaboration, and empowerment as opposed to tokenism. Amy Edmondson has written about power in many of her books, including Teaming, to make the case that flattening power structures in all kinds of teams makes the pooled knowledge more accessible and therefore increases effectiveness. There’s also a great book by Bent Flybjerg called Rationality and Power, which is about how people in power tend to think that they know best, not because they actually have more knowledge or experience or expertise, but because they are in power. When power is concentrated in rank structures it is a Bad Thing. And yet I continue to see examples of leaders thinking that they know better than the people who are closer to the problem than they are, and minimizing the concerns of teachers or dismissing the concerns of students. For the work that we do on amplifying student voice (not just getting input on the prom theme), here’s a piece from our Partners Matter Newsletter.

I have no doubt that when the President circumvented all the normal protocols for investigating and reporting airplane crashes to conclude that DEI was the problem, he was making a racist argument; the attacks on DEI have at their core the assumption that people of color, women, and people with disabilities would not be in positions of authority or expertise without an effort to compensate for their lack of merit, when the real problem is that our society and related institutions have not recognized or promoted the merit that they bring. The attacks also imply that we pay a price for DEI, either because there is an assumption that the economy is a zero-sum game (which it definitely isn’t) or because there is, as Scott Page puts it, a trade-off between excellence and diversity, which is also clearly wrong. So in addition to the racist argument, he was also making a stupid argument, and let’s not forget that part. As educators, I think it’s really important that we not only understand but can speak fluently about the benefits to education and to kids of diversity. Parents need to know that their children will know more and be better off when they are in school with kids who are different from them, and we need to feel confident in explaining that to them.

I am hoping to find the time to write more Black History Month-related posts, and in the meantime, please read CL #204 on conceptualizing racism or #208 on civil rights and strategy, As always, please let me know if there is anything I can do for you. Best, Isobel