Making the Difference: Applying a Logic of Diversity

Abstract

Executive Overview Each year, corporations spend billions of dollars on diversity training, education, and outreach. In this article, I explain why these efforts make good business sense and why organizations with diverse employees often perform best. I do this by describing a logic of diversity that relies on simple frameworks. Within these frameworks, I demonstrate how collections of individuals with diverse tools can outperform collections of high “ability” individuals at problem solving and predictive tasks. In problem solving, these benefits come not through portfolio effects but from superadditivity: Combinations of tools can be more powerful than the tools themselves. In predictive tasks, diversity in predictive models reduces collective error. It's a mathematical fact that diversity matters just as much as highly accurate models when making collective predictions. This logic of diversity provides a foundation on which to construct practices that leverage differences to improve performance.