Diversity works

I recently went to the exhibition 'Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2010' (www.nhm.ac.uk/wildphoto) in my hometown. What struck me was the diversity of the images and the way the photographers had developed the theme "life on earth". The resulting photos varied from animal portraits and close-ups of plants to animal behavior, wild places on earth and influences on nature, such as erosion and colorful deposits of minerals in the Rio Tinto.

The winning photograph shows leaf-cutter ants 'in action'. At first glance a striking green picture but when looked at for a longer period, it comes alive. You see ants busily cutting parts of the leaf, silhouettes of travelling ants and enlarged contours of pieces of the leaf. A true 'marvel of ants', as the title of this picture suggests. By being a part of this exhibition, this picture illustrates the value of diversity. It also showed me that there are more sides to diversity than the commonly known diversity of gender and species. This exhibition also showed me diversity of perspective. As in: Peter has a different way of looking at the world than John or Annie. They all observe differently, take different pictures and then the whole picture emerges when they are all put together.

As I walked around, the step from nature to organizations was easily taken. When something goes wrong in organizations, it is common practice to hire an external consultant to make an analysis and let him/her do the diagnosis. In photography terms: he or she will shoot some pictures and the perspective of the picture then depends upon the outlook of the consultant. Whichever angle he or she uses, the end result will always bring only a part of the whole picture. The consultant is not to blame for this. His/her assignment probably only focused on what went wrong.

My take away: if you want to get the full picture, you will need more than one picture or one 'photographer'. Why not let employees act as the photographers in case of 'problems'? Jointly they will see a lot more than one consultant. The exhibition also showed me that focussing on numbers (quotas) will not bring out the true potential of diversity. Diversity will only work in a context in which people are facilitated and encouraged to bring out the best in themselves. As was the case at this photography competition!