Welcome to this first week of learning universe teams and organizations. This first week we're going to focus on understanding the topic of diversity and why it matters, and how to launch our own personal journeys to help enable diversity to live up to its positive outcomes for our businesses as well as the world. The learning objectives for week one, is understand why diversity is good, and yet it's also very hard, which is why topics like inclusion and equity are paramount. We'll describe the organizational and financial benefits of creating diverse and inclusive teams and organizations. Then we'll identify the conditions needed for diversity to benefit teams and organizations. Throughout all of this we'll work to internalize a growth mindset around personal bias. To help each of us do our best to contribute to the ability of organizations to reach diversity bonuses. I want to pose to you the challenge of this course, the diversity challenge, which is diversity is good. Data-sets across the sciences show that diversity can yield enormous benefits for organizations, for teams, even for individuals. Being exposed to differences can lead you to be more creative, to make better decisions to learn. However, diversity is also hard, it's uncomfortable to be faced with different opinions in our own to be around people that have different experiences in our own. That's why a course like this, in my mind is important for everyone to take is to understand the skills you need to enable diversity to help the world. To enable people to learn the skills they need to create inclusive environments where people feel safe, trick stresses, differences as well as create equitable work environments where everybody even has a chance to come to the table and to be heard and have impact, coming from different backgrounds. Let me show you just one example of the many, many studies on this topic. One of my favorite stays by this was done by, among others, the late Kathy Philips, who was a leading scholar on the topic of diversity in teams and organizations. This study, she had teams in a laboratory environment where everything was controlled, the teams were either composed to be similar. For example, all the same gender, the same race, or the dissimilar, where they had diversity. This effect has been shown to occur across a lot of different types of differences. What she found as others have found, is when you're working in a team with people that are very similar to you, and you ask people after a tasks, so in this case, he did a decision-making tasks for half hour or so. How well do you think you did? People that are in teams that are very homogeneous or similar, say this was amazing, we did so great. We had so much fun, this is a cohesive team, we all get along it's awesome. Contrast, the teams that we're different from one another where members, had different experiences, ideas, and backgrounds, when they were asked how well they thought they performed right after working together, they said," I don't know, I don't think we did that well, we disagreed, people had different ideas, it was a little uncomfortable at times, it was hard." Well, you can guess, from probably going with this, given this course, if you look at how the teams actually perform their objective task performance, their ability to make a correct decision on the tasks they had to do, the teams that thought that it was hard, that it was uncomfortable, they performed much better. The teams that had fun, that got along that were similar, they had things like group think, where are they all thought alike, they never challenged other views and they make bad decisions as a work unit. As I really want to stand still by this because this is going to come-up throughout the course in a sense, is the bedrock this course is based on which is this understanding that diversity is good it leads us to learn, and leads us to perform better. However, it's hard, and it's uncomfortable. We need to learn how to embrace that discomfort, and create work environments where we're inclusive, more acceptable to our diversity can lead us to learn more, perform better as long as our teams and our organizations. Again there's many reasons why diversity matters. Clearly does moral reasons as we see in society around us. Absolutely, that's there. There's clearly the bottom-line performance meta-analysis have supported the idea that with inclusive cultures and effective leadership diversity will consistently benefit bottom-line performance. Finally, as individuals just going through life, there's been a lot of reasons to show the diversity helps us learn and be more creative. All these reasons are there, all these reasons are embedded within this course. That being said, that when we talk about diversity to others, it's been actually research showing the best way to talk about the reasons to embrace diversity, is usually the learning mindset, that people are the most willing to engage with us and learn on these topics when we focus specifically on the benefits of diversity for learning. I think this helps support the notion that diversity is good but it's hard, just like learning anything and been exposed to any type of new or different knowledge. Again, the moral mandate is absolutely they're embedded in this course and I personally believe something that we all need to take seriously. Within this course I'm often to be focusing on diversity from this angle, just because I want to elicit the most openness from all of us, to learn why diversity matters, to learn skills on equity and inclusion needed to help our organizations and our societies thrive. Just to remind you on where those learning opportunities do lead, is they do lead to greater financial growth however you look at it. I want to stand still about how exactly the Learning we get from diversity translates into diversity bonuses. The learning opportunities to and diversity are many. Diversity allows people to bring unique perspectives, and different information to the task. Interesting research also by the late Kathy Philips shows that when we're working in, for example, on racially diverse teams, people better prepare for meetings. They do better homework, they do more homework that come better prepared to share the different opinions. Other research has shown that when we work on diverse teams, our discussion tends to focus more on the facts, and the evidence that we actually have. This lay isn't turned to deeper discussion. Much work including some of my own dissertation work shows the intern diversity leads to more debate, and more task conflict in teams that allows people to really go deeper and importantly, better elaborate on the information available to the team. More data, more information gets brought to the table, people more carefully discuss and elaborate on each of those bits of information. All this together means that individuals, groups, and organizations exhibit improved problem-solving, decision-making ability, creativity, and performance, because of the diversity present in the organization. A challenge to this so, is that at the same time, that diversity brings all these informational differences and allows us to perform better. At the same time diversity just bring with things like social categorizations and in-group and out-group bias. This is particularly likely when there's threats and challenges in the environment. For example, I have some recent research showing that when there's resource scarcity, group diversity is more likely to lead to power struggles and information elaboration. As so this is then why topics like inclusion and equity are so important as to remove this entire darker pathway of social categorization, bias and threat from the table, so that diversity can live up to it's informational benefits. We'll hear a little bit more in this course from Scott Page on this information benefits as long as they're reading from Kathy Philips. Then we're going to stand still and be done with the diversity benefits, and most of the rest of this course is going to be going really deep into the dark side of diversity. How do we remove that? How do we become anti-bias for ourselves? How do we create organizations that are anti-bias and equitable, as well as inclusive to ensure the end of the day the diversity is able to lead to this information elaboration, benefits and higher group and organizational effectiveness. This week in your first week of this course, you're going to start your personal workbook. Tell kickoff your accelerate your journey in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion. We'll get more depth on the bonuses of diversity, we'll learn initially about the challenges of achieving diversity, and then you'll have your first chance to put your learning into practice with your weekly action plan. Wishing you all the best this week.
