by Sidsel Lindsø, CEO of ExploCrowd

Have you seen one of those photos of a Board of Directors, members of a panel debate or a management team lately, where they all are the same gender, same age, same suit, same skin colour and even same hairstyle?

This is a blog post about how unconscious bias forms a threat to your business

Conformity

When I see these Photos of Conformity, my instinct tells me that they, as a group, are not necessarily best for business. Because how can you be sure that they capture what moves in the market, new rising opportunities where you have to move fast to seize it, emerging technologies and new threats to your business model if you all come from the same background, have the same skills, have the same personality profiles and see the same things the same way?

The two best examples that come to mind are an example from Børsen and the famous picture from the Munich Security Conference.

This wonderful example is more than one year old, where the Danish Business Newspaper Børsen published a piece on the upcoming changes in board of Directors across significant companies. The title says “Loads of dynamics and changes at the top of Board levels in 2021” and it tells quite a story about how far behind Denmark is on equal opportunities for all.

*The famous picture of the Munich Security Conference was captured by Editor-in-Chief Michael Bröcker and shared on Twitter.*

The ability to better identify opportunities and threats

Wouldn’t it be smarter if at least part of the team or panel members came from different backgrounds, had different skill sets and viewed the world differently? Wouldn’t the group collectively have a higher level of competence? Wouldn’t they see more opportunities, together? And threats?

Wouldn’t you need the tech savvy digital ninja who knows the latest and greatest of what moves to advice you on how to move faster with better quality? The young dude or dudette who knows how to communicate the vision and manages to capture the audience in a tweet or a LinkedIN post? The people whose thoughts are in the future who are driven by action and make things happen, combined with the ones who like to take time to think and reflect for a while before big decisions are made - just to be sure that they didn’t miss an unnoticed threat in the blind spot?

Why not Bring in world cultures to challenge your way of thinking?

You might also consider to bring in experience and perspectives from across the world. One thing that really became obvious to me when travelling in Viet Nam was how many barriers and boundaries we automatically and unconsciously set for ourselves, just by living in this beautiful and very protected bubble up in the cold north. Study the creative solutions in the pictures below and you will understand the perspective.

I was humbled by the innovation force that I observed, where there was no challenge that couldn’t be conquered and no problem that couldn’t be solved. You could sense an immense driving force, just beneath the surface.

Pictures taken by the author of this blog post.

It is about the mind set, really, and one aspect where it really became visual was in transportation of things and people on the road. Many of us would have stopped because of safety, “That is not how we do it” or something like that, but the innovative ideas you get access to by not setting yourself boundaries are fascinating. I think we could certainly be inspired by how to do things elsewhere.

What we have learned about our own unconscious bias

My awareness of my own unconscious bias has increased significantly over the last few years in my role as CEO.

Most importantly, a pattern has emerged where it appears that the people that I have a deep connection with (unsurprisingly) have the same personality profile as myself. That is something that I am now very cautious about, but it highlights what happens when we recruit through our network and let our ‘gutfeel’ drive the decisions of who you hire.

The Danes even have an expression for it, and it is called the Rip-Rap-Rup Effekten. Or the three identical nephews of Donald Duck Huey, Dewey and Louie. And that is how you end up with leadership teams or boards with identical team members.

Avoid it, or it will look like the conformable examples above.

Conformity is not good for business

If the leadership team in any company looks like each other, the world has the right to challenge if they are best suited to deliver the best performance of the business. Remember here, that countless studies have documented that companies with less conformity usually outperform those high-conformity companies financially.

McKinsey has documented this carefully in several reports and quantifies it to this:

Our 2019 analysis finds that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25 percent more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile—up from 21 percent in 2017 and 15 percent in 2014.

If you add ethnicity to the mix, then your company is actually 36% more likely to outperform less diverse teams, financially. That is good business.

We are consciously using Team Profiling Tools enabling us to identify several of the unconscious bias, and you can read more about it in this blog post, but we have still a lot to learn and be aware about.

My best advice

Be aware of the negative aspects of only recruiting through your network. You will likely get clones of yourself, and though it might be easier to work with (and perhaps a bit lazy, really), a clone of yourself might not be what you need to drive your business forward. You already have that world view and competence secured.

I consider unconscious bias a threat to business - and it is something that I think more investors will have in mind in the future. I hope that more boards and business leaders will too.

In the meantime, we are using it as our competitive advantage.

// Sidsel

Why conformity kills opportunities and diversity matters