Why Diversity Programs Don’t Work

STRATEGY First! To Solve Our Most Important Problems

Perry C. Douglas

June 11, 2024

Since the horrific George Floyd event, the world has delved into the emotional state of Wokeness, and what has followed has been an intensified emotionally driven push for social justice, economic and political empowerment with the new idea of achieving racial equity. Newly coined terms like Anti-Black Racism have become a new industry, a new religion of sorts.

Quick reactive and ill-considered emotional responses, void of any reality-based strategy relative to what the world is, but rather woke ideology has dominated the discourse. However, there is no evidence that racial equity or an Anti-Black Racism agenda has garnered any meaningful results. But it has become a big distraction to Black communities everywhere.

The pursuit of economic security is a universal human condition pursuit, a very competitive one which inherently is also the pursuit of power. This is the nature of the universe going back to hunter-gatherers; groups (tribes) form in their self-preservation interests to competitively pursue security. Security, however, requires the competitive pursuit of economics, and economic prosperity underwrites influence and power.

This is how the real world works, adopting a realist understanding of it and curating a strategy to compete in it, is the primary way groups can apply their intelligence, as a first principle for success. At the end of the day, intelligence runs the world and ignorance carries the burden. So the responsibility is yours to adopt an intelligence mindset and to get as far away from ignorance as possible.

An applied intelligence (ai) mindset is taking a data-driven approach to building effective strategies to compete in the universe. Strategy first, leave your feelings at the door.

So when it comes to your security through employment it is important to recognize that you must apply strategy to your pursuit. Adopting a Black victimhood angle is not a strategy. Hence, victimhood is counterproductive to human relations within civilizations to try and get what you want. It has the opposite effect — you can’t exert power on those in power if you have no power.

When it comes to board diversity programs the appeal to human grievances or writing past wrong doesn’t align well as an effective strategy toward achieving diversity in the workplace. As we are seeing now with many DEI programs shuttering, those approaches were never going to be sustainable.

Why Board Diversity Programs Don’t Work

The evidence shows that a top-down, forced emotional pursuit of racial equity or an Anti-Black-Racism approach to diversity is not effective. These types of programs have tended to be reactionary, trendy, feel-good and politically expedient. Misguided and ineffective has become more of a distraction than anything else, even counterproductive and harmful to the Black communities they were meant to serve.

In a Harvard Business Review (HBR) Behavioural Science study titled, Why Diversity Programs Fail, which was done back in 2016, the findings are still very relevant today. Even more so post George Floyd, which was the catalyst for many DEI and Black economic empowerment organizations coming onto the scene.

The HBR study found that despite efforts to increase diversity, by many Wall Street firms, for example, the initiatives “don’t seem to be getting results: Women and minorities have not gained much ground in management over the past 20 years.”

The same story post-George Floyd but with more hype, many major corporations in Canada and the US joined the plethora of Black economic empowerment initiatives and the new woke DEI religion.

One particular organization of note in Canada was the Black North Initiative (BNI). I wrote an article two years ago (https://perry-douglas.medium.com/winter-is-coming-the-peril-of-the-black-north-556f70665616) titled Winter is Coming, the Peril of the Black North. About BNI being a misguided and a distractive hindrance to real progress for Black Canadians. BNI has built an advocacy organization by exploiting the emotions of both Black and White people, I said at the time. And that BNI’s non-adherence to reality, and willful ignorance of the systemic environments…make BNI a threat to Black Canadians’ economic ambitions.

As a case study, BNI rested on its flagship CEO Pledge; signed by more than 300 Canadian CEOs, it was said; to address systemic anti-Black racism and increase diversity and inclusion in Canadian businesses and boardrooms. A well-intentioned objective but one void of intelligent insight practicality and strategy — it failed to launch.

You can’t mandate diversity in the private sector. Canadian corporations that signed the BNI’s Diversity Board Pledge was a reactive token gesture. Canadian CEOs took advantage of the naivety of BNI leadership, which allowed them to get good PR but never follow through — BNI created a big off-ramp for accountability and responsibility in the Canadian corporate world. Giving CEOs a pass…they signed the pledge and did nothing.

Fast forward to today, we cannot find any evidence of meaningful or measurable change in Canadian executive suites and boardrooms, and the CEO Pledge initiative has been removed from the BNI website like it never existed. Today, BNI is an organization of many contrived programs far removed from its originally stated purpose of increasing diversity and inclusion in Canadian businesses and boardrooms.

The problem is when corporations are trying to reduce bias they are doing so with reactionary top-down quick fixes…that are antiquated going back to the 1960s, according to HBR. Times have changed and so too have technologies, minds, and ways and means. Therefore, employing strategies of the past becomes incoherent and ineffective, particularly in the new globalized economy.

For strategies to be effective, they must be data-driven, fact-based and analytical toward generating good insights that are empirically warrantable. Which can then be intelligently applied to develop proper bottom-up relevant strategies to solve human problems.

HBR found that the top-down approach with “the usual tools — diversity training, hiring tests, performance ratings, grievance systems — tend to make things worse, not better. The authors’ analysis of data from 829 firms over three decades shows that these tools actually decrease the proportion of women and minorities in management. They’re designed to preempt lawsuits by policing managers’ decisions and actions. But as lab studies show, this kind of force-feeding can activate bias and encourage rebellion.”

Nevertheless, the study’s analysis did uncover numerous diversity tactics that did move the needle, such as recruiting initiatives, mentoring programs, and diversity task forces. The common denominator in those successes was it was bottom-up and employee-driven, not outside consultants without skin in the game, parachuting in and telling everybody what to do.

Still, responsibility also lies on Black people to understand how the world is and have a long-term intergenerational strategic approach to effectively competing in it. Because none of this can be solved in the short term or by policies alone.

It is important that we also focus on education and building an entrepreneurial culture towards building sustainable wealth and opportunity within our own communities. Small and medium-sized businesses are the majority of the employers around the world. Accordingly, in many communities, these SMEs are major employers and creators of wealth. So the fixation with getting corporate jobs and getting on boards, as if this is the holy grail of wealth and opportunity creation, is flat-out wrong!

Entrepreneurship, therefore, is the authentic path to equity creation. How we get to intergenerational wealth and opportunity for our group, it’s still effectively primal, hunter-gatherer in nature. So times and technologies may change but the human condition does not.

So we must invest in Black entrepreneurship, particularly in technology business opportunities, because that’s where the vast majority of the wealth is being created in the 21st century. Such an ecosystem will interweave us into the mainstream economy and corporate environments. Other corporations will become more familiar with Black corporations and people, our influence will be asserted organically, bottom-up, and people will deal with us because it will be about what’s in it for me. In their economic self-interest. Mutual financial interests are the only way things become sustainable.

Among all U.S. companies with 100 or more employees, the proportion of Black men in management increased slightly — from 3% to 3.3% — from 1985 to 2014, according to the HBR study. And according to Bloomberg, those numbers have not changed much particularly in the senior executive ranks. “White people still command the highly paid jobs in the US at S&P 100 companies.”

According to washingtontechnology.com “There are a few small bright spots in our second annual analysis of racial and gender diversity among Top 100 executives. The results continue to point to how diversity lags.

With the big data available today many companies are confronting the reality of the tremendous lack of diversity in the corporate world. But their responses continue to be a quick-fix and disingenuous; not strategic. Many continue to implement failed solutions that simply don’t work.

Therefore, this approach makes things worse, creating a backlash against the programs that they’re supposed to help. Things become counterproductive for both Black employees, and the value of the enterprise and society.

Laboratory studies show that force-feeding of diversity programs can activate bias rather than stamp it out. And social scientists have found people often rebel against rules to assert their autonomy. Therefore, doing the same stale and recalibrated approaches…from the 1960s continues to do more harm than good.

Three decades’ worth of data from more than 800 U.S. firms and interviewing hundreds of line managers and executives extensively, found that companies get better traction and results when they don’t employ top-down control tactics on employees.

The data also shows that forcing managers to solve problems becomes problematic and creates an unproductive work environment. However, the data also shows that more authentic bottom-up approaches like increasing on-the-job contact with minority workers, B2B and B2C collaborations, and community involvement promote social accountability. Making people less reluctant to resist and giving them more incentive to engage, when they feel it’s not forced. They become more open, fair-minded and empathetic.

“Decades of social science research point to a simple truth: You won’t get managers on board by blaming and shaming them with rules and reeducation.” Instead, “interventions such as targeted college recruitment, mentoring programs, self-managed teams, and task forces have boosted diversity in businesses.”

Any positive effects of forced diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two studies suggest and often only serve to activate bias or spark backlash. Still, nearly half of midsize companies use these poor-performing tactics and nearly all the Fortune 500.

So the studies show that voluntary training evokes the opposite response (“I chose to show up, so I must be pro-diversity”), leading to better results: increases of 9% to 13% in Black men, Hispanic men, and Asian American men and women in management five years out (with no decline in white or Black women).

Research from the University of Toronto reinforces those findings: In a study where white subjects read a brochure critiquing prejudice toward Blacks. When people felt pressure to agree with it, the reading strengthened their bias against Blacks. When they felt the choice was theirs, the reading reduced bias.

The Harvard study highlights three strategies that several companies have gotten consistently more positive results from with voluntary tactics. Strategies that don’t focus on forcing people. There are three basic principles: engage managers in solving the problem, expose them to people from different groups, and encourage social accountability for change.

These have proven more effective because when you engage humans to solve their own problems themselves, they tend to take ownership. And when someone’s beliefs and behaviour are out of sync, that person experiences what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.” However, experiments show that people do have strong tendencies to “correct” their dissonance, by changing either their beliefs or their behaviour.

Contact between groups can also lessen biases because their preconceived biases become diminished by the reality of their human interactions. Everyone is the same.

Social accountability, the third tactic, encourages people to take responsibility and be socially accountable, as no one wants to be out of step with societal norms or seen to be biased, or worse a bigot. People want to look good in the eyes of those around them.

Consider this field study conducted by MIT’s Sloan School of Management: A firm found it consistently gave African Americans smaller raises than whites, even when they had identical job titles and performance ratings. So the study suggested transparency to activate social accountability. The firm then began to post each unit’s average performance rating and pay raise by race and gender. Once managers realized that employees, peers, and superiors would know which parts of the company favoured whites, the gap in raises all but disappeared.

Part of the HBR conclusion says that Blacks “have barely gained ground in corporate management since 1985,” even though they have made huge educational gains over the past two generations. The reasons are clear, according to the data, using ineffective top-down approaches is a barrier to change. And we haven’t realized yet, or choose not to, that we can’t motivate people by forcing them to get with the program.

Success comes down to building the right data-driven and advanced analytical strategies and applying empathy and relevance. Where data analysis is useful for creating insights that can be turned into reliable and resilient strategies, that anyone can employ and participate in.

6ai Technologies (https://www.6aitech.com/) offers intelligence-based solutions that empower ordinary people to build helpful strategies, that add quantifiable value to the organization.

6ai software is an easy, do-it-yourself tool with a 6-step-by-step process to master strategy, in any domain without needing any specialized training or complex technical tools. It democratizes AI and makes it accessible to all at a fraction of the cost of hiring or being forced to use outside DEI consultants or advisors, or adding special DEI corporate officers.

Diversity programs that force bias change, continue to fail and set back progress with equal opportunity in the workplace. Wasn’t it Einstein who once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting a different result?

The 6ai software is a scientific process for human progress for genuine change, it empowers strategy by identifying the whitespaces of opportunity for both people and organizations, to grow from change.