@fredricmitchell

Why should I care or listen?

• Profit
• Vanity
• Fear
• Virtue

@TonyaMosley

• Diversity is a fact
• Inclusion is a practice
• Equity is a goal

Captain Janeway

@fredricmitchell

Keep your shirt tucked in; go down with the ship; and never abandon a member of your crew.

@fredricmitchell

Am I open to unorthodoxy?

@fredricmitchell

IQ

• Intelligence Quotient
• Ability to learn, not what you know
• Doesn't change much after childhood

EQ

• Emotional quotient
• Ability to recognize one's own emotions and others
• Changes over time

@fredricmitchell

Emotional Intelligence of Groups

• Source (HBR): bit.ly/ei-hbr-2001
• Teams who develop greater emotional intelligence (EQ) boost their overall performance
• EQ: Trust among members, a sense of group identity, and a sense of group efficacy
• At the heart of these three conditions are emotions, like the ability to listen

@fredricmitchell

@fredricmitchell

Tuvok

On the contrary, the demands on a Vulcan's character are extraordinarily difficult. Do not mistake composure for ease.

@fredricmitchell

What is the logical solution?

@fredricmitchell

What do you hear about great groups? Not that the members are all really smart, but that they listen to each other.

Anita Wooley, Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon

@fredricmitchell

Women Are Key to Smart Teams

• Published in HBR 2011: bit.ly/women-hbr-2011
• High correlation between number of women in the group and high collective intelligence
• Carnegie Mellon and MIT
• Group satisfaction, group cohesion, group motivation—none were correlated with individual intelligence within the group
• Social sensitivity is the key

@fredricmitchell

Feminism and Relative atime

• Valerie Aurora
• atime - last time file was read or accessed (requires write)
• Turning off caused problems
• Community felt unsafe to ask questions
• Has the file been read since the last time it was written?
• Became default in linux kernel in 2009
• http://bit.ly/1WZiNYQ

@fredricmitchell

B’Elanna Torres

If I sprain my ankle, at least I feel something […] I'm not trying to kill myself! I'm trying to see if I'm still alive.

@fredricmitchell

How am I evaluating talent?

@fredricmitchell

The Difference

• Scott Page
• Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics
• Published 2007
• bit.ly/scottpage-difference

@fredricmitchell

Perspective, Heuristic

• Perspective
  • How one looks at a problem
• Heuristic
  • Tells a person where to search for a solution

@fredricmitchell

I want to hire the most qualified

@fredricmitchell

But it would be better if that someone was a woman, even though the ‘woman’ part of that statement is irrelevant?

How do I define
'most qualified'?

@fredricmitchell

Changing perspective to arrive at a new heuristic is called

@fredricmitchell

"Innovation"

• Ambien : Women are tiny men
• Fashion and Pockets - iPhone 6s
• Apple HealthKit - No period tracking

@fredricmitchell

Seven of Nine

But that is irrelevant.

@fredricmitchell

How do I execute on this?

Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem

Conditions

• The problem must be hard
• Each solver has a local optima to the problem
• An improvement can be made to a non-optimal solution
• Large pool of solvers to form a decent-size collection

 

@fredricmitchell

Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem

@fredricmitchell

Counter

https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/20375/

http://www.ams.org/notices/201409/rnoti-p1024.pdf

Counter-Counter

http://bit.ly/1juIvFI

http://www.ams.org/notices/201501/rnoti-p9.pdf

Problem solvers with diverse perspectives may have trouble understanding solutions identified by other agents.

Dr. Scott Page, Professor at Univ. of Michigan

@fredricmitchell

EQ

@fredricmitchell

Paths Forward

• Be an Ally Accomplice
• More role models
• Stay bold in the compound interest of action
• Strive for maximum group collective intelligence

@fredricmitchell

TheWhether.com

• Objective assessment for leadership, team dynamics
• NLP tools to map tendencies, personality
• Design Thinking + Algorithmic approach to job matching

What led me to a creative, simple, and extremely fast solution was being part of a feminist community in which people felt comfortable sharing their technical problems, wanted to help each other, and respected each other’s intelligence.

Valerie Aurora, co-founder of the Ada Initiative

Sources
Groups are smarter with women - http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-more-women/ar/1
EQ (HBR link) - http://www.mindsetmatters.com.au/Portals/0/dox/building%20emotional%20intelligence%20of%20groups.pdf
Group Intelligence Correlates More with Social Aptitude than IQ - http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/10/collective-intelligence-and-th/
Being an Ally as a Person with Privilege - http://www.scn.org/friends/ally.html
Risk of Speaking Up - http://www.ashedryden.com/the-risk-in-speaking-up
21st Century Talent Spotting: Potential Trumps Brains, experience, and competencies - http://www.egonzehnder.com/files/_b_77ddd4d.pdf
Mathematical Model of Diversity - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/science/08conv.html
Scott Page: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Schools, Societies - http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~spage/thedifference_content.html
Diversity Trumps Ability - http://www.crowdsourcing.com/cs/2008/05/chapter-6-the-m.html
Scott Page, Lu Hong Research - http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16385.full
http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/now-voyager-the-least-beloved-star-trek-offered-some-of-the-franchises-strongest-feminist-messages
http://www.startrek.com/page/star-trek-voyager

@fredricmitchell

Bonus

• Bring on the female superheroes
• We got it from here, thank you for your service
• The gender ambition myth

Bonus Bonus

...there’s a much larger point here ... that relates to the purposes of formal models.

 

Yes, we can subject them for empirical testing, but we can also use them to change how we think about the world.

 

The Hong Page, Perspective–Heuristic model forces us to think about people as collections of tools and of ability as a reflection of the applicability of those tools to a given set of problems.

 

 

- Professor Page

https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/20375/

Bonus Bonus Bonus

Within the Hong Page framework, a group’s collective potential to solve difficult problems depends on both ability (people with lots of tools) as well as diversity (people with distinct tools).

 

Further, the Hong Page framework expands on the notion of ability as some sort of general capacity and in doing so provides a language with which intelligent, thoughtful people can discuss a variety of issues related to hiring, inclusivity, and opportunity.

 

- Professor Page

https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/20375/

Thanks for listening

IDIC

@fredricmitchell