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COVERAGE OF THE 2016 APTA ANNUAL MEETING

Diversity Is Not the Problem; Differences Are Organizational Assets

As public transportation agencies and businesses strive to implement policies and practices to strengthen diversity among their workforces, riders, advocates and other stakeholders, they could be tackling the wrong problem.

That’s the perspective of Steve L. ­Robbins, speaker at the Monday General Session titled “Your Brain Is Good at Inclusion...Except When It’s Not.” Robbins, a social neuroscientist who studies how social behavior impacts the human brain, delivered a thought-provoking and humorous address before a packed session.“Diversity is not our problem,” ­Robbins said. “It’s closed-mindedness or narrow-mindedness.

“When you invite diversity into the room—different skin color, different personality styles, different personality styles, different problem-solving styles, different types of degrees—and you have a bunch of close-minded people … the outcomes are usually misunderstanding, miscommunication and conflict,” he said.

“But when you invite those very same differences into the room and you have a bunch of open-minded people, what you usually end up with is possibilities, opportunities and potentially greater innovation.”

In fact, Robbins, added, differences are an asset to an organization. “We leverage assets when we are open-minded, willing to entertain different ideals. But open-mindedness does not mean you accept every new thing [that comes] your way,” he said. To underscore his point, Robbins cited Aristotle: “The measure of a wise person is the ability to entertain new ideas without necessarily having to accept them.”

Robbins discussed how close-mindedness limits an organization. “What happens when we are more close-minded than open-minded? We create these things called insiders and outsiders,” he said, suggesting that these terms are especially valuable when talking about diversity.

“The brain sees people in terms of ‘insiderness’ and ‘outsiderness’,” he said. “From a human behavior and brain perspective, that’s how your brain sees the world—as insiders and outsiders when it comes to people.”

Everyone has experienced both conditions, he noted. “Have you noticed, you could be an insider at a 9:00 meeting and an outsider at a 10:00 meeting? Have you noticed you can be an insider and an outsider in the exact same meeting?,” Robbins asked.

So how do these concepts strengthen an organization? “Sometimes [in] what I call traditional or diversity discussions, it’s either implied or interpreted that certain people are always insiders and certain people are always outsiders. That’s not the case,” he said. “If we understand that, we can start to empathize with people when we’re the insider and they’re the outsider. Empathy is critical to really do the work of diversity and inclusion.”

In addition, “outsider-ness” impacts performance, Robbins said, because it forces the brain to spend valuable energy on counteracting social pain (anger, isolation, anxiety) as it also attempts to fit in. “You cannot focus on more than one thing at any given moment. You think you can [multitask], but you can’t,” he said.

“Social pain can often be worse than physical pain because it endures, and it’s very unpredictable. Now take social pain and combine it with multitasking and you have an employee who cannot be as productive as they could be.”

People who find themselves in such situations make mistakes, he noted. “When you try to push your brain to do things it’s not able to do, and push it too hard without giving it rest, you put yourself in a state that we call cognitive overload,” he said, which causes people to become distracted and experience higher levels of stress and anger. “Your brain goes control/alt/delete,” he said.

The antidote is to “create environments where people feel like insiders, where they’re not distracted by outsider-ness and don’t have to experience that social pain,” Robbins said.

“Do not underestimate the power of words and messages to tear people down, to cause them social pain because they feel like an outsider then. But also do not underestimate the power and words of messages to lift people up,” he said.

Robbins followed up his remarks at a concurrent session immediately following the General Session.

This session was sponsored by AECOM.

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