Secret of diversity

 

 

 

 

 

 

"How do you find yourself?"

 

 

 

The word ‘diversity’ is one of hottest word in society today. People believe that we must take diversity because it is a right thing to do. But diversity shouldn’t be limited within that Righteousness. In 1990, there was a very interesting experiment conducted with chickens to test the productivity of an organization. Simply about “who produces more?”. Dr. William Muir of Purdue University and his team prepared two different cages. One side of cage only had SUPER Chickens that have proven record of high productivity while the other cage had 9 ordinary Chickens with normal productivity. And their productivity monitored over the years through chicken generations.

 

 

 

WHAT HAPPENED? What do you think that happened? If our common belief is right, the cage of super chicken should have the higher productivity. But the result wasn’t what we expected. Ordinary Chickens were busy producing eggs as much as they could and were able to increase their productivity by 160% at the end. What about the SUPER ones? The result was very interesting. Only few Super x Super ones survived but bruised and rest of the Super chickens were dead. They started their competition in healthy way at the beginning but ended up fighting at the end because the success of a super chicken depends on the failure of others.

 

 

 

If the only way to be productive is by suppressing the productivity of the rest,

then we desperately need to find a better way to work.

And a richer way to live.
― Margaret Heffernan ―

 

 

 

HOW DO YOU FIND YOURSELF? Many organization or leaders still believe competition is the way to boost up the productivity and want to create a high level of competitive environment around the asset to push higher business output and only want to have Super Chickens in the organization getting rid of those ordinary chickens. Of course, competition is needed at some point. But it ultimately fuels the zero-sum game of the people at the end. Also, the problem of today became so complicated that it cannot be solved by one single solution or one Super-chicken. We need more flexibility and diversity to create better solution and option for us. We all have disability at some points. We are not a super chicken. Someone think his age is his disability, and someone think gender is her disability. We, as a Leader, have to believe that every individual has different personalities, different subject matter expertise. And have to think of how to maximize use of those to achieve strategic goal of organization.