Unlock Creativity with Diversity | Transform Your Team You Now

Evan Carmichael and Stephen discuss how diverse perspectives boost creativity and business results. Spotify uses diverse focus groups to catch usability problems engineers miss. Diverse teams distribute idea generation, preventing one person from carrying all creative work.
Could diversity take away from your creativity as well? From Kirk.
Hi Kirk, I think it's a good idea. I think, um, I think the critical thing is stay true to your idea, stay true to your mission, your purpose. That, that's fundamental, that's your foundation. But within that, then the next question is how do you reach your audience, uh, and then also how do you do it, how do you go to market, how do you create the product I think by including diversity, you actually increase the level of creativity dramatically. And the financial results of companies that are strong and diverse tend to be way better than those that are very restrictive and traditional. Now, I think, why does it increase diversity? You know, if, again, at Spotify, it's really cool. They have this music room, and then they have this area where they can watch people on focus groups and stuff. Stuff like that. And they deliberately will get very diverse people listening to their new products and actually going through the whole usability of their new products. And you— because I guess I've lived in technology a long time— you cannot believe how great engineers don't realize how difficult to use their products are. And they might have built the best mousetrap in the world. They might have built the best features and functions and the coolest kind of music download in the world, but unless it's usable and simple and intuitive, then it's not going to get, uh, the airtime. So they, they, you never ever, ever, um, get disappointed by getting user feedback in terms of road testing your products. And I think around that, you don't want to just road test unless you've got a very narrow product just to one segment of society. It's much better if you really want to scale your product to do that and then go out to other segments and be very diverse in your thinking. And I think the creativity, just speaking for me personally, by having a lot of people within the company challenge me from very diverse backgrounds gives me a much greater appreciation of how to do the best for our customers. So, and again, you know, it's so true in life. Sometimes I think as an entrepreneur, you get a bit successful, you start believing your own PR, and you get a bit comfortable. And when you do that, you kind of lose your creativity. Whereas what your question is all about, Kirk, is about how do you accelerate that creativity? And I think diversity is just one of the ways you can do that and get some fantastic input, some really strong invention, innovation. And then as a leader, you kind of got to make the choices and start executing and delivering on that vision.
Yeah, I'm definitely with Stephen on this one. I don't know that we really disagree a lot though on the questions anyway, just different sides of the coin on most of these. I don't see a world in which for any company adding diversity would take away from creativity. It just— I don't know how that happens. I think maybe maybe your own, you know, if you're injecting other people into a company, then maybe the responsibility on you isn't as great to be creative. If you have to come up with everything, then now that you have people you can rely on, maybe you don't have to come up with as many ideas. Maybe your own personal creativity, um, I don't know if that's what he's getting at, but, you know, look at what's in the best interest of your company. The best ideas win. If it's only you coming up with ideas and the ideas are just okay, by adding more people into the mix, they can take that okay idea into a great one. And so if that means you're not coming up with every single idea for the business, and maybe that's a good thing to help you get to where you need to go.
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