| Welcome to my newsletter! I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. I write this newsletter I've called Scarlet Ink, which is a weekly newsletter on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice. Free members can read some amount of each article, while paid members can read the full article. For some, part of the article is plenty! But if you'd like to read more, I'd love you to consider becoming a paid member. Many large companies have diversity and inclusion organizations (perhaps slightly fewer over the last few years, due to political pressure). There are social organizations for women in engineering, various minorities in engineering, and gender diversity groups. If you ask our recruiting teams at tech companies which types of diversity we're interested in, they'd quote statistics regarding women in engineering. Or they might mention BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), with a quiet note that we don't consider Asians part of a diversity program, considering that there's no lack of Asians in tech. This is because corporate diversity focus is about protected classes. It's a PR effort. I think it's critical to support hiring diversity, but that's not where diversity should end either. Ask a leader in front of an audience why we care about hiring diversity, and they'll talk about people with "different backgrounds" and "different ways of thinking about problems." They're referring to cognitive diversity. But our hiring only reflects those protected classes. This is a clear disconnect. If we're honestly looking for cognitive diversity, we need to look beyond PR-focused corporate diversity efforts and try to imagine how you'd hire people with different backgrounds and different ways of thinking. And the results of those hires. I've worked on teams where we all got along fantastically. We had similar interests, agreed on our priorities, and frequently came to the same conclusions when making decisions. We hung out after work, and I made some great friends. However, these teams would have been more effective and made better decisions if we weren't getting along so well. The root issue is that we didn't have cognitive diversity. We all thought the same way. It's easy to get along with people who think the same way. But you're going to have the same blind spots, the same risks, and likely make the same mistakes. What do I specifically mean by cognitive diversity?Working at tech companies, I've regularly met people with similar personalities. They agreed with my decision making processes, my bias towards moving quickly, my favorite sci-fi books, and my method of people management. These people were sometimes Hispanic, or women, or gay. But that didn't necessarily change how they worked or made decisions. They frequently had a similar educational background, a similar financial background, and a similar work background, and so their decision-making framework mimicked my own. The underlying assumption behind our diversity programs is that increasing protected class diversity will lead to the benefits of cognitive diversity. While in general that may be true, it overly simplifies the diversity topic. It turns something complex and nuanced into a metrics task. It encourages everyone involved to blindly chase metrics rather than consciously looking for the right outcome. What does real cognitive diversity look like? Well, it's people who think differently than I do. What are some ways we can find cognitive diversity? The first, and most obvious is to simply hire people who think differently than we do. At Amazon I ran organizations, and I had a mental idea of my "second in command", which sounds a bit more military than I intend. But the idea is that I have someone to take my place in meetings when I'm busy, be my main partner in critical decision-making, make decisions when I'm out of the office, and frequently this person was my succession plan. But what I frequently didn't clearly tell people is that I worked hard to ensure that this person thought differently than I did. I gotta say, it's very difficult to hire someone who thinks differently. Because you likely see that difference as "wrong". Over the years, I felt my approach worked well. I ensured that the people I relied on the most were successful but didn't approach problems the same way I did. For example, I would lean on people I felt were overly cautious, but that caution countered my natural inclination to embrace risk. I've mentioned situations before where I suggested to my team that we skip some QA or process step to move more quickly, and my second would step up and tell me that it was a bad idea. This wasn't by accident. This was by design. But in what specific ways can we find cognitive diversity?
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