Vantage
I have spent most of my working life in a place where diversity is not a program. It is the weather. The UAE is home to more than 200 nationalities, and on an ordinary Tuesday in Dubai, a meeting of eight can carry six passports and four first languages.
I used to believe that made teams innovative by default. It does not. I have sat in very diverse rooms that produced very ordinary work. A mix of people is an input, and nobody pays for inputs. They pay for a better decision, a risk avoided, a program that lands. India’s boardrooms are still largely debating the input: ratios, targets, the annual slide. Three moments from my own work taught me to look past it.
The Call That Changed
As Head of Research and Advisory at Dun & Bradstreet South Asia & Middle East, I was leading due diligence for a Middle East client on a target in Taiwan. Our working view was to invest. Then we sat down with colleagues in our Taiwan office. They walked us through how layered holding structures can sometimes be used to flatter group performance and blur who really owns the intellectual property. The documents alone would not have told us that. Their experience did.
We downgraded our view from Invest to Proceed with Caution, and the client removed the deal from their pipeline.
That is diversity tied to an outcome. Not a count of nationalities on a team sheet, but a different vantage point, given authority over the call, changing a decision with real money attached. Had those colleagues been included without being heard, the diligence would have been diverse and wrong.
The Proxy Trap
The second lesson came from the opposite direction. We were building credit profiles for a major regional bank when we saw how nationality or country of origin can end up used as a shortcut for risk. The logic is about stickiness: some owners are assumed more likely to leave the country, and a borrower who leaves is a loss.
A compliance-led response bans the variable and moves on. An outcome-led response asks what the variable is standing in for. Nationality was a proxy. The real driver was the likelihood of staying: years in the country, assets held locally, family settled here, a business with roots. Measure those and the risk view becomes both sharper and fairer. The same holds for hiring and promotion. Wherever identity is used as a shortcut, a variable underneath usually goes unmeasured.
Fit, Then Authority
At the Dubai Creative Clusters Authority, a regulatory entity mandated to oversee and develop Dubai’s creative economy, I was designated in my capacity as Director, Strategy & Policy, to lead a cross-cutting innovation team working to bridge the gap between regulation and services that businesses, startups, and freelancers within the ecosystem needed to thrive. It brought together policy, data, business, and legal professionals from Lebanon, Finland, India, and the UK. The businesses we were designing for were just as mixed in their origins.
What I noticed was not that we had more ideas. It was that our disagreements mirrored the market’s. Arguments in our room about how different communities would use the same offer were arguments our users would otherwise have had with us later. The design shifted from one generic program to a multi-community one. The diversity worked because it matched the problem, not because it was present. It was not comfortable, and that is exactly the point.
In a 2009 Kellogg study, Katherine Phillips and colleagues found that groups with a socially different newcomer solved a problem correctly more often but felt less confident doing it. Homogeneous groups felt better and were wrong more often. The value of difference arrives as friction. Most organizations manage the friction away and lose the value with it.
Government added the last piece: authority. At the Dubai Competitiveness Office, I had a brief stint as a Strategy Expert, a role that put me on a task force working on policy reforms to strengthen Dubai’s competitive position across ten broad-based indices published by the World Bank, OECD, and IMD. These reforms had to be incubated and assigned to the right stakeholders, who would then implement them and report on how effectively they ‘moved the needle’ on the indicators the Office was tracking. One set of policy directions that we proposed focused on uplifting Emirati women’s participation in leadership and board positions. Real movement came when a women’s business council went from being consulted to owning proposed indicators and being accountable for measures on the scorecard leadership already answers to.
A voice in the room is courtesy. Ownership of a measure is power.
Three Questions Before You Call It Diversity
1. Which decision does this mix improve?
An investment call, a risk model, a market entry, a product for customers you do not yet understand. If you cannot name one, you are running a compliance program. That may be necessary. Call it what it is.
2. Does the different view hold the pen?
Representation without authority over the outcome is decoration. In this year’s AIMA–KPMG survey of corporate India, one organization in ten still had no women in leadership at all. Difference that stops below the decision layer changes nothing.
3. What is identity standing in for?
Wherever you rely on who someone is to predict what they will do, find the variable underneath and measure that instead.
Diversity That Answers to the Business
Compliance asks who is in the room. The business asks what the room got right that it would otherwise have got wrong. In Taiwan, the answer was a deal not done!
That is what diversity looks like when it answers to the business.
