Diversity is a superpower that all teams should use.
Teams where everyone thinks the same are useful in some ways, but more stuck in others. For example, a team of people familiar with server side development, will struggle with adding in browser development. Similarly,they will be challenged by mobile development too, due to the lack of experience. A team that has a mix of people with server and mobile experience will do better.
The same is true when adding people to a team. When everyone is similar, then the group has similar ideas, and there is little for team members to develop from. This makes it harder for the team to build on each other’s ideas as they develop their product.
Products are never as simple as they might appear at the start of their ideation and development. This means that teams will encounter more challenges in deciding upon audience, architecture, and many other aspects they haven’t realised they need to consider.
This makes software engineering and development teams interesting. It is also why teams should be diverse. This is a superpower we can help add to a team. We should also recognise when we might dilute the diversity superpower in a team.
Diversity goes beyond the obvious things
While there are many protected characteristics, I’m thinking beyond those. Each of the protected characteristics brings something to the team, and this is good. Go read Datafeminism, for any number of examples showing that the use of white male researchers, has distorted science that affects all of us. Facial recognition didn’t work for everyone in the beginning: the data sets where mostly white faces.
Here, I’m thinking of wider diversity issues in education. Degree subjects, cultural background, sporty, geeky, academic, and those with part-time jobs. Any and everything that can be considered when putting teams together. Homogeneity will only dilute the diversity superpower, so make teams diverse.
Diversity provides more perspectives
Teams with diverse team members have multiple perspectives automatically. This means they will start with a wider range of ideas for their product. They will be more likely to have anticipated the range of issues already, or know how to address them in a successful manner.
When the team encounters something outside of everyone’s experience, then the diverse team is also more likely to create a successful approach to resolve the issue. The diverse perspectives help the team work through more ideas. And more ideas of how to deal with something are always better.
Diversity provides learning opportunities
Team member diversity also provides opportunities for everyone to learn from each other. The interaction of team members should mean they learn about each other while working together. Assuming, they go beyond coordination to collaboration, that is.
Team members also gain from each others’ experience. Those who prefer server programming, can learn from the user interface people, while pairing together. Similarly, the database person can teach things to the graphics person.
Make the team diverse if you have a choice
If you offer teams the chance to choose their team members, that’s great. Also give them guidance to follow to make their teams more diverse.
Depending upon context, you can provide some guidance for them. If they know each other already, then you can let them start forming teams. If they don’t know each other, then you can do some exercises that let them know each other a bit before they form teams.
The exercises should help people learn relevant things about each other: subjects, experience, whatever you think will be an attribute that matters. Temper this by how long, or serious the work they will do together is too. For example, is it for a weekend, a term, or for a year? This should suggest how much effort you might want to put into the matching exercises.
If you’re going to be in a new team for something, then you should also aim to add diversity to your team. Who around you could you add to make it more diverse? Which team would benefit from the diversity superpower you bring?
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration.