News Flash to the GOP Senate Healthcare Working Group: Diverse Teams Make Better Decisions

by Martha F. Davis, Northeastern University School of Law     

      With the House of Representatives’ vote on the American Health Care Act came another in the series of increasingly familiar photos of overwhelmingly white, male Congressmen celebrating their achievements.  In fact, these images are so pervasive that in February, a Swedish Deputy Prime Minister staged her own parody with a collection of approving women – no men in sight — gathered around to observe her signing a bill on climate change.

            Unfortunately, these images coming out of Washington seem anything but inadvertent.  In photo after photo, from the selfie of Paul Ryan and the Republican congressional interns to the photo ops of last week, the apparent lack of race and/or sex diversity among policymakers is so striking that it must be intentional.  Indeed, some pundits speculate that these photos are designed to send a message to President Trump’s electoral base, presumably those supporters who do not want women or racial minorities anywhere near the table in the halls of power.  

            Yet the joke is on the Administration as their band of homogeneous brothers puts together one half-baked initiative after another.  The much-ballyhooed travel ban has yet to take effect, caught up in legal red tape.  The sanctuary cities order has been enjoined in federal court.  The House Obamacare repeal is widely criticized by conservatives and liberals alike as poor policy that will harm millions.  

            And no wonder so many of these policy initiatives are floundering.  This is an Administration packed with business leaders, yet it is ignoring one of the great workplace lessons of recent years: diverse groups make better decisions.  Scores of academic studies of problem-solving have driven this point home.  As early as 2003, more than sixty large corporations, from 3M to Xerox went before the U.S. Supreme Court to stave off a challenge to the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy.  They argued that diversity in educational settings was critical to American success in business, because “a diverse group of individuals educated in a cross-cultural environment has the ability to facilitate unique and creative approaches to problem-solving arising from the integration of different perspectives.”

            More recent studies provide an interesting explanation for this widely replicated phenomenon.  According to empirical research conducted by Katherine Phillips and Adam Galinsky of Columbia University, the introduction of diversity into a group forces group members to justify their positions and think harder about their conclusions.  As a result, in these experiments, diverse groups solved problems with far greater accuracy than homogeneous groups, even though the homogeneous groups had greater confidence in their conclusions.

            So, back to those photo ops coming out of Washington these days.  Yes, the smiling men in these photos are comfortable and happy, standing with their trusted peers, and they may feel very confident in their conclusions.  But that’s the problem.  In the echo chamber of the current Administration, they don’t know what they don’t know.