Why Creativity Needs Diversity

Tibor Kalman, the Hungarian-born designer and editor-in-chief of Colors magazine, has long been an inspiration for many of us working in the creative industries. Diversity was his creative juice.

“We’re all different and we’re all the same,” he wrote in the manifesto that inspired the magazine. “Diversity is good.”

For Kalman, investigating, learning from and enjoying other cultures was a practical route to creativity.

I’ve come rather late, but decided, to share his view. I’m a woman, born in Louisiana, raised in Texas, and schooled in Washington DC. I have spent my adult life in Europe, first in London, and now in Amsterdam. Wherever I have gone, I’ve been acutely aware of operating within - and often, at odds with - the prevailing culture. The conservative Bible belt of suburban Dallas. The moneyed privilege of Capitol Hill. The bivalence of the London ad scene, at once self-centred and self-deprecating. Everywhere, I have felt other - an outsider by gender, nationality, background or belief. Until I moved to Amsterdam, and 72andSunny.

The Dutch are nothing if not practical, and Amsterdam’s vibrancy as a creative and commercial centre of Europe is credit to the values of tolerance and openness that shape society - and legislation, here. Like our home city, the company is a smash-up of cultures, languages, sexualities and backgrounds. The city and the company both rail against monoculture, as Kalman did, in pursuit of a better creative output.

“Who the fuck is Alan Partridge?”

Homogeneity makes us lazy. Diversity makes us work harder. Studies have shown that when we work in groups that we know to be diverse in race, in gender, or even in belief (for example, if we know a colleague comes from a vastly different religious or political ideology than we do), we prepare more for meetings, we present more thoughtfully, and we participate more attentively. Knowing that our audience does not necessarily share the same references, experiences or thought processes as us, makes us up our game.

A German, an Argentinean and an American walk into a briefing

In the presence of diversity, we are not only more diligent, we are also more open-minded. Again, studies show that even the anticipation of diversity jolts us into cognitive action in unique ways. Working with a group of similar people leads us to expect consensus. When we’re in this mindset, we tend toward the dominant perspective. However, working in a diverse group of people leads us to expect difference of opinion. In an almost self-fulfilling tendency, when we expect difference, we change our posture to be more open towards it. We accept it, and work with it. And so we get to more interesting ideas, and more unexpected solutions.

Thanksgiving/koningsdag

I’ve not got any evidence for this one, but in my experience, diversity is more fun. At 72andSunny, our LA and NYC offices celebrate the Dutch national holiday of Koningsdag (King's Day); and our Amsterdam office celebrates Thanksgiving. Dressing up in orange, eating turkey together, and having to explain our idiosyncratic national customs to one another makes work and life more fun.

If you want same, be same

Scientifically speaking, diversity is not necessarily good for all business. If you want reliable, reproducible results, uniformity is good. But if you want innovation and unexpected leaps, court diversity.