Critical Thinking and DEI
Sun 16 February 2025
Part of my day-job as head of Engineering at Google Ireland was attending talks and events/Q&A for local interest groups like Engineers Ireland. I was reminded today of a panel I was on around diversity in engineering in Ireland, and my allegedly 'fascinating' comments at it. That's not the part I remember most vividly, though.
After the presentation of the report, there was a Q&A session, with some good but not unusual questions. At one point, someone up the back raised a hand, and asked:
"What is Critical Thinking?"
The panel kind of went a bit quiet, but the cogs and wheels were turning in my head. It was exactly the right question at the right time, and a lot of stuff in that very moment fell into place in my head. Probably one of the best Q&A questions I'd ever seen, let alone had the privilege to answer.
Critical thinking is the ability to inspect a problem from different perspectives, and most crucially, to be able to reject hypotheses without bias. You need to be able to take your bright idea, and discard it in place of a better one, without attachment. To do it, you need people who have different frames of reference, who have had different 'crucible moments' and who have different contexts culturally that allow us to respectfully disagree and offer a broad set of views.
Homogeneous teams simply can't do it. We like to imagine we can transcend our personal experiences, biases and ego, but it simply isn't the case. That, to me, is what came to form the core of my thoughts on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (or at least, the Diversity part). It forms a key part of my philosophy on building good teams. You simply can't build a good team from folks who look, think, and have experienced the same. Homogeneous teams are weak teams.
Another example: much earlier in my career, I was part of a small group in a leadership training tasked with coming up with a simple means of telling each other the number on a price tag without speaking. One of the team asked "How do we say a comma?". Myself and another Irish person in our group didn't see the point; just spell out the digits, why put in commas?
Turns out in big parts of continental Europe, price tags have a comma between the euro amount and the cents, whereas in Ireland there's a period. This may seem like a facile example, but these are the sort of small assumptions that get made every day that lead to accessibility issues, bias and poor quality outcomes in products you build.
There are a lot of things happening right now that make this a hot button issue; I care deeply about the social justice aspects of the naked white supremacy, homophobia and xenophobia that informs the current US administration's policy shifts. My friends are being hurt.
However, another aspect of pushing back against this wrong-headed, unjust and deeply stupid shift is what also reminded me of something I got to say to James Damore in the brief time he was at Google after his stupid-ass memo (this got me put on an external list of 'SJWs', a point of particular pride for me).
I told him, "You're not just wrong, you're incorrect."
As well as the plain prejudice, racism and homophobia that informs the current policy shifts, it's also worth pointing out that they simply weaken capability. We're being asked to build weaker teams, with narrower mindsets and much less interesting approaches to work.
While we're resisting and addressing these changes as leadership, remember that pointing out real, tangible risks to business and capability are part of the arsenal.
Category: Writing Tagged: writing leadership dei
