THERE is no doubt that diversity is a critical factor in the world of business, and this operational imperative is under the spotlight in all sectors of commerce.

It can be said that in order to be competitive in the future, companies must build a natural acceptance of diversity at every level of the organisation.

This is a prerequisite for creativity, which in turn is a prerequisite for innovation and resilience.

“Diversity” is a loaded term that carries with it enormous baggage and has much emotion attached to it. Yet it is essential for many aspects of competitive advantage in the 21st century that we build a passion for differences into our corporate cultures. This is part of ensuring organisations are ready to respond to challenges and take advantage of opportunity. Organisations that value difference at every level will have an increasing advantage in the connection economy.

To build a culture that values difference requires an understanding of existing paradigms, as well as the emerging theory of doing business. We need to create a new lexicon of “important” words that have until now been frowned upon by our paradigm. We need to move from:

Harmony towards disruption (and reframe disruption as “conflict that is not destructive”);

Certainty towards paradox (and reframe paradox as “not wishy-washy”);

Homogenous towards heterogeneous (and reframe heterogeneous as “not selling out”); and

Alignment towards creativity (and reframe creativity as “not chaos”).

From a business point of view, diversity presents itself in two broad guises. The first is that of a threat, impeding efficiency and progress. The other is opportunity that enhances the creative ability of people approaching old and current paradigms. This allows for different approaches, problem solving and ways of doing things.

To understand the threat, it is important to realise how business has developed. In the early 1900s Henry Ford reached the pinnacle of the industrial era with the quantum leap that his assembly line represented. His was a world of efficiency attained through people. He is remembered for saying: “All I need is a good pair of hands. It’s a pity they come attached to a human being.” Machines could not run the lines on their own. People in this environment had no ability to be creative or make fine adjustments to meet deadlines. People were critical to the process, and we have kept this paradigm close to how we view the people within our business today.

This view of the relationship between people and efficiency has pervaded our approach to management: top-down, hierarchical, command and control. But we are no longer as reliant on people for efficiency as in the past. Certainly people can slow down our operations, but our systems, machines and IT infrastructure are far more capable than before.

We now have the luxury of redeploying people to more creative roles, where they can think more freely, choose opportunities to interact with our customers, and assist our machines and systems to find more efficient ways to do things. To do this we need to move away from the efficiency/people paradigm of the industrial era towards a people/creativity paradigm of the connection era.

This shift has not been driven by diversity, but diversity plays an important role in enabling us to create thoughts and ideas we have not been able to before. It is also a prerequisite for resilience.

If business is able to move to a new paradigm that accepts diversity as a key component of our society — and sees people less as “machine like” and so not needing to be controlled, and more as creative resources — one can only imagine the potential that can be unlocked.

Bramley is chief imagination officer at TomorrowToday.biz.