Breakthroughs at the Intersection of Jazz Improvisation, Neuroscience, and Diversity and Inclusion in Business
Paper presented at the University of Guelph Jazz Colloquium, 2012
Contemporary Diversity in Business Context
What is Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) in Business?
Early definitions of diversity in an employment setting typically restricted focus to differences of gender and, in some countries, race or ethnicity. Primarily centred on hiring and promoting more women and racial or ethnic minorities, traditional diversity work focused on achieving alignment with equity and human rights principles. However, contemporary definitions do not limit diversity to gender and race, nor do they pin diversity on being different from the mainstream. Even more, the work has expanded beyond efforts to increase employment representation of marginalized populations. Instead, the contemporary field of D&I in business centres on having a diverse mix of employees and making the most of that mix to achieve business outcomes. Although notable progress has been made in the course of this evolution, D&I strategies are yielding insufficient results. The global practice of D&I requires innovation to achieve meaningful and ethically responsible results at individual, organizational and societal levels. Toward that, understanding brain activity during jazz improvisation can offer important insights that can enable the creative solutions the field of D&I needs.
The Tension Between Profit and Business Ethics in the Field of D&I
Business ethics and the field of D&I intertwine to define principles and codes of behaviour that guide business leader and employee conduct. In some cases, D&I objectives stem from an organization’s true commitment to social justice. Indeed, for social enterprises with missions to serve marginalized populations there can be a clear alignment between the objectives of D&I with the organization’s products and services. For example, LIME is a social enterprise serving persons with disabilities by connecting them to employment opportunities. Similarly, the MicroSkills enterprise builds skills for employment and equality for women, racial minorities, immigrants, and youth. When an organization’s very purpose is to provide services to marginalized populations associated with diversity, the ethical tension between organizational goals and D&I goals substantially diminishes.
In other cases, companies are motivated to meet the letter, if not the full spirit, of various equity and human rights regulations. Businesses might be driven to employ D&I strategies to enhance their corporate social responsibility brands and reap related profitable benefits. Related efforts might include fostering employment brands that attract and retain talent, strengthening market branding to attract and retain consumers, offsetting reputational risks associated with discrimination and harassment complaints, meeting customer and investor requirements, and persuading communities to provide companies with license to operate. There might also be a business case for D&I built upon a need to attract and nurture a diverse mix of talent to run the company. Increasingly, D&I strategies are employed to help companies attract and retain a diverse mix of customers and provide them with relevant products and services. Further, with profit and shareholder gains at the core, corporations are more frequently applying D&I strategies to penetrate diverse market segments locally and globally, to innovate lucrative products and services, and more.
Some organizations, and genuinely well-intentioned individuals within them, effectively balance D&I marketing goals with social justice and corporate citizenship objectives. They strive to be both profitable and ethical with regard to D&I. However, when D&I strategic emphasis as a means to profit overrides the cultivation of an organization and society based on fairness and equality, we must consider the ethical implications of appropriating the field of D&I for financial gains and competitive advantage. Ethical questions also arise when organizations ineffectively frame the field of D&I in business and insufficiently resource it to achieve expected equality outcomes. At the extreme, organizations might occlude concrete D&I outcomes with marketing rhetoric aimed solely at penetrating labour markets and consumer markets. Some manipulate statistics to make progress in diverse representation seem more positive than it is, and others offer tokenism as a sufficient solution. Many promote D&I training or events but provide little follow through to create real change. Moreover, organizations and their stakeholders become complacent as they receive awards for D&I that commend ostensible best practices that do not actually deliver best results. Still others collude in delaying progress by hiding behind the overused phrase that “change takes a long time”. Ironically, this is unquestioned despite the ubiquitous theme of the rapid pace of change when it comes to most other organizational challenges. Even more, businesses continue to put the onus on individuals to change themselves to perform within a broken system instead of adjusting organizational policies, processes, structures and systems to enable a diverse mix of employees to thrive. Organizations that approach the work of D&I in these misguided, superficial or ineffectual ways thwart meaningful outcomes and raise ethical questions.
Current State of the Field of D&I and the Need for Innovation
Since the inception of the field of Diversity, organizations have made concrete, notable progress, and incremental improvements continue. At the same time, companies have not fully addressed challenges or fully realized opportunities. Thought leaders say that the Diversity field is “stuck” (Thomas 65), or “stalled” (Kandola 1), in need of a “fresh look at an old subject” (Wittenberg-Cox 6), and desperate for a transformation to generate “breakthrough” results (Tapia 13). Cultivating creativity in the global practice of D&I to achieve meaningful, significant, sustainable, and timely results is the focus of my current work in this field. I believe design thinking for radical innovation is the best opportunity to transform the global practice of D&I, and I see countless opportunities to apply models and metaphors of jazz improvisation to help drive these changes. One specific opportunity comes from exploring the implications of the results of neural imaging research on improvising musicians, which might help us understand one aspect of how the current D&I framework inherently embodies constraints that might interfere with optimal conditions for creativity. In particular, research by Limb and Braun 2008 demonstrates how Improvising jazz musicians turn off their impulse control, a process linked to their musical creativity. In contrast, D&I theory and practice commonly emphasize not only turning on, but also turning up impulse control, which I argue might restrict the creativity and innovation necessary to enable improved outcomes. Before exploring the implications of impulse control, it is important to overcome some common misperceptions of contemporary D&I work, a field commonly misrepresented or misunderstand in terms of it breadth and complexity.
Understanding the Contemporary Field of D&I
As the field of D&I has evolved, we more commonly describe diversity in an employment context as the uniqueness that each person embodies, or the total mix of differences among all people associated with an organization. These newer definitions integrate both mainstream and marginalized populations as a foundation of diversity. For example, although gender balance formerly referred to the advancement of women, contemporary frameworks require engaging a mix of both men and women (Whittenberg-Cox 3). Moreover, contemporary business definitions of diversity are frequently supplemented with an expanded list of examples of relevant differences, which might include not only gender and race or ethnicity, but also dimensions such as nationality, culture, beliefs, sexual orientation, ability, age, native or aboriginal status, and family status, as well as functional expertise, cognitive or leadership styles and even personality. As the field evolves, the overall framework has broadened beyond hiring employees from marginalized populations, and the scope of work has expanded to include enabling a broad mix of people to thrive and to work together to achieve organizational goals. Compliance with relevant regulations is still important but is less frequently the core driver or main objective of a D&I strategy. Aligned with these changes, the field of D&I increasingly emphasizes the work of creating inclusive environments by developing underlying systems and individual competencies that enable the navigation of differences to make the most of collaboration among a diverse mix of people. Specifically, contemporary diversity work is not about others. It is about all of us together, and in business, it is about how we can optimize the total mix to work to deliver the value proposition of an organization.
This paradigm change arose more than two decades ago, when Dr. R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr. explained that diversity includes everyone (“From Affirmative Action” 1). In emphasizing this point, he took care to spell out that this includes marginalized groups as well as prevailing populations (e.g. white males in a North American context). Thomas discussed diversity as the total mix of similarities and differences in a population. In this, he challenged the ethics and effectiveness of efforts to assimilate women and minorities into a dominate white, male culture (in the United States) and advocated efforts to create a new dominate heterogeneous culture inclusive and enabling to all employees and to the organization’s value proposition. Similarly, Andrés Tapia more recently proposed that contemporary D&I strategies benefit from a both / and approach (e.g. both men and women). This orientation is consistent with Thomas’ argument and resonant with theatre improvisation’s “Yes, and” rule, accepting your fellow actor’s improvised suggestions and continuing in that vein (Sawyer 138). In contrast to traditional Diversity initiatives targeting marginalized groups, Tapia explains that contemporary D&I work needs to “call out” and navigate a full range of individual and group differences. He asserts that this condition is vital to fully tap into the creativity arising from the intersection of diverse perspectives and to provide value at the level of individuals, groups and organizations (12-13).
Examples of D&I work at the Individual, Group and Organizational Level
On an individual level, the value of D&I centres around being able to contribute fully and reach one’s full potential. This is analogous to Barbara Lange’s description of improvised “music’s profound ethical dimensions, the ideal that egalitarianism should be a core principle in music-making, and the belief that this music enables the musician’s full self to flower” (1). Underlying the idea of nourishing individual potential are quality relationships and business environments that enable a sense of belonging, respect and wellbeing. On an individual level, D&I outcomes focus on being treated fairly in an environment that ethically applies the Platinum Rule to treat others as they would like to be treated, an environment that respects individual perspectives and talents as an enabler to give one’s best.
On a team or group level, D&I work centres on making the most of diverse perspectives and ways of working within a group. For example, a diverse team can make the most of Frans Johansson’s “Medici Effect,” collaborating to generate breakthrough innovation at the diverse “intersection of cultures, disciplines, and fields”(5-6). Similarly, in Group Genius, Keith Sawyer asserts that collaboration fuels creativity, and that diversity makes groups more creative because the friction resulting from the mix of a variety of perspectives will propel the group to generate novel outcomes (71). Sawyer demonstrates that groundbreaking creativity results from “collaborative emergence” (192) as “multiple sparks” (192) of innovation arise from interaction among different individuals. As an example of the value of group diversity for a business and its customers, consider Speedo’s success when they mixed diverse perspectives from NASA with those from ANSYS engineering simulation, athletes, and fashion designers to innovate the LZR Racer swimsuit with rare qualities and exceptional performance. Within one year of its introduction, swimmers wearing the LZR set nine world records (Ribberström n.p.).
On an organizational level, D&I work can enable profitable growth. As an example from Avivah Wittenburg-Cox in How Women Mean Business, Best Buy found that it was not effectively selling to females in 2005 (292-93). The company invited women and men to discuss how to improve the customer experience and then implemented an initiative to capture more of the female market. Resulting changes included “in-store boutiques” (Whittenberg-Cox 292) focusing on experiential sales techniques to connect products in the store to the sense of having them at home. Also, after realizing females in the stores were largely disregarded, sales staff were trained to better connect with female customers. Because of D&I customer initiatives, female customers were more equitably included, female market share increased, and revenue generated by females increased by $4.4 billion in fewer than 5 years (Whittenberg-Cox 293).
Disappointing D&I Results
Thought leaders have reframed contemporary D&I work to illuminate the expansive opportunities of the field, and some organizations are making progress toward that view. Certainly there are examples of successful outcomes in the field. However, as a whole, one of the biggest challenges of the field of D&I is that common paradigms and ways of performing the work are much too slow in making progress and do not deliver the full value that has been both demanded and predicted. Alison Maitland writes, “A snail could crawl from Land’s End at the southwest tip of England to John o’Groats in the far north of Scotland and halfway back again in the seventy-three years it would take […] to achieve gender parity on the boards of Britain’s largest one hundred companies”(68). In countries across the world, similar data draw a stark picture of the pace of inclusion across all sectors, organizational levels, and diversity dimensions.
Gaps between expected value and real results to date are frustrating organizations that have spent substantial time and money on D&I initiatives but find progress falling short of the promise of diversity. Discontent multiplies when systemic barriers and unconscious biases block full potential and subdue individual talent. It multiplies further when individuals are distracted, disengaged and disheartened by the need to hide their true selves in a precarious attempt to fit in with the prevailing mainstream in an environment that is not yet optimally inclusive.
The Opportunity for Improved Results through Innovation
We do not have to settle for a snail’s pace. D&I innovators can accelerate increasingly significant, meaningful, and sustainable results. We need innovative D&I strategies to achieve a rich and relevant mix of diversity from entry level to board level in this lifetime. We need to replace deficient traditional practices with new D&I practices to make the most of that mix to achieve individual, organizational, and societal goals for this generation.
With the potential of innovation to mitigate such stubborn roadblocks, the field of D&I has never been more compelling. We have the opportunity to look back at how this discipline has grown and evolved since its inception, to celebrate our collective progress, to apply the lessons we have learned, and to take forward the best of what has worked. At the same time, we have the opportunity to let go of paradigms and practices that have not garnered the results we need and results that are ethically admirable. Although we have earned the privilege to be pleased with hard-won results to date, we need to ask ourselves if continuing with current best practices will escalate the extraordinary results we need to achieve in the short and long term. I suggest that radical innovations in the field of D&I are necessary to expedite positive outcomes at the macro level of society, mezzo level of organizations, and micro level of lived experiences of individuals. Further, I believe jazz improvisation models and metaphors can provide helpful insight on the path to novel approaches to D&I work.
Jazz Improvisation: Insights for Innovating in the Field of D&I
Jazz Improvisation and Business
Jazz improvisation is a paragon of creativity and an exemplar of collaboration. Spontaneously producing music that has never before existed is creative by definition. Furthermore, collectively pulling this off requires remarkable collaboration. Many have studied jazz improvisation as a model and metaphor for business, and as Peter Blouw summarizes in Improvisation, Business and Management Theory, researchers commonly point to two primary opportunities for businesses applying improvisation insights: a) augmented creativity to innovate products and services, and b) increased organizational agility (1). Although Blouw adds that businesses seeking to gain these potential benefits have difficulty cultivating collaborative conditions that integrate improvisation techniques (3), the potential benefits are compelling for the field of D&I in business. Although I believe that many concepts from improvisation are relevant to, compatible with and useful for D&I opportunities, I will limit this discussion to the exploration of one particular concept drawing on insight from neuroscientific research in jazz improvisation that illuminates a possible barrier to innovation in the field of D&I.
Creativity and Impulse Control during Jazz Improvisation
Ideal external conditions, cognitive context, and mental processes giving rise to creativity and innovation are complex, but researchers across disciplines continue to gain understanding of the dynamics at play. As the scientific understanding of the neurophysiological basis for the creative capacity of the brain continues to develop, research is advancing the body of knowledge giving insight into brain functions that enable creativity. For example, in an effort to identify the active and inactive areas of the brain during improvisation, Limb and Braun asked pianists to play a keyboard inside a functional neuroimaging machine that produced brain activity images. Each pianist participated in four distinct exercises designed to distinguish brain activity when playing memorized music from brain activity when improvising novel music. These exercises were a) playing a one-octave C-major scale in quarter notes without improvising, b) improvising using any notes they wished within the limits of C-major scale quarter notes, c) playing an original jazz melody memorized in advance, without improvising, while a recorded jazz quartet accompanied the tune in the background, and d) improvising their own tunes with the same recorded jazz quartet accompaniment (Limb and Braun 2).
Analysis of the brain images across the various exercises showed distinct differences in which parts of the brain illuminated in response to the stimuli. In particular, the authors found that when jazz musicians improvise they turn off the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex area of their brains (Limb and Braun 3). This is a region of the brain linked to self-censoring, inhibition, and conscious monitoring, such as attentively choosing what notes to play to avoid error or choosing words carefully to avoid expressing bias (Limb and Braun 4). When people activate their brains’ lateral regions (including the lateral orbitofrontal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), they engage in self-monitoring and focused attention. In contrast, deactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is associated with unbound attention enabling spontaneous connections and insights (Limb and Braun 3). When the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is not engaged to police consciousness, unconscious intuition, free from conscious presumptions, can surface (Limb and Braun 4). Notably, concentrated awareness and mindful self-monitoring have been shown to constrain spontaneity and compromise performance in other domains (Limb and Braun 4). Limb and Braun suggest that the ability to deactivate this area of the brain, to suppress inhibitions and concerns about playing the right or wrong notes in the right or wrong way, is part of the brain pattern enabling creativity in jazz improvisation (1). The distinctive pattern of brain activity observed might shed light upon “cognitive dissociations” inherent in creating new material without conscious intention (Limb and Braun 3).
Improvising music with recorded accompaniment while lying inside an MRI machine is clearly different from improvising with a live band during a concert performance, and context cannot be disregarded. Nevertheless, Limb’s and Braun’s conclusions are intriguing and point to insights that might help unveil enablers and inhibiters of creativity. In fact, the researchers suggest that understanding musical improvisation might provide understanding of the “neural correlates” of creativity in general (Limb and Braun 1). In “This is Your Brain on Jazz: Researchers Use MRI to Study Spontaneity, Creativity” (2008), Limb suggests that “this type of brain activity might also be present during other types of improvisational behavior that are integral parts of life for both artists and non-artists” (Brownlee 1). As argued here, there might be implications for creativity and innovation in the field of D&I.
Impulse Control in the Field of D&I
The domain of D&I is heavily laden with worry about 'playing the wrong notes', as it were. In fact, the field tends to emphasize becoming aware of unconscious, unintentional biases and controlling the impulse to act on them. Even more, it is common for people to avoid even constructive dialogue about diversity and its inherent tensions out of concern for saying the wrong thing.
In The Value of Difference, Eliminating Bias in Organizations, Dr. Binna Kandola argues that having biases and prejudices is a normal part of being human, and that discrimination develops as a survival mechanism to simplify the work of interpreting our complex and often ambiguous environment and to inform how we should behave within it (44). Human psychological and sociological dynamics condition each of us to favour some people more than others. Categorizing others helps us make quick (although sometimes inaccurate) predictions to use in responding to the complex world around us and its rapid, sudden changes. At the same time, categorizing ourselves informs our own behaviours, identity and value in comparison to others. Groups to which we belong cultivate unity and allegiance not only by differentiating themselves from other groups and defining others’ differences as deficiencies, but also by monitoring their own members’ behaviours.
Although a particular bias or prejudice might vary from individual to individual (e.g. one person might have a bias against football players while another person does not), the fact of having biases is something humans share. Further, biases happen so automatically that we might not consciously be aware of them. Drawing from Fiske in The Handbook of Social Pyschology, Kandola describes MRI research that demonstrated that people who do not seem to have biased attitudes on the surface might still have unconscious biases. Furthermore, as prejudice and society’s reaction to it have evolved, we increasingly hide our prejudices from ourselves and from others to present an image to both self and others as rational, objective and impartial. Without noticing, we constantly monitor our environment, filter it through biases, and modify our behaviour. Despite being natural and having some utility, these schemas can lead to inaccurate interpretation of the information surrounding us as we go through our lives. Our attitudes and behaviours informed by and reflecting such errors in our perceptions can have profound ramifications on our ability to cultivate environments based on the principles of equality or to make the most of diversity in organizations.
Notably, Kandola explains that automatic responses to our environment do not necessarily lead to prejudiced actions. We can overrule biases and prejudice by choosing to consciously examine them and act as “critics, editors and managers” (Kandola 60) of our ideas to manage our biases and mitigate their negative effects. In other words, our natural biases and automatic responses do not need to lead to prejudiced actions, discriminatory behaviours and unfair outcomes. When we vigilantly, consciously address biases, we can choose whether we will act in alignment with them or not. Put differently, when biases are inhibited, we can break our habitual connections between biases and actions to choose to behave in an unbiased, respectful and inclusive manner. People who personally believe in D&I objectives, and to a lesser degree, people who do not embody the principles but know they are being monitored and held accountable to D&I objectives, try to inhibit acting on their biases. For example, we might try to restrain thoughts in reaction to a bias by carefully choosing our words in communication with others to avoid exposing our biases and to avoid offending or excluding others.
In fact, within impulse control engaged to mitigate unintentional bias, there is a particular emphasis on self-censoring through careful selection of words and actions to avoid causing offence, fostering stereotypes, or expressing bias toward a person or group. While efforts to recognize the power of words and attempts to communicate in an inclusive way have merit, self-censorship can become problematic. UPMC’s Chief Inclusion and Diversity Officer, Candi Castelberry-Singlton describes a “stigma in the workplace that has resulted in us having politically correct conversations about diversity rather than the ones we need to be having” (qtd. in Tapia 134). In other words, meaningful communication is constrained through excessive filtering of words resulting in absurd circumlocutions and indecipherable euphemisms or even complete avoidance of D&I topics. These practices also might tap into a pressure to conform to a socially enforced orthodoxy and an unhealthy censorship leading to intolerance of others’ ways of expressing themselves. Taken too far, an exchange becomes ineffectual or, worse, ironically points to the bias the speaker is trying to hide. The following question from a sensitivity quiz for London 2012 Olympic volunteers illustrates this point.
2. Ethnicity/Race: You need to point out one of your team members to another colleague who requires his level of expertise. How do you describe him?
The tall black guy with short dark hair.
That guy over there, who looks like an athlete.
As your colleague is black, you are worried about sounding racist when you describe him, so you select another less qualified team member to assist instead (Furness 1).
Among the given choices, the straightforward answer in choice (a) is correct although many people are reticent to describe someone by their colour, race or ethnicity. Answer (b) is vague and disregards race as a recognizable descriptor, opening up potential for confusion in an Olympic setting, which presumably would have more than one “guy over there, who looks like an athlete” (Furness 1). In answer (c), self-censorship has negative practical and discriminatory impact because the team is not utilizing the expertise of the black colleague.
This dynamic also can work to prevent constructive dialogues about differences as impulse control is employed to avoid discussion of specific tensions or of diversity more generally. Self-censorship employed to avoid saying the wrong thing prevents useful discourse, constraining the opportunity to address individual or systemic biases and limiting the capacity to make the most of diversity. Without dialogue, exploration, and understanding, we have often erroneously defaulted to treating everyone the same. Because people are, in fact, different, treating people as if they are the same does not create equal or equitable outcomes (e.g. an office building with a single entry at the top of a staircase designed for the mainstream has different accessibility outcomes for a person using a wheelchair than for a walking person).
In Building on the Promise of Diversity, Dr. R. Roosevelt Thomas writes that many people, including leaders of D&I, are uncomfortable with these chronic tensions inherent in diversity. This discomfort makes individuals and organizations ineffective in the midst of ongoing stresses and anxieties that are a highly probable adjunct of diversity. (Building 76, 82). Avoiding tensions and ignoring differences impairs ability to understand others, to make high caliber decisions, and to develop solutions that address problems and seize opportunities. Removing all friction, including not only those associated with “isms” (e.g. sexism, ageism, racism), but also those inherent in the complex mix of similarities and differences, is improbable. Recognizing this context, Thomas asserts the importance of acknowledging diversity frictions and developing capabilities to perform in the midst of them (Building 166).
Consistent with Thomas’ discussion, Andrés Tapia asserts that tensions in a diverse work environment are inevitable and often mismanaged (Tapia 14-15). Tapia notes that when we downplay and avoid differences instead of calling them out, conflict grows without resolution. He urges that we stop avoiding differences and inherent tensions if we are to effectively acknowledge and navigate diversity. He advocates ways to create positive interpersonal and group relationships, and to build effective human resources programs and opportunities that attract the best talent to do their best work by constructively calling out and managing differences effectively. “Calling out differences unleashes the true creative contributions of diverse perspectives that play off each other and lead to better work relationships, greater innovation, and profitability that benefit individuals, teams and organizations” (Tapia 12-13).
Making Choices Amidst Tensions
These tensions between ignoring differences or calling them out, between avoiding difficulties and engaging difficulties, between turning down or turning up the volume of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex bear some similarities to tensions that can arise in improvised performance. Improvising musicians during group performances have choices in how to respond to each other. As described by avant-garde jazz musician and Improvisation, Community and Social Practice Postdoctoral Research Fellow Mark Laver, one option is to respond to a musical idea by playing imitatively, going with the flow or “joining in a groove” (Laver n.p.). A different option is to respond with a starkly contrary choice that challenges the previous musical idea, swims upstream or goes against the grain. In jazz improvisation, either the imitative or contrary approach can be complementary depending upon how it is delivered.
Keith Sawyer examines a similar phenomenon as he compares dynamics in improvising theatre to “group flow” (i.e. peak experience and performance among groups) (43). In Group Genius, Sawyer writes, “Group flow happens when many tensions are in perfect balance: the tension between convention and novelty; between structure and improvisation; between the critical, analytic mind and the freewheeling, outside-the-box mind; between listening to the rest of the group and speaking out in individual voices” (56).
Whether during group collaboration, mundane conversation, or theatrical and musical improvisation, individuals have the option to agree or disagree with those with whom they are interacting. Both can be done in a complementary fashion, and in improvisation in these various collaborative contexts, there might be an oscillation between agreement and disagreement. Notably, the contrary choice carries with it the added responsibility and skill of presenting and navigating disagreement in a manner that encourages expansive, generative opportunities rather than extinguishing dialogue and further exploration. The improvisation resides both in the moment of choosing to affirm or contradict your interlocutor and how you navigate the consequences of the choice (Laver n.p.).
In this sense, improvisation provides another key insight for the field of D&I as individuals oscillate between avoiding and engaging with the inherent tensions at play in this work. Do you agree by identifying and focusing on similarities and common ground? Do you disagree by acknowledging and focusing on differences with their inherent tensions and possibilities? Do you withdraw by not engaging in dialogues and decisions about diversity at all? Will organizations employ D&I strategies for social justice or will they employ D&I for profit? Roger Martin’s “Integrative Thinker” leans into such tensions and their complexities, engaging competencies first to learn from opposing ideas and then to generate superior solutions (Leavy 2). If we embrace Tapia’s both / and model, along with the analogous “Yes, and” rule of theatrical improvisation, we can say ‘yes’ to employing D&I for both social justice and profit. To that end, we can design innovative, integrative solutions, beginning with improvising new ways of working in the field of D&I that achieve superior results by blending and engaging both similarities and differences to make the most of the total mix. In this way, our innovations might meet Debbe Kennedy’s call for mutualism, or the practice of ensuring that “everyone benefits, and no one is harmed” as “the final arbiter of all plans, innovations, decisions, products, services, programs, profit making, et cetera” (39).
Conclusion
Neuroscientific research indicates that when improvising, jazz musicians turn off their impulse control, clearing a path for creativity. In contrast, in the field of D&I impulse control is emphasized as individuals carefully choose actions to avoid tensions associated with diversity. This orientation might block our ability to achieve creative solutions that can make the most of diversity. In this, unresolved problems grow, unrealized opportunities stagnate, and ethical questions about the field of D&I in business persist. While the practice of D&I faces additional barriers to positive innovations, including lingering pressure to find a perfect balance between profits and ethics, I believe we can learn from the jazz improvisation phenomenon of turning down self-censoring brain activity. By acknowledging and managing the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in improvisation and creativity, we might address the incongruence of turning on impulse control to mitigate bias and turning off impulse control to generate creativity. This might foster the design of novel approaches in the field of D&I that generate breakthrough, ethically responsible results for individuals, organizations and society.
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