Ok, let’s start by dealing with the elephant in the room – at Fabriq, we do not have a diversity and inclusion policy. Oops, politically incorrect? Maybe, but we stand by it.
Who’s “we”?
A bunch of self- confessed MasterChefs and fashion opinionated data scientists, travel-obsessed structured linguists, process-driven creative minds, cricket fanatics placid souls, adrenaline-seeking yoga practitioners, commercially minded eco-warriors, spiritual tech coders and aero-space engineer unicorn storytellers.
Yeap, that is us, all of us. And now you know why we do not have a diversity policy.
Values over Policies
However, with such a diverse group how can one get inclusion, for the ultimate purpose of organisational unity? What is the key to unity? It may seem at first like a contradiction, but the key to unity is for each person to be self-reliant. When people think ‘it’s not my job/someone else will do it’, unity cannot be achieved, and inclusion fails.
Therefore, when we expand our team, we look for curiosity, resilience, humbleness, for trial and error examples aka post-traumatic growth, for the ability to deal with ambiguity.
We are a bunch of people for whom
when it gets hard, we take a rest rather than give up.
Counter-intuitively, this is our way
of achieving diversity and inclusion: by focusing on character building and
personality defying traits commonly shared, we take great pride in them and
hugely value them in our team-mates. Then diversity and inclusion metrics take
care of themselves.
‘Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. […]Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, [..] the rise of cities, cultures, […] bacterial resistance … even our own existence as a species on this planet.
The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means— crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them— and do them well. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility.’
From this point of view, it is because of our diversity (of thought and circumstance) and inclusion that we, as an organization, have gained the much needed antifragility; ahhh, we also do flexible working…surprised?
This article was written by Oana Neumayer, CMO at Fabriq
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