Why diversity is so important to us

With Women’s Day coming up, I thought I would mark it at immedia by talking to some of how we see the world.

At Open Night last week, I mentioned how fortunate we are to be a diverse and creative team. As a South African, any kind of South African, you can picture yourself in our team, and I think that simple statement says more about what we have achieved here at immedia than anything else.

We draw our strength and courage to walk this road even though it takes effort and awareness, because we are firmly committed and convinced of one simple fact.

At immedia, as it is out in the world, diversity is our source of magic.

We simply are not skeptical of that fact.

We don’t always get it right, which is why we have a culture of learning at immedia, so we can iterate ourselves and improve as a team and personally as people.

As a result we have been able to build careers, value and relevance for countless of us through the 21 years we have been around, many of whom are leading our charge today.

And many of them are women. Not because it makes us look good, but by the simple fact of choosing the best talent for the job.

Many people see diversity as race or gender, but it isn’t. It’s diversity of thought.

When we can include more of us in the problem solving, in the pattern analysis then we can see things in ways we could not before, for we are casting our data nets wider.
As humans, we are all sensors on the universe. And when we have diversity, we collect more data and iterate with better outcomes.

Think of diversity as the number of pixels in our composite: we see more detail and nuance with a higher definition picture than a low definition picture.

As technology has allowed us to share our context, we can finally have empathy for the plight of others.
When we work together, we can see all the ways we are the same, not the things that make us different.

I see that you are human too.

And with this shared context, we can change.

With empathy can come enlightenment, and then resistance to change crumbles and often, it just evaporates.

You wonder – how could we even?

Don’t believe me?

In just the space of a few years, the parent or sibling of a gay child no longer has to denounce them but can rather talk to the love that binds them.

In the space of just a few years, apps and the cloud have changed our opportunities. We can do more together, with less effort globally.

In just nine years, the smartphone revolution has allowed a shared context so dense that an anguished community could finally knit together and say: you can’t, you can’t, you can’t … you can’t just shoot us like this anymore.

Last week our election results reintroduced diversity into our public life.

And that’s good.

And human diversity is our well of magic.

When we open ourselves to others, we open ourselves to our true selves, not our same selves.
To reaching the full quantum probabilities of a productive life and all of the possibilities of a life of purpose.

So this Women’s Day, spend a moment to committing to diversity of thought and allowing new ideas in, and not worrying too much on who or what is bringing those ideas.

Don’t see diversity through a prism of race, gender or corporeal packaging.

You will change the world you see.

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And put in a more traditional way…
This is not a day to say “thank you” to women with meaningless gestures or hollow attempts at diversity, but to reflect deeply on how we wish to address injustice in the world, to women and anywhere else it exists.
Because we can do that simply by changing our attitude to each other, now. We can choose to change for the better, now.

A little more diversity, not a lot – limited colour palette and style but wow. So much more information and subtlety revealed.