A Blues Club with only white musicians is going to be limited in the musical variety and influences they bring to the audience.
I live in an area of London that is at the edge of a London borough that is amongst the most diverse and vibrant of any part of this amazing city. I say at the edge, as right beyond where I live there is a sea of sameness, from the housing to the population. One notable and noticeable specific of this is that there are large areas where the population has been in the area multiple generations and is, well, almost all white.
I then recently noticed a weekly music club in the area that invites in Blues bands and is building a great reputation for that not just locally but nationally. “Great”, I thought, “I love Blues, let me take a look at it then I’ll likely go check it out”. However, I then noticed that the venue they use is a well known local “members club” that, again, is (to put it politely) not known for diversity. I then looked at the YouTube channel of the weekly music club, scanned the bands that have played each week for the last two months. Great bands, great music, yet not one single non-white person on stage at any point.
The website for this music club also notes for musicians aspiring to get one of the weekly slots that they have hundreds of bands waiting to play there for the 52 weekly slots each year, and yet every band has every member white? For the music form of Blues, this is surreal, it is a music of oppressed black people in the deep South of the USA. I note again that the music on the youtube clips was great and, in isolation, there is no issue with a blues band with only white musicians, but if that is repeated over and over again in a venue that tends to only be visited by club members who go back many, many years in the area, then there is some level of unconscious bias going on.
This gets me thinking about why this can and still happen in general terms and what the impact can be.
First, one key reason is that we humans tend to stick with whatever we are comfortable with. If we play golf and are in business, we may well join a business network centred around golf, as an example. I myself was invited to join one last year, but then I looked at the membership and saw no women in the first hundred members I saw listed on the app. Yes, golf is already played more by men than women, but I felt profoundly uncomfortable that this had been in fact magnified in this network. So, much though I love golf and love business, I declined to be a part of this group that lacked diversity. I am sure they have great events and enjoy their golf, yet they are in their comfort zone of it being ok that they have very, very few women members.
Comfort zones are great, it is lovely to be comfortable with the familiar and what we like. Heck, one of my best friends likes curries, yet has eaten the exact same dish every single time for over two decades. They know what they like, they never vary it. They love it, yet part of me always wonders what they would think and feel if they simply stretched a tiny bit and enjoyed the wide and wondrous variety of South Asian cuisine beyond their generic “curry house” tikka masala?
You see, there is no growth in learning unless we stretch to be open and even a little uncomfortable. A part of that is to be open to meeting people we wouldn’t normally meet, experiencing things we normally wouldn’t experience, trying things we wouldn’t normally try, even eating things we wouldn’t normally eat.
A Blues Club with only white musicians is going to be limited in the musical variety and influences they bring to the audience.
A Business Club with only the ideas around business from men who play golf is a limited subset of business owners, so therefore necessarily limited in the new and varied ideas the members will be exposed to at their events.
Now, in your own business, do you stretch or do you stay in your comfort zone? Do you ever use the six most dangerous words in business? (which are “we’ve always done it this way”). Do you hire people like you, or do you at least sometimes consciously hire people different from you?
This can be visually different in terms of gender, race or age (three areas of obvious bias), and it can also be in terms of where they have lived and worked (international experience is ever more vital in our globalised world).
Going beyond visual differences, another area where diversity is also often missing is education and educational background. Businesses are increasingly recognising that we have gone too far in the “filters” of; where did you go to school? college? what exam results did you get? I’d rather hire a young person who didn’t go to private school or Oxbridge but has known struggle and managed a university degree from lesser university and shown dedication and desire to achieve. Try running that through the filters of the big investment banks or management consultancies though and you’ll find that “we want a 1st or 2:1 from a Russell Group university” and those high potential employees I speak of are rejected precisely because they come from outside the “comfort zone”.
Think about what we can lose by sticking to those comfort zones, the risks we take in our businesses by choosing (consciously or unconsciously) to avoid diversity and so lose out on the diversity of ideas, approaches, styles, the rich tapestry of human experience that can bring so much growth and learning in all areas of life and business.
Back to the title: “Can you imagine a Blues Club with only white musicians?”
Perhaps not, but one exists, so can you also imagine a Board of Directors that is nearly 100% white, male, educated at exclusive private institutions? They exist to and, in fact, still dominate in the Western World. Oh, and for listed companies with those Boards, one of their key focus areas will always be “Risk”, yet every day they take risks of lack of diversity of thought impacting their business as they stay in their comfort zone.