In the Thick of it: Navigating the “Trails” of Data

Recently, my social media feed has been filled with articles about the crash of Silicon Valley Bank. As I reflect on my experience in the Sustainable Investing Research Consulting Project, I can't help but think about a Wall Street Journal column by Andy Kessler that caught my attention. In the article, we can read: In its proxy statement, SVB notes that 91% of their board is independent and 45% women, they also have “1 black”, “1 LGBTQ”, and “2 veterans”. I am not saying that 12 white men would have avoided this mess, but the company may have been distracted by diversity demands.

I am not writing another article to explain why the SVB crashed or to assess whether or not SVB had a focus on diversity and if that supposed focus could have been one of the reasons why the Bank crashed. This blog post is not about the merits of diversity either, but I am just wondering why diversity efforts were pointed out as a possible distraction for the bank while the bank was less diverse than any of the United States’ top five banks. This got me thinking about why we, as a society, are so afraid of differences. I understand the tendency to be drawn to people who look like us. I love being in groups where I am surrounded by people who look like me because I feel safer in those environments and I feel that I can share my experiences and fears freely because my peers can easily relate to what I am sharing. But it still baffles me that certain people believe that they can't work collaboratively and accomplish great things with people who are different from them. 

When thinking about working with people different from me, I can’t stop thinking about my consulting team and the team dynamics we have developed during the first half of the semester. Taking part in the Sustainable Investing Research Consulting Project has allowed me to be in one of the most diverse teams I have ever been to. Together, we represent three different continents, three different ethnicities, and two different genders. I could spend a lot of time explaining how beneficial it is to work in multicultural groups. It has helped me open to other perspectives that I would not consider. But in this blog post, I will focus on how working with my team has made me realize how similar I am to people that are somewhat different from me.

In the first part of the class, our main tasks were to understand the scope of the project, develop a good relationship with the client and understand his expectations of us. But we also had to develop a good relationship between us because the quality of the results we will deliver depends heavily on the team dynamics. One of the things that my team did to maintain a good team dynamic was to always take a few minutes to talk about something not related to the project, whether it is our plan for spring break, our career path, or even the free food availability at SIPA. Sharing those little snapshots of our life made me realize that, apart from our ethnicities and gender, we are very similar individuals. We are all students juggling between our multiple assignments, our social life, our career, and our desire to make the world a better place. We may have different life experiences, and the world may perceive us and treat us differently but in the end, we are similar individuals living similar lives with similar goals.

Working with my team made me think about how we always point out differences whenever we talk about diversity as if people from different backgrounds cannot have a common goal and work towards it. I think if we spend a little more time learning about our peers, especially if they come from a different background than us, we would be surprised to see how similar we are as human beings. And maybe, we would stop seeing differences as a threat but as an advantage that we can leverage to achieve a common goal.

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