The Science Behind It

The Complexity of Diversity & Inclusion

Each company is a unique, complex ecosystem whose behavior is driven by the interactions among and between employees, customers and competitors. Our approach to measuring inclusion was inspired by our scientific research in Complexity Science, a field that combines behavioral science and computer simulations to analyze and quantify organizational performance by understanding the behaviors and attitudes of individuals, and how these behaviors and attitudes are shaped by day-to-day interactions with others in an organization.

Computer Simulations to Capture Organizational Behavior

Computer simulations can capture the causal links that drive overall company behavior, whose complexity cannot be analyzed with traditional techniques. Simulations can replicate the behaviors of individuals and the complex interactions just as they occur in real life. As a result, we can explore how the macroscopic behaviors of entire organizations emerge from the individual behaviors and interactions. This makes it possible to analyze and quantify the individual behaviors and the overall organizational behaviors in a single, consistent framework.

To show how this works in practice, the video below shows a simulation that replicates a hypothetical company with four levels of employees (entry level, manager, VP, Executive) and two genders (male, female).

This simulation was used in a research project showing that Equal Opportunity is not enough to restore balance in an organization, even when hiring and promotion biases are removed. You can read more about it in this Forbes article. More recently, we wrote an academic paper showing that gender biases in the promotion process can capture the gender imbalances seen across a variety of industries.