Diversity and inclusion

Your team will benefit from persity in all aspects that you can amalgamate. Diversity in age, gender, organizational level, geographic origin, socioeconomic means, faith (and lack thereof), educational background, sexual orientation, neuropersity, circadian rhythms, and more will make your team more effective and valuable.

Advanced analytics and AI teams are made up of a wide range of personalities, from the introverted to the highly extroverted, from the careful and thoughtful to the impulsive and innovative. Analytics teams benefit greatly from the varied perspectives that a wide spectrum of inpiduals bring to the collaborative environment.

Perhaps you have seen teams where the leader hires mostly people that think, act, and look like themselves. In extreme cases, this is called conative cloning and it can lead to myopic thinking and a narrow focus when approaching challenges and the resulting solutions. If you think of hiring as a continuum, on one end of the spectrum you have a group that is a conative clone of the leader. Groupthink is common and no one challenges the direction set by the leader for the strategy of the group or the approach taken for each project. This is not the optimal approach for any group. On the other end of the spectrum, you have a team that is so perse that they cannot communicate or understand each other to such an extreme that little to no collaboration can take place. This is not desirable either. As with most things in life, somewhere in the middle of this continuum is where you want to operate.

It helps to have guidelines in hiring. We need to be careful and cognizant that our guidelines do not become dogma and that we do not fall foul of our original goal of building an effective, cohesive, collaborative group that can work internally as project teams in numerous configurations among the team members, but also a team that connects easily and collaborates with all functional areas and levels of the company and with external partners of all types.

One area of persity that is not typically discussed because it is unique to advanced analytics and AI teams is the persity of knowledge in analytical approaches. The team is better served from having inpiduals who are experts, but experts in various analytical approaches. The team needs experts in natural language processing for text-based applications, neural networks for image processing, deep learning for a wide range of predictive applications, decision trees for problems with a large number of relevant variables to be considered, and emerging fields like video and audio processing.

The team needs a varied collection of experts who can lead projects that require the aforementioned specialized analytical techniques; experts who can and will lead the initial projects requiring these techniques. The experts will mentor the other team members in learning the technologies, techniques, and other considerations of building solutions for the class of problem being addressed. The experts act as teachers and mentors for the other team members to become proficient, if not experts, in the technique being used for the immediate project, and on the next project, a different expert provides the same opportunity for the other team members to learn from them and broaden their technical portfolio of skills. This dynamic is important for the analytics team to grow in their collaboration skills as a team and for inpiduals to grow in technical proficiency.

Of course, all team members need to be experts in basic mathematics, and it is useful and helpful if they are well educated and competent in basic and advanced statistics and probability theories. These are the foundational technical skills that we would expect from an intern or co-op student joining the team for an interim assignment and we would certainly expect this level of competency from anyone that we might consider bringing on to the team as a full-time team member.

The advanced analytics and AI team needs to have a foundational operating premise that they are all valued and respected members of the team and that they all have valid views that can be freely expressed in a positive manner to improve any project that they are involved in or to review a colleague or sub-team. It is expected that everyone respects all other team members personally and professionally and that our differences are a source of strength that provides our team with a broader and deeper view than any other team in the organization or that of our partner organizations.

One of the founding goals of the group is to start out with a perse team and to grow in a manner that includes as much persity across as many aspects as conceivable and practically possible.