Making Progress through Brute Force

Last week, I read Invisible Women, a great book by Caroline Criado Perez that shows the negative impacts that happen when policy decisions, product designs, medical guidelines, and employer policies fail to consider data on women or their unique needs.

The main point of the book: “The result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience – that of half the global population, after all – is seen as, well, niche.”

I was also struck by Criado Perez’s description of how we often argue for objective criteria without seeing how much those criteria were (and are) influenced by the exclusion of women. She gives an example of the Bank of England’s argument for their “objective selection criteria” for inclusion on currency:

“To join the ‘gilded list’ of ‘key figures from our past’, a person must fulfil the following: have broad name recognition; have good artwork; not be controversial; and have made ‘a lasting contribution which is universally recognised and has enduring benefits’. Reading these subjective designations of worth, I realised how the Bank had ended up with five white men on its banknotes: the historical gender data gap means that women are just far less likely to be able to fulfil any of these ‘objective’ criteria.”

As soon as I read that line about the Bank of England, it caused me to review the authors of the books in my Leadership Library. 

Sadly, of the 99 books, only 16 of them had women authors. Embarrassingly, even fewer books were written by people of color.

My first reaction was to defend my methodology for choosing the books. Nearly all of them came across my radar through “objective” criteria—lists of the best business books, best-seller lists, and those referenced in other books. 

But really, I was just making excuses.  

Fortunately, this is a classic small-numbers problem. And the nature of a small numbers problem is that, by definition, one doesn’t need a grand strategy to solve it. Instead, focused action makes immediate impact—the brute force solution. 

In fact, the time it takes to develop a strategy might just delay the action that would have solved the issue in the first place. 

This dynamic exists for lots of problems we face in organizations and in our lives. For example, hiring just one more person of color at the executive level can move the numbers. Getting just five people on the street to give feedback on the product is sometimes all you need. And it might just take a day to gather all those compliance documents that you know you should be filing. 

In all those cases, we could plan ourselves to paralysis when taking action is the solution.