As a young adult, I used to play a game I called The Accent Game. I have an unusual accent, and no one can ever figure out quite where I’m from. When people asked, I’d ask them to guess, and note their response. I only took first guesses, but I stopped counting when I got to 20. What fascinated me was that people were often really confident about their guesses, but never in the same direction – to the extent that people would argue amongst themselves, right in front of me, about where I was from. Neither of them correct.
It was so common that people who had heard me say the same things, at the same time, in the same way, would zero in on different aspects of my voice, and have quite contradictory opinions about how I sounded.
People experience things so differently.
Recently, on Bluesky, someone posted saying they loved the Paladin books by T Kingfisher, and asking for other books that had the same vibe.
Now, I love the Paladin books. They are sweet romances, with some grizzly murder horror, sure, but the characters are just beautiful. You want to hug them, have a nice cup of tea with them (Especially Bishop Beartongue – the stories that woman could tell!), and occasionally slap them about with the Frying Pan of Enlightenment for being SO FREAKING OBTUSE OF COURSE HE LOVES YOU, YOU GOOF. In short, they are people you would love to be friends with (and who doesn’t want a Paladin of their very own, REALLY! Or possibly a Bear-lady. Or both, maybe…). They are wonderful. Despite the grizzly murder-horror, I always put the books down feeling like I’ve just had the most glorious adventure with beloved friends.
So I paid close attention to this “books like the Paladin books” thread, because apparently it is unreasonable to expect T Kingfisher to write books at the speed I read them (approximately one per day, in the case of the Paladin books, because I am NOT DOING ANYTHING ELSE UNTIL I’M DONE. GO AWAY). So alternatives are welcome. A couple of people strongly recommended Prophet by Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché, and I was thrilled to find that it was available immediately as an ebook from my library.
Gentle Reader, they are not the same vibe. At all. Prophet is a brilliant Science Fiction book, but it is gritty, despairing, and bleak. Or, at least, that’s how it felt to me. While the Paladin books are joy with a side of horror, these books were horror with maybe some joy if you peeked under the very grubby carpet and didn’t mind getting your hands ooky rummaging for it.
Which made me think harder about vibe. I am not, for a moment, going to claim that my point of view is THE ONE TRUE OPINION (an attitude the tech industry could usefully stop adopting, quite frankly). Indeed, it would not surprise me if, given a large group of people who had read both the Paladin books and Prophet, you wound up with a cluster of “These are SO MUCH THE SAME” folks, a cluster of “These are NOTHING LIKE EACH OTHER” folks, and a scattering of people who suspect both clusters have been hitting the halucinogens a little too hard.
Vibe is very personal. The Paladins books make me happier. Prophet made me sad, angry, and despairing. But I dare say it makes other people happy! And there are probably people who find the Paladins books sad.
But this is why diversity matters. Because on any given team, where the principal designer says “Everyone’s gonna love this, because I love it”, you need a bunch of people who are prepared to go “Um, no, there’s a group of people who are going to hate it, here’s why.” (Probably because you just made a stalker app, AGAIN)
As human beings, we seem to be born with a big blindspot where the perspective of others should be. It can be really hard for us to remember that other people can see and experience things differently. Given one event experienced by 5 people, you will probably get 7 different accounts. Not because any of them are lying, but because we remember how we experienced and understood an event, not the actual event itself. Brains are strange beasts, and they lie to us all the time. They are particularly keen to make us the centre of our own universes, and to discount everyone else.
So given a product, unless you’ve designed it with a whole range of perspectives built into the process, it’s highly likely that you have designed something that is awful, possibly even harmful, for a group of people you have never considered. To be honest, even if you have a wonderfully diverse team, that’s still a chance. But the more diverse the team, the broader the range of perspectives you will consider by default.
That’s aside from the many other documented advantages of diversity, from increased creativity to higher profitability.
So maybe next time you or someone you know is accused of being a diversity hire, take it as a compliment. “I sure am! How lucky is my company?!?”