A Crisis in Workplace Competence: The Diversity Movement at its End Game
When diversity became a priority over meritocracy, institutional competency eroded and systems began to fail with increasing regularity.
Image: Nasa.gov
The U.S. relies on a vast network of interconnected systems in order to function as a first-world nation delivering a high quality of life to its citizens. For example, a vehicle driver pumps gasoline and pays by credit card at the pump, a healthcare system sends a bill to a patient by e-mail, or a customer orders an item on the Amazon app using a smartphone. All of these systems must be assumed to work in order for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system can lead to cascading consequences for all adjacent systems.
Because of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing. And if you drill down to a root cause, it’s largely because of a multi-generational push to put diversity ahead of meritocracy, prioritizing people’s appearance ahead of their capabilities. As a result, our complex systems are nearing a breaking point.
When meritocracy mattered
The idea that individuals should be evaluated and selected based on their capabilities rather than wealth, class, or connections, led to significant improvements in the quality of life at all economic levels of American society. Following the early 20th Century adoption of systematic selection criteria such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, Army General Classification Test, and Law School Admission Test, this system of institutional management led to numerous technological breakthroughs and the establishment of a robust societal and technological infrastructure that we enjoy to this day.
This systematic selection process for competence came in direct conflict with the civil rights movement in the 1960’s. A series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders and laws put meritocracy and the new protected-group diversity imperative on a collision course. Statistically observable examples of disparate impact among groups became accepted as prima facie evidence of discrimination. The eventual outcome of this has been a decrease of competency through a forced diversification of the workforce irrespective of ability.
While everyone welcomes a workforce containing a diverse collection of backgrounds, origins, and individual qualities, the act of a person being hired or promoted on the basis of something other than skill or ability dilutes the organization’s ability to operate as a team to achieve the company or institutional performance goals. Eventually, older workers with the required skills and experience leave the organization and are replaced by those who were not hired on the same basis.
Institutions and industries lower the competency bar
In academia, the use of standardized tests to determine admission to universities is being gradually eliminated. Today, a majority of U.S. colleges have either stopped requiring SAT/ACT scores or are on a glide path toward elimination. Harvard Law School no longer requires the LSAT as of 2023, thus thousands of unqualified law students are headed to a bar exam that they are unlikely to pass. To mitigate this lowering of competency among law students, the National Conference of Bar Examiners is planning to dilute the bar exam under its “NextGen” plan and will certainly reduce the degree to which the exam tests for competency.
Similarly, other professions requiring competency certification such as medical, piloting, and engineering, are seeing a dilution of standards in order to widen the pool of diverse candidates entering the workplace. This is being done without any consideration of the consequences of what happens when the people who built the complex systems on which our society relies are replaced by people who were chosen for their appearance or societal connections rather than their ability to actually perform at their job.
The airline industry has already demonstrated how placing diversity over competency has made air travel more dangerous. When you add in the other systematic elements – manufacturing, air traffic controllers, mechanics – you now have a fragile system that has the potential for a total breakdown.
The impact on this policy of promoting diversity over competence does not simply affect new hires and promotion decisions. Morale among those already working inside of these systems declines, and high-performing individuals who want to be on a high-performing team respond by either disengaging or leaving the organization altogether. The result is clear - the combination of new people hired for diversity, not competence, and the declining engagement of the highly competent creates a landscape of system failures of increasing frequency and magnitude.
A path to failure paved with good intentions
While each failure is officially seen as a separate issue to be narrowly fixed, the reality is that entire systems are failing widely and at an accelerating rate. Rather than protecting the competency that made those systems possible, the modern preference of diversity over competence has reduced meritocratic evaluation at all levels of American society and will lead to a civilization whose declining quality of life is inevitable due to the collapse of those systems.
As America chooses to hollow-out its systems under feel-good programs intended to promote diversity while assuming that these systems will work just as well with fewer competent, skilled workers, this path of least resistance will soon have a reckoning with reality. As residents of Mexico, Brazil and South Africa can attest, tap water is unsafe to drink, power outages are almost daily, and sanitation-caused hospital infections are common and often fatal. Without a change in direction and a renewed culture of excellence, America in the near future will look a lot like this.