Everett Harper

Move to the Edge, Declare it Center


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complex issues and make better decisions, despite lots of unknowns and uncertainties. Let me introduce a story about one complex issue – diversity, inclusion, and equal pay – and our approach to addressing it using the core practices in Move to the Edge, Declare It Center.

      Imagine your first day at work, and your business card looks like this:

An illustration of a business card.

      What would you think? Might you wonder, “Does everybody have their salaries displayed on their business card?” Might you look around and ask yourself, “How do I compare with the other directors?” I suspect you are definitely thinking, “Why on earth would a company do this?”

      Our Move to the Edge started with several hypotheses:

       Building a diverse company is a long series of investments resulting in a network of trust.

       Diverse teams outperform nondiverse teams, especially around innovation, decision‐making, and accounting for risks.

       Diversity and inclusion initiatives must be central to the core operating model of the company. DEI initiatives that are only marketing or human resource initiatives will fail.

       There are skilled, motivated, and high‐integrity people from diverse backgrounds who live outside the San Francisco Bay area.

      But we didn't know the answer, so we started on the journey using what became the framework for Move to the Edge, Declare It Center. I'll return to the specific methods in the Salary Transparency Case Study in Chapter 2. However, it is time to examine the ways we can make poor decisions around complex problems, despite our best intentions.

      If you searched “decision‐making under uncertainty” on the internet, you would find thousands of academic citations across the fields of organizational behavior, neuroscience, behavioral economics, and computer science. In addition to the academic work, the topic shows up in the theater (from Hamlet to Hamilton) and even in your decision about which line to get in at the grocery. Suffice to say that a full literature review is way beyond the scope of my brain, your attention, and this book.

      Over the course of my career, I have experimented with diverse research, tools, and practices in order to solve complex problems under uncertainty. I learned, through good and bad decisions, to cultivate reliable practices that help make better – though not perfect – decisions in uncertain times. There are four key principles that anchor these practices, and they animate the rest of this book.

      Our Brains: Wired for Shortcuts

      The first three principles have to do with our brains. First, we're less rational than we think. I used to have endless arguments with economists in grad school, where the dominant paradigm was based on the assumption that humans are rational actors. In contrast, my personal experience reflected theories in social psychology that people use simplifying shortcuts, social cues, and responses to their own emotional states in order to make decisions that