Sixteen Bean Diversity

Let me tell you a story about a teacher named Tom who found himself teaching diversity one cold and blustery winter afternoon at a university near Lake Erie. He described the power and potential of diverse groups of people and their propensity to create better decisions in complex and nonroutine situations. He told of the higher quality decisions that these groups make especially when the issue is important but not urgent. As he extolled the virtues of diverse groups, he suddenly struck upon a metaphor that fit the current weather conditions. You see, he was a fan of homemade soup and had a constant crock pot of something going on in the kitchen at home. At the moment, he had a batch of sixteen bean soup in the pot, one of his favorites for the rich flavors and textures the broad mix provided, especially when they were enriched with an array of spices that accentuated the individual flavors of each of the various legumes. In the pot resided pinto beans, small red beans, pink beans, red kidney beans, great northern beans, baby lima beans, large lima beans, black-eyed peas, small white beans, black beans, whole green peas, yellow split peas, green split peas, lentils, chick peas, and pearl barley. Sixteen different races of bean, sixteen ways of being bean, sixteen different colors and sizes, sixteen different success stories of what it means to be a bean, sixteen different ways of making sense of the bean world.