Creative companies should embrace five phases of action, says Roberts.

You’ve had (or at least heard) the repeated, cyclical conversation around diversity in business: On one hand, diversity of backgrounds and demographics among your talent only means something once it yields a diversity of ideas.

On the other hand, you can’t generate the right diversity of ideas until you get the right diverse composition of talent.

As important progress is being made with demographics, slowly but surely, more focus is needed on the question of what’s supposed to happen when you finally get the right people together in one company, or in one room.

Diversity in business is a hot topic, but while we continually focus on the social good – good that is relevant and necessary – we may not fully realize just why it’s so especially vital for the marketing world: Diversity is one of the top psychological and sociological drivers of creative thinking. Period.

Quite simply, without an understanding of these psychological dynamics, all your demographic diversity will be impeded. Your enemy is an ongoing desire for sameness, which curses our industry to a point where we are under massive pressure to reinvent. If we’re not harnessing the psychology of diversity, we’re not leading innovation and we’re losing ground.