A ll Canadians are thugs. At least that's what Mark, a high school buddy of mine, used to think. I guess he had his reasons. In the midst of a three-week canoeing trip in the Canadian wilderness, he and two friends were walking along the back streets of a small town, looking to buy supplies. A car screeched up to the curb, and four guys piled out and proceeded to beat the tar out of Mark and his buddies. These were the only Canadians Mark had ever encountered, and the impressions they left on him were the kind made from fists and boots.
My point is that despite all the feel-good rhetoric about how people should embrace all kinds of other people into their inner circles of valued human beings, real-life experiences often get in the way. Someone can tell me what I should think about a particular group of people, but if that thinking runs counter to my personal experiences with people from that group, I'm unlikely to buy into it.
Over time Mark's opinion of Canadians changed. But that resulted from getting to know more people from Canada, not from embracing a philosophy of diversity. It's worth noting that Mark isn't some xenophobic, small-town rube. He is a successful engineer who recently returned from a three-year expatriate assignment in China. Like many of the individual leaders I work with, Mark is a scientist by training, and he requires data-not the opinions and theories of others-to change his mind.