Philip Patston at TEDx Auckland 2012

You may be interested that I didn't sing a single note in that song. For that you can thank autotune.

Labels, we love them don't we? You may notice there are becoming more and more of them.

Before I talk more about labels, let me introduce "Driving Forward". She's a Greyhound, fast, a winner, a money-maker. Because of those labels, she had a pretty crappy life. I'll come back to her later.

This is me, about 3 years old. Happy chappy. No labels. Then I went to a "special" school. I didn't know why. I would have thought WTF? But that phrase hadn't been invented.

Reason I had never seen myself as disabled was twin brother. As far as I knew, I was just like him. Though I'm not sure what was going on with my grey shorts.

By the time I was 17 you may notice I was developing another label. A couple of years after this photo I realised I was gay. No-one was incredibly surprised.

Fast forward 20 years and I'd trained as a counsellor, a social worker and been a professional comedian.

I had grown an impressive list of labels - white, male, gay, disabled, social working comedian. I was confused. White men saw me as that gay disabled guy. Maori lesbian disabled separatists saw me as that bloody white guy. When I was serious people thought I was just kidding. And my audiences weren't quite sure if they should laugh or not.

The lesson in this is that our notion of diversity has been to create more labels, more categorisations and more representations.

The problem with this thinking is we create a b&w world, a world of polarities, where we tend to use labels to discount people.

I'm not saying labels aren't useful. They create Awareness ? Recognition ? Human rights ? Understanding

But they have limitations too. They can create ? Assumption ? Judgement ? Entitlement ? Separation. So in a world where we are using more and more labels to categorise and represent ourselves - transsexual vs transgender, gay vs queer, ADHD vs autism vs aspergers - how do we stop?

Decay. Diversity is far more evident in decay than growth. Compare colours, textures, shapes of this decaying leaf to the growing ones. And the conditions where decay is possible are more diverse than growth.

So I believe that, in order to truly realise our diversity as humans, we need to decay our urge to label, categorise and represent.

But what, you may ask, do we need to decay?

In individuals, what needs to decay is identity. In order to recognise your own and others' diversity, you need to let go of your idea of who you are or who you think the other person is. This may include dropping labels, assumptions, values and beliefs. You may hold them dear, but they will lock you into an idea of who you or someone else that is constrained by them.

Organisations need to decay  culture – ideas of what is efficient, professional, acceptable and usual. Without losing these old notions of what was important, diversity strategies are token.

Where communities struggle with diversity, I believe, is in their need to hear or to speak with one voice. In short communities need to decay agreement. Communities tend to need common language, behaviour and structures to create collective identity. Like leaves on a healthy tree they want to foster a certain shape, colour and texture. Unfortunately, diversity within community is about embracing and working with paradox, discomfort and uncertainty. It's messy, frustrating and hard work.

To see an increase in economic diversity we need to decay our addiction to money. Everything in our world is measured by money and that really concerns me. Our only measure of value is profit or loss. Money restricts technology development and causes 98% of the social problems that we through money at to solve.

Finally, Humanity – no pressure. I'm aware I'm at risk of totally destroying my credibility by positing one thing everyone needs to do without, in order to embrace diversity. But what the hell. I'll put it out there. I think the thing that humanity needs to decay is the need for answers. Answers impede the exploration of diversity more than anything else in the world. Once we know (or think we know) the answer to who we are, or who someone else is, or how, or why or when, we stop asking questions.

Now more than anytime in history we need to be asking questions about the shades of grey of humanity - and there are many more than 50. Questions about Gender Ethnicity/culture Sexuality Function Judgement Quality Legality Resources Health.

The questions we need to be asking are, how are we unique and how are we common? The great thing about these two simple questions is that the answers change depending on context. For example, we are experiencing the commonness of sitting in this theatre. I am experiencing the uniqueness of you all looking at me. And yet, you are all experiencing me uniquely, depending on where you are sitting, your values, beliefs, whether or not you agree with me. The synergy of this is our diversity.

Remember "Driving forward"? She's been de-labeled. She's now Meg. She's still a greyhound. She is still unique in her speed. But I take pride and pleasure in giving her the dignity to celebrate her commonality. She's a dog. Thank you.

• Courtesy of diversitynz.com

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