Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI or DEI) programmes have rightfully become a key priority of all reputable organisations. These seek to ensure that everyone has fair opportunities to succeed, irrespective of their differing needs. While I will not even attempt to scratch the surface of the importance of EDI programmes, in this post, I’ll explore an aspect that is often missing when discussing diversity. The Chartered Insititute of Personnel and Development, a professional body of HR professionals, defines EDI as consisting of age-diverse workforces, disability, gender equality, race inclusion, religion and belief, as well as sexual orientation and gender identity. Whilst inclusion and equity programmes should account for all of these personal characteristics to ensure everyone is able to thrive at work, these miss out on one fundamental dimension – differences in how people think.
Neurodiversity and Cognitive Diversity
The concept of neurodiversity has often been framed as relating to people with medicalised definitions of brain function and behavioural traits, such as autism, dyspraxia and ADHD. This approach however requires the existence of such a thing as a ‘normal brain’ modelled around a standardised way of behaviour, measurable along a linear IQ scale. Recent studies such as “The Power of Neurodiversity” by Thomas Armstrong instead argue that there are a large variety of dimensions of intelligence, including visual-spatial, interpersonal, logical and kinaesthetic, and that neurodiversity is simply the reflection of this infinite variation in human thinking and behavioural style.
One way of characterising neurodiversity is described by Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge professor of psychology. In his book The Pattern Seekers, Baron-Cohen argues [2] that thinking styles can be mapped against two categories, systemising and empathising. People who are good at systemising can spot patterns and understand the underlying mechanisms of how things work. Empathisers on the other hand are adept at intuitively understanding other people’s thought processes and reacting appropriately. All of us fall somewhere on a scale describing these two cognitive abilities.
This leads us to the concept of cognitive diversity, the idea that people with different backgrounds, training, experiences and perspectives, as well as thinking styles, will approach solving problems in different and often complementary ways. This post will explore why cognitive diversity is a critical consideration to any team tasked with dealing with creative and challenging problem-solving.
Team Dynamics and Performance
Managers have long known that effectiveness comes from getting the best of a team as a collection of individuals, rather than managing performance solely at the individual team member’s level. Matthew Syed’s excellent book, Rebel Ideas [3] explores the impact of cognitive diversity on decision-making, and equally crucially, what are the consequences of its absence. He discusses how during the Cold War years, recruitment in the CIA focused on individual excellence from a small set of universities, resulting in homogeneity in its personnel – mainly white, male, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon. (For disclosure, I score 3 out of 4 on this CIA homogeneity test!). Syed argues persuasively that this homogeneous group overestimated the size of the Soviet economy in its dying days due to ‘perspective blindness,’ where all team members shared the same blindspot, or viewed a problem with the same lens. Similarly, Syed argues in the run-up to the September-11 attacks, American intelligence agencies, despite being staffed by patriotic, committed, bright individuals all shared the same blind spots, missing, for example.
Syed illustrates the importance of cognitive diversity very effectively by representing a problem space as a rectangle, and the perspective of an intelligent individual team member as a circle within it. Cognitively-similar teams consist of a clustering of people with the same perspective and problem-solving space. This means that this team of ‘clones’ has an unconscious predisposition towards a single way of solving problems, and consequently significant blind spots. Such teams are prone to reinforcing the same perspectives and mirroring prejudices. These are exactly the conditions that lead to GroupThink, a topic I explored in a previous post.
Applying measures to ensure demographic diversity (age, gender, social background) in your teams can go some way to improving cognitive diversity. In particular, I have found demographic diversity to be essential in teams creating products for mass-market adoption. For example, a team of relatively young male engineers may struggle to relate to the usability concerns of a mass-market customer base. However, whilst there is an overlap between demographic and cognitive diversity, the simple act of hiring demographically diverse teams will not in itself ensure cognitive diversity. For example, recruiting five graduates from the same business school will likely provide five very similar viewpoints, irrespective of their race, gender and socio-economic background. In other words, superficially-diverse people can be very homogeneous.
Syed describes an intelligent team as a team of rebels, consisting of people who are individually no smarter than those in cognitively-similar teams, but, taken together, bring a diverse range of perspectives and problem-solving styles to the problem space. Individuals in these teams challenge each other, diverge, disagree and consider contradictory proposals. In doing so, they collectively improve the intelligence of the team. For diversity to raise the overall level of intelligence of the team two things must be true. First, the experience and skills being brought to the team by each member must have some form of relevance to the problem space. Second, the team leader must foster a culture of constructive dissent, scrutiny and curiosity in order to allow different viewpoints to emerge and be considered. You may have the most carefully selected and assembled team, but if one viewpoint dominates, then the diversity of viewpoints will go to waste.
In a Harvard Business Review article [1], Alison Reynolds and David Lewis described a problem-solving exercise they ran over a number of years with teams consisting of senior execs, MBA students, managers, teachers, scientists and teenagers. Traditional measures of diversity (gender, ethnicity and age) did not account for the variability in results. Some groups fared very well, while others did very badly, irrespective of their demographic make-up. To try and understand whether there were any other factors at play, they classified participants according to the AEM cube, a psychometric tool that assesses people according to how they approach change. This measures knowledge processing, the extent to which people prefer to generate new knowledge or use existing knowledge when solving a problem, and perspective, the extent to which individuals prefer to use their own expertise or orchestrate the ideas and expertise of others. Their study showed that teams that completed the problems quickly had diversity of both knowledge processing and perspective, while those that failed the test were homogenous across those dimensions. In other words, cognitive diverse teams greatly outperformed cognitive homogeneous teams.
The importance of cognitive diversity has not just been recognised in tech companies, it is also rapidly being embedded as a core cultural value in modern militaries. The US Army teaches its officers [6] about the importance of cognitive diversity in achieving greater organisational performance. Officers are encouraged to learn how their subordinates think and process information and encourage different viewpoints. The guidance for junior officers in to let people question assumptions, and to lead with humility, both approaches that go against the stereotype of a top-down command and control culture we expect to find in military organisations. A recent book by Jason Lyall, Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War, examines the relationship between diversity and battlefield victory across 250 different wars. He finds that over the past 200 years, inclusive armies have outperformed their opponents and states that “meaningful inclusion creates lethal armies; military inequality divides them, destroying them from within”. For Lyall, “bigotry and racism are threats to national security.”
Optimise for the best team, not the best individual
Cognitive diversity puts to bed the fallacy that there is a trade-off between hiring the best individuals and meeting diversity objectives. This approach was famously summarised by the late US Supreme Court Justice Scalia, who said you can “choose diversity or to be super-duper.” This is a false choice as it uses the individual, rather than the team as a frame of reference. Filling a team with identical clones, even if all are ‘super-duper’ will result in a team of lower collective intelligence than one chosen with cognitive diversity in mind. Indeed, the more complex and uncertain the problem space, the more essential it is to bring different problem-solving approaches.
So what practical steps can you take to foster cognitive diversity? Here are some of my thoughts on approaches.
Cross-functional teams. Probably the default organisational setup in most companies is to group people by specialisation or function – lawyers reporting to lawyers, software engineers to engineers and so on. Being grouped with people who share your profession provides an environment for sharing and developing your expertise further, and having a manager with the same professional background can help in your personal development. However, building problem-solving teams from people from the same background and discipline is also a surefire way to create an organisational silo as well as to create a discipline echo chamber where opinions are reinforced. Wherever possible, the simple act of grouping people into cross-functional teams self-evidently injects diversity of thinking approaches into the team.
Psychological safety. Grouping people from different backgrounds, in and of itself does not guarantee that the different viewpoints and contributions will be heard. A while back, I described how a multi-year study at Google showed that psychological safety was found to be the greatest predictor of team performance. The concept is simple, the safer people feel about taking risks, making mistakes, and suggesting ideas that may be quirky or ‘out there’, the more likely they are to explore a problem from all angles. Equally importantly, they are also more likely to be cohesive.
Unity of purpose in execution. Whilst creativity is a time for divergence, debate and exploration, once a route is chosen, the team needs to stick with the chosen direction. Unless someone feels strongly that unacceptable risks are being ignored or overlooked, all team members must rally around the decision. The transition point between ideation and execution is a critical juncture and one that can be difficult to navigate in teams with a strong ‘rebel’ culture. One of the leadership principles at Amazon is called “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit.” It encourages leaders not to pursue agreement for the comfort of social cohesion. Nevertheless, once a decision is made and the team pivots to delivering on the decision all members are expected to commit to it, whether they agree to it or not.
Further Reading
- Reynolds A. and Lewis D., “Teams Solve Problems Faster When They’re More Cognitively Diverse,” Harvard Business Review, March 2017
- Baron-Cohen S., “The Pattern Seekers – A New Theory of Human Evolution,” Penguin, 2020.
- Syed M., “Rebel Ideas: The Power of Thinking Differently,” John Marray, 2021.
- Chamorro-Premuzic T, Winsborough D., “Personality Tests Can Help Balance a Team,” Harvard Business Review, March 2015
- Matthew Syed Consulting, “Diversity is vital to turbocharge innovation and drive better decisions,” June 2021
- Saxton A., “The Power of Cognitive Diversity for our Military,” The Center for Junior Officers, US Army.
- Lyall J., “Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefied Performance in Modern War”, Princeton University Press, 2020. Reviewed in International Affairs, Oxford University Press, 2021
- The Herston Project, “3 Ways You can Improve the Diversity in Your Teams,” July 2020
- Smith M., “More than a Buzzword: Diversity can help defeat Disinformation,” War On The Rocks, 2021
- Sunstein C., “Amazon is Right that Disagreement results in Better Decisions,” Harvard Business Review, August 2015.