‘If we are intent upon answering our most serious questions, from climate change to poverty, and curing diseases to designing new products, we need to work with people who think differently, not just accurately. And this requires us to take a step back and view performance from a fundamentally different vantage point’
I’m reading Matthew Syed’s Rebel Ideas book at the moment and it makes a compelling case for the power of cognitive (alongside other forms of) diversity. Matthew describes how we need to think of human performance far more from the standpoint of teams rather than individual performance, and how cognitive diversity in teams is an essential ingredient for success and more broadly for enabling a greater level of collective intelligence.
This is particularly important given the complexity of challenges that most teams face in the modern world. Gone are the days when a simple, linear approach to problem solving can reliably and consistently yield the best results. Linear kinds of problems can often be solved by existing, or relatively focused knowledge. Simple problems can be solved by individuals, complex problems benefit from being solved by teams.
With complex problems a variety of perspectives yields more insight, not less. As Matthew says: ‘…solutions to complex problems typically rely on multiple layers of insight and therefore require multiple points of view’. The trick, he adds, is to ‘find people with different perspectives that usefully impinge on the problem at hand’.
He gives a fascinating example of a study done by Richard E. Nisbett and Takahiko Masuda at the University of Michigan which analysed the differences in how an American and a Japanese audience responded differently to videos of underwater scenes. When asked to describe what they had seen the Americans focused almost entirely on the fish, whereas the Japanese talked overwhelmingly about the environment in which the fishes swam. This cultural difference in perspective demonstrates just how divergent our perception and how we think about an situation can be.
And that can be a fantastically useful thing. There’s plenty of academic research that shows that teams that incorporate greater diversity of knowledge and perspectives are able to solve problems faster and better. Matthew has a lovely way of framing the benefit of diverse perspectives which can be represented by the diagrams and scenarios below:
The rectangles here are the problem space. The circles are the level of knowledge or useful outlooks that each team member has.
In the first scenario the team have big overlaps in their knowledge or perspective. Knowledge is clustered around certain areas. Perhaps they all think alike or have similar views, experiences and outlooks. It’s worth noting that it’s surprisingly common for this to be the case in teams. The London Business School/Ashridge study linked to above showed that whilst cognitive diversity is less visible than other types, there is often an inherent functional bias which can lead us to gravitate toward the people who seem to think and communicate in similar ways to us.
The second scenario incorporates far more diversity in experience or expertise or perspective. Here the leader needs to be brave enough not to stuff the team with likeminded people but instead to deliberately consider how the combination of different outlooks and knowledge may cover more of the problem space (as Matthew puts it: ‘Successful teams are diverse, but not arbitrarily diverse’). Then it becomes about creating an environment in which everyone can contribute and share their ideas.
The third scenario is one that I’ve added. Here the team may have a diverse set of perspectives but the leader (the circle in the bottom left) does not enable or facilitate a broad set of contributions, or healthy debate and disagreement. So perspective is once again limited (to that of the domineering leader), or the team can fall foul of groupthink, which will not play well against complex problems.
A last thought from the book is about perspective blindness. We interpret the world through frames of reference but we can have a big blind spot when it comes to appreciating the different frames of reference amongst others. Matthew quotes John Cleese:
‘Everybody has theories. The dangerous people are those who are not aware of their own theories. That is, the theories on which they operate are largely unconscious.’
So we underestimate what we can learn from people with other points of view (David Foster Wallace’s amazing ‘This is Water’ speech describes how our ways of thinking become so habitual that we rarely question how this filters our view of reality). Being surrounded by likeminded people simply reinforces these blind spots.
Cognitive diversity, in a complex world, is like a superpower.
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