Rethinking Diversity

Cognitive Diversity

“…what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Nearly every industry across this nation, and in fact across the world, is revisiting the concept of diversity and the benefits it brings. Some of the conversations are academic and others are deeply emotional. However, more and more we are realizing the way things have been in workplaces is not the way things should be moving forward. The most obvious shift is for half of the population, yes, women, to be more proportionately represented at each level of society’s institutions. Proportionality is also true when considering other representatives that make up a society and the richness those cultural perspectives bring.

However, there is another element of diverse representation I never quite realized was missing until I came to the Bay Area. While this geography has led the nation in the more obvious aspects of diversifying their workforce and leadership teams (including the new California law SB 826 requiring at least one woman on every publicly held company board by the end of 2019) there is a major blind spot. I began noticing it over the course of a couple of years. Through each tech conference attendance, networking event participation and water cooler conversation overheard, the theme was unmistakable: everyone assumed everyone else thought the exact same way as they did in, well, everything. While the exterior differed greatly, there was not one case where anyone offered a different perspective or challenged the ideology. It was the perfect manifestation of group-think. I could not help but wonder: did these groups really all think the same way or were those other perspectives such a minority that they were silenced for the sake of social survival?

As I was recently re-reading the Little Prince, I was reminded that it is the unseen that has even greater impact on an organization, community and ultimately society than what is seen. People are naturally and unconsciously drawn to others that not only look, but also think, like them. What becomes a concern is when this self-selection of like-mindedness avoids the consideration of other perspectives. With the rise of social media, this has become not only easier to do but more difficult to balance. The algorithmically-reinforced digital echo chambers are now translating into the real world of politics and the workplace. (The Pew Research Center is working to measure this polarization in society and how it corresponds to social media activity).

Organizations are faced with this challenge as they grow their teams. Are hiring managers putting the same effort and value on recruiting people from a variety of educational backgrounds, political affiliations, and personalities as they are ensuring a balance of age, gender and race representation? Are they encouraging healthy discourse and for people to be authentically themselves in the workplace? Both having those diverse voices and the environment for all professional perspectives to be shared are elements required to attract and ultimately realize cognitive diversity.

Cognitive diversity has been defined as differences in perspective or information processing styles. It is not predicted by factors such as gender, ethnicity, or age. When people process information and approach problem-solving differently there is a dynamic increase in the value of the outcome as seen in a recent study conducted by Alison Reynolds and David Lewis. They focused their research around how individuals think about and engage with dynamic situations leveraging the AEM cube developed by psychiatrist and business consultant, Peter Robertson. The AEM cube measures the different ways people approach change through knowledge processing and perspective. Reynolds and Lewis (2017) ran a strategic execution exercise with executive groups focused on managing new, uncertain, and complex situations. They asked six groups to formulate and execute a strategy to achieve a specified outcome, against the clock while measuring the level of cognitive diversity in each group. Having previously run the execution exercise around the world more than 100 times over the last 12 years, Reynolds and Lewis (2017) found no correlation between the diversity of gender, ethnicity and age and performance. Though as you can see in the table below, their analysis across the six measured teams shows a significant correlation between high cognitive diversity and high performance.

Humans are building more and more Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to improve everything from medical devices to financial lending. So then should those humans represent the cognitive as much as the physical diversity of the people they seek to serve? There are several high-profile tech companies who have been criticized on Capitol Hill for political biases in their content-blocking algorithms. Unfortunately, they cannot point to a diverse group of engineers able to incorporate the subtleties of different perspectives into their product or feature design.

There is the familiar saying “we recruit in our own image.” A call to anyone reading this article is to consider your team and how to best get that diversity of thought into your organization and thereby into your product. When everyone agrees on something, go find that dissident to challenge your ideas. Then remember what the fox said to the little prince; “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Source Reference: Reynolds, A. and Lewis, D. (2017, March 30) “Teams Solve Problems Faster When They’re More Cognitively Diverse.” Harvard Business Review. Retrieved March 17, 2019 from https://hbr.org/2017/03/teams-solve-problems-faster-when-theyre-more-cognitively-diverse