Cognitive Diversity — The secret ingredient to collective intelligence

Diversity in business usually means having more women in senior and board positions and a greater range of ethnicities, abilities and even ages, but there is another form of diversity that even positive discrimination isn’t addressing — cognitive diversity; the inclusion of people who have different ways of thinking, different viewpoints and different skill sets in a team or group. Let me explain why this is a missed opportunity.

I came to France in September 2000 to work for the International Herald Tribune — ‘The World’s Daily Newspaper’ (now known as The New York Times International). What interested me about this job was not the brand’s prestige or the career potential, but the opportunity to be immersed in a sea of global perspectives. I knew the International Herald Tribune would offer me a very diverse environment.

The department I was responsible for was culturally and generationally varied but I quickly came to see it was also cognitively diverse. The staff worked in two different teams with two very different styles. For half the department, the job required that employees be multi-lingual, familiar with different cultures and be great verbal communicators. The other half needed no special language or communication skills, but analytical expertise, speed and accuracy were paramount. From an organisational standpoint we were a department but functionally the two teams operated separately, errors arose and time was lost on processes. Each was culturally diverse but cognitively similar.

Why was that a problem? Collective intelligence in the department was low.

Collective intelligence is the shared intelligence of a group derived from collaboration between its members. Cognitive diversity is best defined by the three different cognitive styles describing how you receive and analyse information:

• Verbalizers — often lawyers, writers and journalists and those using descriptive language
• Spatial visualizers — usually the engineers and those strong in maths-driven and analytic professions
• Object visualizers — the most artistically able.

Whilst cognitive diversity and collective intelligence are very different, it is possible to encourage and enhance collective intelligence using cognitive diversity.

Cognitive diversity can be the ‘secret ingredient’ to creating great collective intelligence, but getting the recipe just right isn’t easy. In large groups high cognitive diversity can make it difficult for the group to coalesce around a problem or idea. Inversely, there are examples of very talented highly educated teams that failed because their cognitive styles were not different enough. The failings of the CIA prior to the 9/11 attacks — as outlined in Matthew Syed’s book ‘Rebel Ideas’ — is a case in point.

What Matthew wrote about in 2019 I experienced first hand in 2000 when I started working with my new department. I remember the first time I took the department offline for a day to workshop some problems and start to address the cognitive bubbles. When I forced the breakdown of the bubbles by putting the staff into groups of diverse cognitive styles they started to come up with some very strong proposals. This was when we truly started to collaborate and develop collective intelligence. Their ideas were pragmatic and could be rapidly adopted as they’d already been proposed and validated by the various cognitive styles in each workgroup. More importantly these solutions didn’t cause friction or another problem somewhere else in our organisation because they had been born of the collective.

I didn’t need to radically change the department in order to do this, I just needed to break down the comfortable groupings that had naturally formed in order to get the right cognitive diversity mix to release their collective intelligence potential. Once the change was made it took root — the positive results we saw in our decreased error rate and increased efficiency proved they were capable of finding great ways of working together.

So whether you’re a leader in a large company or just starting out and creating your first team don’t just think about developing your collective intelligence. Be sure to consider your cognitive diversity too.

Get in touch if you’d like to learn more.