Cognitive diversity: everybody wins!
While certain differences are clear to see, such as skin colour, gender, age or social background, some characteristics are not immediately apparent. This is the hidden part of the iceberg that is all too frequently ignored, notably within companies. And yet one of these differences, cognitive diversity, could establish itself as a lever for substantial change.
For Mai Lam Nguyen-Conan, author, lecturer, coach and CEO of Muutivate, cognitive diversity can be encapsulated in a single question: when you’re faced with a problem, how do you solve it? What type of thought process do you rely on by default? Do you tend to gather information? Divide the problem into various parts? Or maybe you wonder about the people for whom this problem is a problem? Everyone has their own method, and that’s a positive thing because this cognitive diversity is a genuine asset for organisations. But it needs to be acknowledged and given room to exist.
Know yourself
“And this is still rarely the case”, says Mai Lam, for whom not acknowledging cognitive diversity is the cause of shortcomings in companies. “I’ve spent my life thinking, about me, my differences”, she explains.
Born in Laos of Vietnamese parents, she grew up in France, where she studied marketing and philosophy, before heading off and working all around the world, from Jerusalem to Cameroon. “My very diverse background has meant that I have participated in numerous discussions during which I tried to explain my differences.” Because it’s important to know yourself properly. However, very few people are capable of analysing and dissecting the way they solve problems. “When I ask the question, 99% of people tell me they don’t know, they’ve never thought about it”, Mai Lam laughs. “It’s crazy, isn’t it, given that we spend all day trying to solve problems?”
Although knowing yourself properly is paramount, it’s not so much the differences that are relevant, but the way in which they enable us to articulate from “I” to “We”. In a company, for example, where there may be 5 generations of staff who haven’t all learnt in the same manner, the way people think, and therefore the way problems are solved, can often be radically different. “And that’s essential”, the entrepreneur asserts, in companies but also in all types of organisations where cognitive diversity can establish itself as a lever for transformation. Why do we need to leave room for cognitive diversity? Because to solve serious, shifting and multidimensional problems in our VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) world, a single way of thinking just isn’t enough!
1 +1 = 3
For Mai Lam, what’s hindering cognitive diversity’s potential is our companies’ increasing focus on identity and community. “The danger is that a company is a homogenisation machine”, the entrepreneur explains. Because within a company, like elsewhere, individual people are subject to two harmful types of bias: a similarity bias, which consists in surrounding ourselves with people like us, people who think like us, which encourages the regeneration of a single thought process, and that of ingroup heterogeneity, where a person will always tend to overestimate how open-minded they are and how different those around them are. “These two phenomena, very widespread, therefore generate the status quo”, Mai Lam laments. In companies, managers tend to hire staff who share their way of thinking, which impoverishes the solutions a team is likely to suggest in the face of a challenge.
What we need to do, on the contrary, is to try to extract ourselves from such behaviour, free ourselves from these community-centric reflexes to become smarter thanks to others and their differences. We have to challenge the laws of arithmetic and transform 1+1 = 2 into 1+1 = 3.
To do this, the entrepreneur recommends two things: ignore diplomas and what she sees as secondary differences, such as the sector of activity — considering borders are disrupted by digital technology — to focus solely on the unique way a person has to solve a problem, exploiting their entire history, experience, background and origins. “And, at the end of the day, you’ll see that recruitment based only on this criterion will automatically bring diverse profiles to the table in terms of socio-professional categories, cultures and beliefs.”
As French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry said, let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences, rather than fearing them.
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