How to build a team that thinks differently

You don’t need to hire more people, but you might need to unlock the different types of thinking that are already in your team

At this year’s Change conference, Jonas Templestein, co-founder of challenger bank Monzo, talked about how their hiring policy has changed. They’ve stopped looking for ‘culture fit’ — people who match the existing team. Instead, they’re looking for ‘culture grow’ — people who will challenge the bank, forcing them to think differently as they scale.

It’s a challenge that we see all the time on Fluxx projects. Because, unlike skin colour, gender or age diversity, cognitive diversity is invisible.

We were working with a multinational bank, and given a team of five eager, enthusiastic participants. They looked pretty diverse, but we quickly realised that their skills were very similar. They were all analytical, considered, cautious, dependable thinkers with a background in business case development and business analysis.

This was serious intellectual horsepower, but the team was almost fatally limited. When faced with an innovation challenge, they reverted to their strengths. Instead of thinking about customer insight, experimentation, and identifying novel solutions, they always jumped straight into the spreadsheets. They wanted to find out if something was going to make money, before we had any idea what that ‘something’ might be.

In other projects, we’ve met innovation teams of bright, passionate technologists; all eager to build autonomous VR blockchain wearables,
but desperately nervous about listening to real customers explain their needs.

Teams that work well are diverse in the way they think. There are many reasons why cognitively diverse teams are rare. It’s not just about companies who hire for ‘culture fit’. Colleagues gravitate toward the people who think and express themselves in a similar way. As a result, organisations often
end up sorted into like-minded teams.

Often we don’t even realise this is happening. Alison Reynolds at the Ashridge Business School asked managers to rank their decision-making styles. The managers claimed hugely diverse styles. She then asked their employees the same question; from their point of view, the managers were far less diverse.

People like to fit in. So they are cautious about thinking and behaving differently from their peers. When organisations have strong homogenous cultures, people often conform to the ‘done’ way of thinking and behaving. They stifle their natural cognitive diversity and self-mitigate their potential for having and voicing unique ideas.

This is — counter-intuitively — good news.

There may be far more cognitive diversity in an existing team than first impressions might suggest

There are simple ways to unlock your team’s inner diversity, to help them think differently. And it is about being different, not just being more ‘creative’ — whatever that means. It’s about being more everything: more persistent, more cautious, more opportunistic, more risk-taking. A team made up of brilliant individuals who think in very different ways is the fastest way that we know to get there.

Fluxx projects are designed to bring out this difference. We listen to customers to break the groupthink inside an organisation.

We use data to distract from the loud voices of people who know it all. And we work best with cross-disciplinary teams, often people who’ve never worked together in the past.

This can create super-diverse teams with accountants, designers, front-line customer care staff and engineers sparking off each other to create something truly new.

To find out more about our work at Fluxx, check out Fluxx Studio Notes on Medium, download our latest book, or sign up to our Newsletter.

Karl Jansen also contributed to this article. Megan and Karl are both Innovation Consultants at Fluxx Ltd.