Looking around the executive teams we work with as consultants and those we teach in the classroom, increased diversity of gender, ethnicity, and age is apparent. Over recent decades the rightful endeavour to achieve a more representative workforce has had an impact. Of course, there is a way to go but progress has been made.
Throughout this period, we have run a strategic execution exercise with executive groups focused on managing new, uncertain and complex situations. The exercise requires the group to formulate and execute a strategy to achieve a specified outcome, against the clock.
Received wisdom is that the more diverse the teams (in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender), the more creative and productive they are likely to be. But, in our exercise some groups fared exceptionally well and others incredibly badly, regardless of their apparent diversity. This was corroborated when we looked at the data; we found no correlation between successful outcomes in the execution of the exercise and diversity in the executive teams.
When there is so much focus on the importance of diversity in problem solving we were intrigued by these results. If not diversity, then what accounted for such variability in performance? We wanted to understand what led some groups to succeed and others to crash and burn. This led us to consider differences that go beyond gender, ethnicity or age. Differences referred to under the heading of 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. Here we are interested in a specific aspect of cognitive diversity, how individuals think about and engage with new, uncertain and complex situations. We call this kind of cognitive diversity ‘thinkversity’.
The AEM Cube®, a tool developed by Peter Roberson, a psychiatrist and business consultant, assesses differences in the way people approach change. It measures:
We used this tool to measure the different levels of thinkversity in teams undertaking the strategic execution exercise. Our analysis across six teams who undertook the exercise shows a significant correlation between high thinkversity and high performance in the exercise.
Intuitively this makes sense. Tackling new challenges requires a balance between applying what we know and discovering what we don’t know that might be useful. It also requires individual application of specialized expertise and the ability to step back and look at the bigger picture.
A high degree of thinkversity generates accelerated learning and performance in the face of new uncertain and complex situations, as in the case of the execution problem we set for our executives. These cognitive preferences are established when we are young. They are independent of our education, our culture and other social conditioning. Two things about thinkversity make it particularly easy to overlook:
First, it is less visible than ethnic and gender diversity, for example.
Being a man or woman, from a different culture or of a different generation, gives no clue as to how that person might process information, engage with or respond to change. We cannot easily detect thinkversity from the outside. It cannot be predicted or easily orchestrated. The very fact that thinkversity is an internal difference requires us to work hard to surface it and harness the benefits.
The second factor that contributes to thinkversity being overlooked is that we create cultural barriers that restrict the degree of thinkversity, even when we don’t mean to.
We are familiar with the saying ‘we recruit in our own image’, but this bias doesn’t end with our formal recruitment processes. We continue to gravitate towards the people who think and express themselves in a similar way to ourselves. As a result, we often end up in like-minded teams. When this happens, we have functional bias and low thinkversity.
Functional bias is a problem for teams facing new uncertain and complex situations because with little thinkversity the ability to see things differently, engage in different ways (e.g. experiment, versus analyzing) and create new options, are limited. Similarly, when organizations initiate change programmes they often seek out and identify ‘advocates’ or ‘change agents’ to support activities. Those selected often have a similar approach to change. This lack of thinkversity has two impacts. First, it reduces the opportunity to strengthen the proposition with input from people who think differently. Second, it fails to represent the thinkversity of the employee population reducing the impact of engagement initiatives often spearheaded by change agents.
If you look for it, thinkversity is all around but people like to fit in and are cautious about sticking their necks out. When we have a strong homogenous culture (e.g. an engineering culture, an operational culture, or a relationship culture), we stifle the natural thinkversity in groups through the pressure to conform.
There is much talk of authentic leadership, i.e. being yourself. Perhaps it is even more important that leaders focus on enabling others to be themselves as opposed to homogenised holograms generated from the generic competency frameworks leaders put in place.
If thinkversity is what we need to succeed in dealing with new, uncertain and complex situations, we need to overcome cultural barriers and encourage people to reveal and deploy their thinkversity. We need to recognize the expression of authentic drives and responses, instincts and preferences; to make it safe to be yourself, to try, to fail and try again. Far more important than to have all the answers, creating psychological safety is the prime responsibility of today’s leaders.
About the authors
Alison Reynolds () is a member of faculty at the UK’s Ashridge Business School where she works with executive groups in the field of leadership development, strategy execution and organization development.
David Lewis () is Programme Director of London Business School’s Senior Executive Programme and teaches on strategy execution and leading in uncertainty. He is co-founder of a research company focusing on developing tools to enhance individual, team and organization performance through better interaction.
This is an excerpt from Strategy@Work, a Brightline and Thinkers50 collaboration bringing together the very best thinking and insights in the field of strategy and beyond.
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