Great Minds Don’t Think Alike: How to Realize the Potential of Cognitive Diversity

My last post on cognitive diversity seems to have hit a mark. First of all, thank you for your great feedback! As many of you asked about advice on how to foster cognitive diversity, I spent some time thinking about my personal experience with this.

During all my career, I have seen that it is not enough to put an ethnically or gender diverse group around a table to get diversity of thought. True diversity is more than just gender or ethnicity – true diversity is all about personality. Companies produce the best results when team members have different ways of thinking, decision making, communicating, gathering and processing information.

I already stated in my earlier post that organizations often end up with like-minded teams. While it is completely natural to gravitate towards people that have a similar style to our own, it is important that we are aware of this bias.

That said, here come some tips for fostering cognitive diversity:

• Embrace differences: Don’t limit opinions, but make sure all perspectives and voices are allowed into the discussion and given equal consideration. And when everyone agrees, find someone who disagrees and cherish their opinion.
• Create a safe and inclusive environment: Cultivate an environment where team members feel safe, know they can speak up, ask questions and potentially disagree.
• Learn to recognize unconscious biases: Train yourself and your employees to recognize their unconscious biases so everyone can better collaborate with others who have different views.
• Welcome conflict: As humans, we want people to agree with us. People have conflicts when they care about something, so conflict is a major part of improving things.
• Enable your leaders: People are made up of different experiences. Leadership is about bringing together different points of view and then channeling them for the best outcome.
• Support your team members: Help your team members to understand and acknowledge their own thinking style, how they are they gathering information, how they are making decisions.
• Mix up your teams: While you can learn something from anyone, research shows that you learn best from people who are not exactly like you.
• Learn to listen: Each person has a valid, but perhaps different, perspective. It’s about listening with respect, listening to learn, and then building from these ideas.
• Hire differently: While a like-minded person might seem tempting, challenge yourself to consider the added value of a diverse thinker.
• Develop differently: Develop people to be open minded and curious to embrace new perspectives, encouraging others to willingly share information, insights and creative concepts. 
• Promote differently: Support and encourage people who think outside the box and are not afraid to reject common conceptions in the quest for a better solution. 

I know that this list is far from being complete, so feel free to leave your take in the comments!

Once you start looking for it, you will see that cognitive diversity is all around. There are as many personality styles and ways of viewing the world as there are people, and while they say that two heads are better than one, I think they are best if they think differently.