Surfacing Bias in the Context of Innovation

Hello again Humantific readers. We hold these truths to be self evident: That divergent women and men are created equal to convergent women and men.

In this week’s post we are returning to a theme long at the center of our practice and that is Cognitive Inclusion, also known as Cognitive Diversity, also known as Inclusive Innovation Culture Building. 

Not sure exactly why but, out in the marketplace today, you can read 10 articles on the evolving subject of “Diversity in Organizations”and the notion of cognitive diversity never comes up. 

You can read 10 articles on the subject of “Cognitive Bias”, some even focused on innovation, and the notion of thinking styles as a form of bias never comes up.

You can read 10 articles on “Pillars for Nurturing Innovation” and the leadership responsibility of acknowledging and tackling cognitive privileging is never mentioned.

Perhaps it's a little like fish not being aware of the water they are swimming in. Whatever it is, we have noted several enduring blind spots in the popular media literature of these diversity and inclusion related subjects. 

Noting that media train we decided it might be confusing to our clients to be seeing articles and posts that point out 15 or 16 dimensions of “Cognitive Bias” related to innovation that never mention what we teach, front and center, in Humantific Academy workshops….so here we are! Good time to check in!

For us inclusion began more than two decades ago when Elizabeth figured out in graduate school that information can be designed in an inclusive way, for children and for adults. In the span of a couple of years we went on to connect the dots, not just between inclusion and information but also between inclusion and cognition more broadly, between inclusion and innovation, diversity, thinking styles, team dynamics, technology, processes, the work environment, and to culture building. Since our inception Deliberate Inclusion by Design has been and remains underpinning everything we do.

At the heart of this work was/is the realization that without specific awareness and skill, many very smart and educated adult humans tend to advocate, model and ultimately privilege their own personal information processing style and thinking style, often unconsciously, often quite forcefully. A team will do the same as will an organization. Ultimately team dynamics as well as organizational values, strategies, reward systems, etc. all become effected by that unconscious, often unacknowledged projecting and privileging.*[1]

?With the help of our own innovation enabling research we began, years ago now, to see a need to make the various advocacies and imbalances more visible, more clear in spite of the political difficulties that might arise. Over time we embedded this know-how into our skill-building workshops attended by organizational leaders seeking cross-disciplinary leadership skills connecting information and innovation, sensemaking and changemaking.

As we connected more and more dots we began to see that we could not only paint a picture of this capacity but skill-up a new generation of MetaMind Innovation Leaders who see and understand the importance of deliberately enabling inclusion across numerous dimensions which impact innovation in organizations. These next generation leaders are skilled to rise above their own information processing style and thinking style preferences in order to enable and speak up for the whole.

As part of thinking about what it means to be human-centered at the scale, not of products and services, but organizations and societies, we introduced in 2005, the notion of what we call inbound and outbound empathy. In organizational contexts we underlined the need for not just outbound empathy for external users but inbound empathy for internal project teams grappling with cognitive bias. Human beings are amazingly adaptive creatures but saddling internal teams with mountains of unacknowledged cognitive bias is a formula for not only slow motion and growing frustration but typically high rates of attrition. 

We could not do what we do without that inbound and outbound empathy model. As many of our readers will know we have for numerous years been teaching those MetaMind Skills: cognitive awareness and balancing in Humantific Academy.

Along the way we saw interesting others researching and operating in parallel universes introducing subjects and ideas that interconnect with inclusion from different angles. One of those arriving parallel universe subjects was Ambidexterity. We could see direct connections between notions of enabling inclusive innovation and ambidexterity as innovation strategy. 

Over time we developed numerous interconnected visual models including the Ambidexterity Continuum (previously published) that we use in the context of conversations with organizational leaders. Having those visual sensemaking models present significantly accelerates collective understanding of where the organization has been and where it wants to go. Having tools, adaptable process and an interconnected skill-building program makes the journey do-able. Who doesn't want to maximize brainpower? *[2]

Here today my intention is not to unpack the entirety of what we do at Humantific but rather just point out a couple of key learnings. 

Like a competent medical practitioner who has been interacting with patients for a decade one begins to see patterns, commonalities and typical challenges appearing and reappearing, across industries and across time. Engaged in such work one becomes aware of patterns that others might not yet see. 

In terms of what is going on in the marketplace, over time it was not difficult for us to see that occurrences where divergent thinking was dominating and being privileged in organizations were relatively rare, while occurrences where convergent thinking rules the roost, often in direct contradiction to stated innovation objectives were common. *[3]

By far the most often seen cognitive bias directly related to undercutting innovation in global business organizations is the overwhelming domination and privileging of convergent thinking. Often unacknowledged in business organizations convergent thinking privileging has become the juggernaut of all innovation biases out there. All other cognitive biases pale in comparison, in terms of frequency, depth and impact. In part this can be explained by the often overwhelming numbers of folks with this thinking style present inside business organizations. (An entire topic for another day.) *[4]

If I had to take a guess I would say that 80-90% of our innovation enabling client engagements are, in one way or another, related to this unsurfaced cognitive imbalance. Ultimately the imbalance of privileging convergent thinking and convergent thinkers is underneath a lot of what organizations are struggling with in the innovation age where the behavioral requirements are quite different from by-gone eras.

Coming to terms with the presence and dominance of this often deeply engrained cognitive bias is not an easy task. For many folks trained in academic programs that have a long history of positioning convergent thinking (decision-making) as the highest form of value (Can you guess which academic programs those are?) this is an orientation that is deeply embedded in their legacy, learned value proposition. In some knowledge communities it’s a bias that has become institutionalized. Doing collective brain surgery on that old school orientation in the context of organizations now facing a new age of continuous change and renewal inevitably takes considerable creative, heavy-lifting work. 

Included below are a few screens from the visual story that we share with clients around this subject. In its various forms we see this subject appearing more and more on the radar screens of organizational leaders, whether they refer to it as diversity seeking, inclusion, maximizing brain power or something else.

At Humantific we believe unconscious cognitive privileging can be reformulated towards a new era of conscious and deliberate inclusion by design. It's a universe we know well. *[5]  

In closing here are a few tips on Red Flags to watch out for:

COGNITIVE BIAS RED FLAGS:

Signs of Convergent Thinking Imbalance:

Lots of jumping from vague idea to implementation.

Constant positioning of decision-making (convergent thinking) as the highest form of value.

Few ideas in the organizational pipeline but constantly moving forward to action.

A culture where the mental operation of judgement rules supreme.

A culture where problem solving and even innovation are depicted as decision-making.

A culture where "the deciders" (convergent thinkers) reign supreme.

A culture where the more critical you are the smarter you are perceived to be.

Signs of Divergent Thinking Imbalance:

Lots of focus on brainstorming ideas as problem solving. 

Constant positioning of idea-making (divergent thinking) as the highest form of value.

Hundreds of ideas in the organizational pipeline but little forward motion and action.

A culture where the mental operation of ideation rules supreme.

A culture where problem solving and even innovation are depicted as idea-making.

A culture where "the ideators" (divergent thinkers) reign supreme.

A culture where the more ideas you generate the smarter you are perceived to be.

Another Way to Look:

To look at this picture another way we might ask: What do Divergent Tilted Leaders, Convergent Tilted Leaders and MetaMind Innovation Leaders do? What are their attributes?…Take a look:

Convergent Tilted Leaders

Consciously or unconsciously privileges convergent thinking. (decision-making)

Consciously or unconsciously creates (or buys into) processes that accentuate convergence, optimization and implementation.

Consciously or unconsciously considers convergent thinking (decision-making) to be the highest form of value.

Consciously or unconsciously builds teams and organizations that privilege convergent thinking.

Divergent Tilted Leaders

Consciously or unconsciously privileges divergent thinking. (idea-making)

Consciously or unconsciously considers divergent thinking (idea-making) to be the highest form of value.

Consciously or unconsciously creates (or buys into) processes that accentuate divergence, creation and conceptualization.

Consciously or unconsciously builds teams and organizations that privilege divergent thinking.

MetaMind Innovation Leaders

Consciously, creatively tackles the privileging of divergent thinking or convergent thinking.

Consciously considers divergent thinking (idea-making) and convergent thinking (decision-making) to be of the equal value.

Consciously creates processes that balance divergence, creation and conceptualization with convergence, optimization and implementation.

Consciously builds teams and organizations that equally value convergent thinkers and divergent thinkers.

Hope this has been helpful and good luck

?Rethinking Inclusion Take Aways:

Diversity programs that fail to recognize and include cognitive diversity miss the mark in the age of continuous change and innovation.

Diversity is core to disruptive innovation in a complex world when cognitive bias is recognized and cognitive privileging is disassembled.

It makes no sense to be working on “Innovation Pillars” such as values, structure, process, incentives, etc. if your foundation is infected with unacknowledged institutionalized cognitive bias.

To be effective in organizational contexts Deliberate Inclusion Design must encompass awareness of cognitive bias, cognitive minorities and the leadership courage to tackle cognitive privileging.

Enabling Inclusive Innovation Cultures involves an eyes wide open approach to intended and or unintended cognitive bias.

See: HUMANTIFIC's Journey to Inclusive Innovation here!

NOTES:

*[1] In the context of our recently published book: Innovation Methods Mapping; Demystifying 80+ Years of Innovation Process Design we coined the term Preference Projection Theory for this unconscious projecting and privileging. It impacts process design and process embrace as well. Related research is ongoing in our practice.

*[2] We have previously published on the topic of enabling Ambidexterity. See Humantific: Ambidexterity Continuum: Getting the Conversation Started and Humantific: Ambidexterity Skill-Building: Constructing Adaptive Capacity

*[3] For those interested in the history of the terms "divergent production and convergent production", see J. P. Guilford 1897 - 1987 and Guilford, J.P. (1967). The Nature of Human Intelligence. Highly influential in the early Creative Problem Solving community of practice, Guilford originated many of the divergent (no one right answer) exercises still found in many innovation workshops today.

*[4] In Humantific Academy we teach organizational leaders the mechanics of Deliberate Inclusion Design, ie: how to connect the root innovation behaviors of divergence and convergence to thinking styles, an adaptable toolbox and ultimately to inclusive innovation strategy. Once a rudimentary caterpillar, the thinking dichotomy of divergence and convergence has been evolved into a multidimensional butterfly.

*[5] If you are an organizational leader on a team or in a global organization struggling with unacknowledged cognitive bias that is impacting your ability to adapt/innovate and you would like someone from Humantific to come give a knowledge-sharing talk to your group send us an email: programs (at) humantific (dot) com.