Cognitive Diversity, a (silent) advantage
The Diversity topic sometimes comes with baggage. But what are cases where diversity creates a clear advantage?
Here’s a fish. It’s in an aquarium. It’s accompanied by many other fish. Two people are in front of the aquarium, looking.
The first person is paying attention to the fish, analyzing its physical features in detail.
The second person sees something broader, they default to a more holistic view. Their attention is on how all the fish in the aquarium interact with each other.
This is one of the opening stories in Matthew Syed’s insightful book on cognitive diversity, Rebel Ideas.
The example continues to fascinate me because it shows how two people looking at the exact same thing can be looking at it in completely different ways.
In this fish example, the first person is analytical and detail oriented, and is perhaps from a more individualistic culture and society. The second person is more focused on context, their attention gravitates towards the whole and collective.
It’s this exact idea — that people see different things, and react to them in different ways — that intrigued me to explore the impact of group and cognitive diversity.
To discover the solutions that will help us solve difficult problems, we need access to new and enabling ideas. These come when you combine people who think differently.
— Mathew Syed
And so I was curious about how much of this is deliberately applied in the workplace. Because when it comes to strategy and problem solving, this type of diversity is already built into many practices and popular aspects of our lives.
Sports and… Portfolio Management
On a Superinvestors podcast, Diego Parilla uses a wonderful football analogy to explain why diversity — or diversification — is a wise strategy in the world of investments and portfolio construction.
Diego talks about how a portfolio is essentially a team. Everything is about the team, not the individual players.
To succeed, you need strikers, midfielders, defenders, and goalkeepers. You need different roles and people who will be able to do well under different circumstances.
If your striker has a couple of great games and has been smashing the goal scoring board, you don’t go out and replace the other 10 players on your team with strikers.
And if you’re playing a team that’s not good at attacking, your defenders might look underutilized — but would you think to replace your defenders?
Here’s Diego on this point:
I don’t believe in a team with 11 strikers, I don’t believe in a team with 11 defenders, and I don’t believe in a coach with a crystal ball who says ‘in minute 40 they’re going to attack’. In reality, you have no idea where the ball is going to be in minute 40. You need a team that is able to do well, wherever the ball goes.
Are we guilty of thinking this way in business — perhaps in the way we hire, fire, or promote?
An open question: if one of your team members has a standout year, while the others do not, do you replace the team with types that match the performer’s?
Superficially, it’s easy to think of doing this. However, in reality, one or two things can do really well because of specific circumstances… until the conditions change and we realize it wasn’t that simple.
Remember: different roles and people thrive under different conditions. The key is to be able to identify the areas that contribute to impact and success. And for that, you need to know where to look (great example on this coming up).
The no-stats All Star
Sometimes the benefit is silent and harder to associate. If you’re not thinking beyond the apparent and obvious, you might be missing what’s enabling you to win.
This is about a former NBA player called Shane Battier, a guard who — despite barely showing any stats — enabled his team to win more when he was on the court.
Here’s the Rockets’ General Manager commenting on him at the time:
When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot worse.
How is this the case?
When Battier was on the court, he guarded the star opponent so well that they were rendered ‘ineffectual’. Simply, Shane’s presence on the court made the opponent’s team worse, and his team better.
Everyone watches Kobe when the Lakers play. And so everyone saw Kobe struggling. Battier has routinely guarded the league’s most dangerous offensive players — LeBron James, Chris Paul, Paul Pierce — and has usually managed to render them, if not entirely ineffectual. He has done it so quietly that no one really notices what exactly he is up to.
— Daryl Morey, former Houston Rockets’ GM
It’s far easier to spot what Battier doesn’t do than what he does. His conventional statistics are unremarkable: he doesn’t score many points, snag many rebounds, block many shots, steal many balls or dish out many assists.
Statistical anomaly, his greatness is not marked in box scores or at slam-dunk contests, but on the court Shane Battier makes his team better, often much better, and his opponents worse, often much worse.
— Robert Seale for The New York Times
I love this example because it highlights the importance of measuring the extended and sometimes silent effects that different people and roles have. If you focused on only the primary stats you saw on the board, it might have not made sense to play Shane Battier.
Defence is obvious in Sports, because that’s how we’ve learned to approach the game. We need scorers and attackers, but we know that we also need defenders.
And again, I’m very intrigued by how much of this we apply in the workplace and — more interestingly perhaps — how it impacts our ability to identify the silent advantages that certain people bring to lift the entire team.
Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. On defense, he routinely guards the N.B.A.’s most prolific scorers and significantly reduces their shooting percentages. “I call him Lego,” Morey says. “When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together.”
Diverse selection by design
Agents are usually incentivized to avoid risk while aiming to optimize performance.
There’s an interesting selection heuristic for diversification: let one person do it.
The logic goes like this:
You’re putting together a stock portfolio. You task 10 employees to each choose a stock that you will group into the resulting portfolio.
Each employee is held accountable for their own contribution. Because of this, they’re not really incentivized to take risk. Instead, they’re incentivized to pick the “best safe choice” — to avoid a disaster. Nobody wants to be the one to take the risky bet that fails.
As the saying goes: ‘Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.’
And so in this situation, what you’re likely to end up with is 10 equivalents — probably large, popular, and safe companies with an indisputable reputation. As individual choices, they each look strong. But at the group level, you have a concentrated stock portfolio of similar inherent characteristics.
Ask one person to choose stocks 10 however, and it becomes an easier choice for them to take risk and diversify because they are in a position to also benefit from being able to choose the safe ones. They can choose some tech stocks, some consumer goods stocks, and a few risky wild cards.
The logic also applies to hiring. A set of recruiters working together might each find it a safer choice to go with someone from a reputable school, background, or previous employer.
More from Matthew Syed on this:
If the recruiting function looks at each potential recruit individually, then you’d look for the same types of candidates, and probably from the same places. And if the totality of your intake came from those one or two places, they’d share the same training, ways of thinking, education, and views.
People of very different backgrounds will have less overlap, and will be able to produces ideas from a wider spectrum of domain, thought, and culture.
Enigma — a lens from outside the box
Local cultures and domains are more likely to think from within the same box.
Sometimes, an unconventional candidate brings an ability to see things from outside the local box. And sometimes, this is what creates a breakthrough.
The Imitation Game is one of my favorite movies. There’s an early scene in which Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), is interviewing for a role aimed at decrypting German communication during WWII.
During the beginning of the interview, Turing says “Politics isn’t my expertise”, which the interviewer — the Commander of the Royal Navy — thinks is some sort of joke.
Turing then goes on to say that he doesn’t speak German either, to which the Commander responds “Well how the hell are you supposed to decrypt German communication if you don’t speak German?”
Alan Turing responds: “Well I’m really quite excellent at crossword puzzles.”
Alan Turing built a machine that decrypted German communication, without speaking a word of German. He did this using statistics and cryptanalysis.
Application: to improve, remove
Now, how can we apply these lessons to our lives? By looking into some of the barriers that get in the way.
Confirmation bias: we have a tendency to want to spend time with people who think just like us. Why? Because this validates our worldview, and validation and reinforcement of what we already think makes us feel better and smarter.
Instead, adopt a curious mindset and learn to accept difference. If a person, idea, or approach makes you uncomfortable, ask yourself why — what is this actually telling you about yourself?
Group brainstorming: Matthew Syed shares that the problem with brainstorming in groups is that as soon as the leader expresses an idea, people tend to conform, and subsequent ideas converge to support it.
A solution to this is to ask your team members to write down their ideas before a meeting, and then post them on a board anonymously.
Culture: is your team’s culture psychologically safe? Can people speak up and offer a dissenting opinion without feeling threatened? The test for this isn’t what’s written on your culture board, it’s what actually happens when someone speaks up.
Measurement: remember to think beyond the obvious when measuring impact. Pay attention to how someone’s presence influences and impacts the things around them.
Does their presence make things better or worse — and what does this look like over the long term?
Illusion of maximizing: diversification can be seen as a dilution or concession, because there is a notion that “I could otherwise be maximizing something”.
Remember: the broader times, culture, and circumstances we live in are also changing and evolving very quickly.
“Over the long term, positioning wins over predicting”. — Shane Parrish
Notes:
Diego Parrilla on The Three Levels Of The Investment Game
The No-Stats All-Star - New York Times. (Special thanks to Tom Morgan of the KCP Group for bringing this to my attention).