The Diversity Bonus: a book well worth reading

We know that on many tasks teams do better than individuals, We also know the best teams will not consist of the best individuals. The best teams need diversity. Most often the best team will balance individual ability and collective diversity.

Scott Page an American mathematician puts it this way:

“Teams win (compared to individuals) because they can draw from larger cognitive repertoires. A team possesses more information, more ideas, more knowledge, and more ways of thinking than a single person. A team can access more perspectives and more tools.

This abundance of cognitive tools allows them to produce more ideas and to find improvements in the ideas they encounter. It allows them to partition reality more finely and avoid blind spots. This abundance depends on the team consisting of individually accomplished individuals who are collectively diverse”

In The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy (2017) https://tinyurl.com/568vn3n5 Scott Page presents a wealth of evidence that teams that include different kinds of thinkers outperform homogenous groups on complex tasks, producing what he calls “diversity bonuses.” These bonuses include improved problem solving, increased innovation, and more accurate predictions—all of which lead to better performance and results.

But he goes further. Given that out identities influence how we construct our lives and how others treat us, we would expect identity diverse groups to be more cognitively diverse than homogeneous groups. We would expect people to behave differently when in a diverse group. Empirical evidence supports both inferences.

Drawing on extensive correlative data, case studies and experimental data, Scott Page shows that various types of cognitive diversity—differences in how people perceive, encode, analyse, and organize the same information and experiences—are linked to better outcomes. He then describes how these cognitive differences are influenced by other kinds of diversity, including racial and gender differences—in other words, identity diversity. Identity diversity, therefore, can also produce “diversity bonuses”.

Page shows how diverse categories and mental models improve predictions. Diverse representation and heuristics improve problem solving. Diverse perspectives lead to more adjacent possibles and make groups more creative, Diverse information and knowledge improve a group’s ability to verify the truth. In all of these domains the right type of diversity can improve outcomes.

Cognitive diversity can contribute primarily on non-routine cognitive tasks – which will include many of the tasks undertaken by NHS staff.

Cultural differences, gender role expectations, marital status, parenthood and a myriad set of other identities all influence the cognitive models an individual develops. Functional background matters but so do all the other identities. A person in a wheelchair will have a range of different cognitive perspectives from those who are not in a wheelchair

In summary, Scott Page argues that identity diversity is a direct source of cognitive diversity. People from different identity groups will bring different knowledge, experiences and mental models to the table for consideration allowing for increased diversity and therefore better outcomes (predictions, creativity, decision making, problem solving and so on) People with different identities walk through the world having different experiences, being exposed to different opportunities, different knowledge and different mental models.

His findings complement those of other researchers. Turner and Pratkanis (1998) show there are times when representation from different types op people is the only way that cognitive diversity is present and communicated and sought after by others in the group https://tinyurl.com/yeuay6zd Bersin and Bourke (2018) found the same https://tinyurl.com/mr4as5yd .

Phillips et al (2009) show that Individuals with the same identity expect individuals with the same identity to agree with more then people who are different. The effects of categorically based expectations. New people stimulate the thinking of the established team members because:

 “the mere presence of socially distinct newcomers and the social concerns their presence stimulates among old-timers motivates behaviour that can convert affective pains into cognitive gains” https://tinyurl.com/jb2fftuf

Caution: Diverse teams and inclusion

Guillaume et al. (2017) and others have found that diversity without inclusion in public workforces may not bring potential advantages but may compromise organizational outcomes. https://tinyurl.com/29zhdcdr Too many NHS organisations have been successful in making their leadership more representative and diverse only to discover teams do not suddenly become more effective. They have to work at it and grapple with issues of identify, inclusion, difference and psychological safety. Often these teams are ill-equipped to do this and the result is that the potential for much better teams is frittered away as newcomers are marginalised, undermined and their difference not welcomed as a bonus.

Scott Page agrees and cautions against that diverse representation alone will not create these benefits. Identity-diverse groups must overcome stereotype threat and implicit bias, and employers must demonstrate and support how identity diversity improves outcomes.

Building effective inclusive diverse teams in turn depends on NHS employers having equitable recruitment and career progression strategies.  As Messenger (2022) found, too often in the NHS appointments and career progression are imbued with bias, notably in access to many forms of “stretch development” via the “tap on the shoulder”.

Acknowledging and mitigating such bias (not least by inserting accountability for decisions) is a precondition to leveraging the benefits of diversity, including identity diversity as I showed in No More Tick Boxes (2021). https://tinyurl.com/3268dufd

Scott Page’s book should be mandatory for anyone seriously interested in why diversity  makes teams effective.

Lets hope those in charge of the current wave of restructuring and redundancies understand what Scott Page demonstrates.

I see very little sign of that so far.