Why Teams of Rebel Thinkers beat Teams of Clones
When teams face complex problems, they need to harness their collective intelligence to find solutions. However, even a skilled, intelligent group of people will fail if team members share similar backgrounds and perspectives. Groups of intelligent ‘clones’ are no match for groups of cognitively diverse, intelligent ‘rebels,’ argues Matthew Syed in his book Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking.
Syed offers an excellent visual representation of his argument. A rectangle represents “a universe of useful ideas” that exists to solve a particular problem. (30) Each circle that overlays the rectangle represents each individual’s knowledge. In cognitively homogeneous teams, those circles closely overlap each other, with each person repeating a similar knowledge set. This group cannot come up with a wide range of useful solutions.
(Syed 30)
A group of ‘rebel’ thinkers will have less overlap — their knowledge circles are laid out across the “universe of useful ideas.” Each team member’s different background and perspective contributes to collective intelligence. These rebel teams can produce quantifiably more unique, helpful ideas than the clone teams.
(Syed 34)
Syed makes the important distinction that team members need to have relevant knowledge to solve the problem at hand. (37) Otherwise those knowledge circles will lay outside the rectangle and represent irrelevant ideas.
For an example of clone teams failing, Syed points to a Poll Tax that Britain attempted to implement in the late 1980s. (31) A group of landed elites created the tax policy, which disproportionately burdened poor and elderly citizens. People took to the streets in protest and arrests and injuries ensued. The tax policy was a failure.
Policy team members were educated at the best universities in Britain and came from some of the wealthiest families. They loved working together on the tax project. However, their camaraderie came from mirroring each other’s perspectives. They believed their collective comfort meant they were on the right track. However, Syed argues, what was really happening was they were “entrenching each other’s blind spots.” (32) The team’s perspectives were too similar and overlapped. They failed because they were a group of clones.
Syed emphasizes that he is not criticizing any individual team member. But rather, he wants to highlight that “when smart individuals have overlapping frames of reference, they become collectively myopic.” (34) As a result, this group of landed elites “unthinkingly project[ed] onto others, values, attitudes and whole ways of life that are not remotely like their own.” (33)
This type of dangerous myopic thinking led to the current administration’s failure to effectively manage the COVID-19 epidemic. An interim report from the House select subcommittee on the epidemic describes how administration “officials sidelined top scientists when their advice put them in conflict with the administration’s agenda.” (Aratani, 2020) The Washington Post lists the disastrous impacts: 220,770 Americans dead and more than 8.8 million Americans infected. Instead of engaging with diverse ideas, the administration actively suppressed them. Horrific consequences resulted and are ongoing.
The hard part is that humans like to be in groups of clones. We don’t want to engage in difficult discussions. We move toward people who share our perspectives and backgrounds because it is comfortable. This tendency to seek out folks similar to ourselves is called homophily. Syed explains that “[h]omophily is somewhat like a hidden gravitational force, dragging human groups towards one corner of the problem space.” (30) It takes an awareness of this tendency to actively push back against it.
Syed gives the example of a Swedish town’s snow removal plan. Their government’s original plan prioritized clearing roads first and pedestrian walkways second. The men who devised the plan didn’t realize that their policy prioritized men over other citizens. Women were brought onto the team and the group’s collective intelligence increased. (35) With new analysis, the group found that men mostly commute by car while women and elderly people use pedestrian walkways to go about their work and daily life. They also found that pedestrian injuries from icy conditions cost the community twice as much as winter road maintenance.
The town changed their long-standing snow removal policy to prioritize pedestrians and it benefited the community overall.
Syed references this Swedish town’s example that he learned from fellow author Criado Perez in her book Invisible Women. He quotes her explanation of the original policy team’s lack of awareness: “The men . . . who originally devised the schedule knew how they travelled and they designed around their needs. They didn’t deliberately set out to exclude women. They just didn’t think about them.’ (36)
Author and poet Audre Lourde argues in Sister Outsiders that excluding different voices is ingrained in folks since birth. She explains that “…we have all been programmed to respond to human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it…copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate.”
This destructive, socialized learning needs to be unlearned so we can collectively achieve our fullest human potential.
Syed notes that homogenous groups are successful in a few areas like building airplane parts, where research shows that increasing racial diversity did not increase the team’s efficiency. He reinforces the importance of distinguishing between demographic diversity and cognitive diversity. Syed writes that “[t]he experience of being, say, black provides few, if any, novel insights into the design of, say, engine parts.” (40)
In the same research report, scientists found that “an increase in racial diversity of just one standard deviation increased productivity by more than 25 per cent in legal services, health services and finance.” (40) In those areas (and many others), demographic diversity is key to a team’s success.
There is nuance involved in creating diverse teams to achieve a specific goal. Syed advocates for balancing meritocracy and cognitive diversity, which often includes demographic diversity.
To illustrate the difference between cognitive and demographic diversity, he gives the example of two economists: “one white, gay, male and middle-aged, the other black, young, female, heterosexual.” (40) They studied in the same economics program at the same university. These two demographically diverse economists are unlikely to have diverse thinking when it comes to economic forecasting. Their range of economic predictions will look like the overlapping circles in the clone team diagram.
Alternatively, Syed gives the example of two economists who look the same and have similar interests: “white, middle-aged…who have the same number of children and like the same TV programmes.” But one is a monetarist and the other is a Keynesian — different economic philosophies. They have cognitive diversity and their “collective [economic] prediction will, over time, be significantly better than either alone.” (40)
Their cognitive diversity means their circles do not overlap much in the rectangle of useful ideas. Between them, they can create more good ideas and solutions than the two economists who look different but think the same.
Syed says his main point is that diversity “isn’t the icing on the cake. Rather, it is the basic ingredient of collective intelligence.” (41) We agree. However, the work doesn’t stop at creating diverse teams.
It takes knowledge and consistent practice to keep diverse teams from reverting back to homophily. Syed explains “that people who start out diverse can gravitate towards the dominant assumptions of the group. This can lead to a situation where leadership teams look diverse, but who are –in cognitive terms — anything but. They have all been at the organisation so long that
they have come to share identical views, insights and patterns of thinking.” (40)
To combat this tendency, Small World Solutions teaches teams how to cultivate interpersonal intelligence that reinforces long-term diverse thinking. We rely on science-based methods that improve how teams relate with each other — teams become stronger because they are diverse.
We work with forward thinking Federal agencies, local governments and private sector companies to build cognitive diversity for the long haul. To create teams that can solve complex problems with a large, useful set of unique solutions. We believe that growing diverse thinking in our highest levels of governance and business is integral to our society’s renewal.
