A recent post by Gary Hamel made a couple points that I found quite timely. The title of Gary’s post is self explanatory “Outrunning Change – The CliffsNotes Version”. He outlines the basic steps that businesses should take to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing market. The two points that jumped out at me:
B. Invest in genetic diversity. What’s true in nature is true in business—a lack of diversity limits the ability of a species to adapt and change. Problem is, the gene pool at the top of many companies is a stagnant pond. The executive committee is usually comprised of long serving veterans whose experiences and attitudes are more alike than different. Homogeneity has its virtues—it facilitates communication and speeds decision-making—but it also limits a company’s ability respond to unconventional threats and opportunities.
C. Encourage debate and dialectic thinking. Diversity is of little value if senior executives value conformance and alignment above all else. One of the reasons that McKinsey & Company* has remained at the top of the consulting game for so many decades is that it encourages internal dissent. It believes that vigorous debate improves the quality of decisions. Within any organization, it’s usually the malcontents and rebels who are the first to sense the impending demise of a much-loved business model, and the first see the value in wacky, new ideas. Yet these folks are often muzzled rather than encouraged to speak up. On every important issue managers need to ask their colleagues, “Where do I have this wrong? How do you see this differently? What would you do here?” These questions, asked repeatedly and honestly, can protect a company from the arrogance and nostalgia that so often stymies renewal.
I found these two points particularly relevant because they conveniently reinforced a seemingly unrelated thesis from a Wired article that analyzed the scientific process, as it is actually conducted in real labs, as contrasted with the idealized scientific method. It describes how experimental scientists systematically ascribe experimental outcomes that contradict their expectations to experimenter error and therefore ignore the possible implications of these outcomes. The entire article is a worthwhile read, but one section is relevant to this discussion:
The diverse lab, in contrast, mulled the problem at a group meeting. None of the scientists were protein experts, so they began a wide-ranging discussion of possible solutions. At first, the conversation seemed rather useless. But then, as the chemists traded ideas with the biologists and the biologists bounced ideas off the med students, potential answers began to emerge. “After another 10 minutes of talking, the protein problem was solved,” Dunbar says. “They made it look easy.”
When Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That’s because, unlike the E. coli group, the second lab lacked a specialized language that everyone could understand.) These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.
This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box. “I saw this happen all the time,” Dunbar says. “A scientist would be trying to describe their approach, and they’d be getting a little defensive, and then they’d get this quizzical look on their face. It was like they’d finally understood what was important.”
This seems very important and is consistent with Gary’s points above. Pundits of all sorts frequently point to diversity as a panacea but give very little thought or explanation to when, why and how diversity is valuable. As Mr. Hamel points out, diversity itself is not enough. Effective diversity requires an organizational structure that encourages dissidents to speak up and rewards the group for hearing them out with an open mind.
Wired gives us an explanation of the why and how. Diversity of thought leads us to new breakthroughs because communicating our ideas to peers, and potentially critics, who don’t have the same background and language forces us to view our position from a new perspective. We are forced to anticipate and prepare for outsiders’ objections. Doing so requires that we explain our assumptions and foundational knowledge in common language, which in turn lead us to reevaluate the appropriateness of those assumptions.
One last thought to place this discussion in a somewhat larger context than the board room or the science lab – we frequently encounter two contradictory claims the internet:
- The internet will bring us all together by allowing us to communicate with people with diverse backgrounds
- The internet reinforces our prejudices and biases by allowing us to surround ourselves with people who believe the same things as us
The explanation from Wired allows us to view both these statements in a new light. Whether the internet breaks down or reinforces prejudices is less about who we surround ourselves with and more about how the conversation is conducted. Even people who hold the same positions have not necessarily come to those positions for the same reasons and therefore could learn from each other. Conversely, people with diverse views are not necessarily going to learn from each other unless they are forced to translate their views into each others’ languages.
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