In Search of Cognitive Diversity

While nothing new, diversity is an increasingly hot topic in popular culture and no less an issue in nonprofits.  Funders want diversity on the boards of its grantees; nonprofits want their boards to reflect their constituencies; everyone wants diversity of staff.   There is, however, no common understanding of diversity, as it is, to a very great extent dependent upon where you are, what you do, etc.  There is one guarantee, however:  most people’s concept of diversity tends to rest on those things that are easily seen—age, race, sex—and fairly easily ascertained—political leaning, sexual orientation, level of education.

The absence of such diversity on boards with which they’re connected comes up often with students in my governance class this semester.  Students are quite frustrated by this absence, and their perception of its negative impact.   In addition to not liking that their boards aren’t reflective of their stakeholders, these students, like so many others, believe that the richness of diverse perspectives and experiences makes for better thinking, problem solving, creativity, etc.

But, so as not to mislead, these students are also quite frustrated by many other things shortcomings of their boards.  For many, the lack of diversity and their boards’ failures to do their jobs well, or sometimes at all, are related.  Interestingly, this realization came together in a conversation about  Governance as Leadership:  Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards, by Richard Chait et.al.  By describing the three modes of governance—fiduciary, strategic and generative—the authors indirectly point out the need to focus on an invisible form of diversity, and one not easily discerned:  how people think.

The three modes of governance are, really, three ways of thinking.  While some will view them as hierarchical—you can’t get to generative thinking unless you’ve first done fiduciary thinking—they are not.  They are three different ways of looking at a situation:  from transactional and linear to an integrated series of events to get to a pre-identified end, to thinking totally creatively about what the ends and means might be.  And, while there are people who can easily flow from mode to mode, there are many who are either unwilling or incapable of moving to another mode.  But, as Chait et. al. make evident, a high performing board needs some people who are totally comfortable in each mode, who can lead the discussions from each mode’s perspective and who will make sure that, when needed, their mode – their lens – is present in the conversation.  Boards need cognitive diversity.

It turns out that all groups that wish to perform well need cognitive diversity.  Two British researchers, Alison Reynolds and David Lewis, have found that a specific element of cognitive diversity present in groups—“how individuals think about and engage with new, uncertain, and complex situations”—and not more traditionally thought of elements of diversity in groups, such as age, race, sex, etc., is what allows for some groups to be high performing and others not.

Using a well validated “strategic execution exercise” that measures how people address change, the researchers looked at two elements of cognitive diversity.  In looking at a new situation, how do people “process knowledge:” do they rely on knowledge they already have or choose to generate new information, and what is their “perspective,” which is the degree to “which individuals prefer to deploy their own expertise, or prefer to orchestrate the ideas and expertise of others.”

They found a significant correlation between high cognitive diversity and high performance:  the three teams that completed the exercise in great time had both diversity in knowledge processing and perspective.  The three teams having less diversity either took longer to complete the exercise or failed to complete it.  While this research is preliminary, having tested this with only six teams, the researchers’ prior work with over 100 teams over a dozen years showed that traditionally diversifying groups did not improve group performance, but cognitive diversity did.

Even if committed to pursuing cognitive diversity, it is not only invisible, but also hard to discern.  And though cognitive preferences are cemented when we are young, and are not influenced by our social conditions, they can be repressed in groups where conformity is valued and expected.