Need to adapt? Secrets of the best team problem solving
Published on 30 May 2024 • Written by Dr Lisa Colledge
If your organization encourages cultural fit, you’re inadvertently encouraging conformity of thought. That’s fine so long as nothing changes and you don’t need to adapt or innovate. But if there is any change in your future, this stagnation, or ‘functional bias’, is dangerous.
Research shows that the diversity you can see, such as gender and ethnicity, doesn’t make any difference to whether a team is amongst the best at solving problems. What matters is a type of diversity that is invisible. All the matters is diversity in how our brains use information: cognitive diversity.
You also need to enable cognitively diverse team members to deliver their collective genius. You can do this by designing and building a nurturing, encouraging organizational culture.
Keep on supporting your demographic inclusion programs. They remain important. But add cognitive inclusion if you want your organization to lead the way in all, not just some, business skills.
Key takeaways
For problem solving, cognitive diversity is the only type that matters. Teams that do best at problem solving are diverse. But gender, ethnicity, age, experience and geography don’t make any difference. The key type of diversity is not demographic, it’s not visible. The only type of diversity that matters for problem solving is cognitive — how people use and create knowledge, and how they leverage expertise.
Enable your cognitively diverse decision makers with a culture of curiosity. Cognitive diversity is half of the story. The other half is that the team must be curious, encouraging, and open to each other’s ideas. Psychological safety is a must for your cognitive diversity to deliver everything it can.
Prioritize cognitive inclusion as one of your diversity priorities for all round business success. Continue with the gender, ethnicity, and any other inclusion programs that you already have running; you need these too, and they make your organization socially relevant. But forget cultural fit, and prioritize cultural mix. Actively seek out cognitive diversity. Start with designing and building the nurturing, encouraging environment that allows diverse cognitive styles to thrive, so you’re ready to welcome and enable a stronger mix of styles.
Some teams are more effective at solving problems than others. We know this implicitly, because we’ve enjoyed being part of teams that were good at it, and been frustrated as part of a team that was not so good at it.
What causes the difference?
Alison Reynolds and David Lewis spent years systematically observing how teams function when challenged to solve a problem in strategic execution (references at the end).
Which of these teams would you expect did best?
A group of middle-aged European men.
Doctorate-holders of mixed gender, age and ethnicity at a biotechnology company, all educated to doctorate level, and motivated to develop their chosen specialization.
It’s not a fair question. You can’t make an informed choice because I haven’t included the relevant information.
The researchers found that they couldn’t predict how well the team would do from their demographic diversity. Gender, age, experience, ethnicity, and geography didn’t matter at all, and that was true whether the team was componsed of middle-aged European men, post-doctorate scientists, senior executives, MBA students, general managers, teachers, or teenagers.
They were missing something.
What is the secret ingredient to successful team problem solving?
The researchers went on to use a psychological technique to look at the thinking styles (experts refer to these as “cognitive styles”) of team members. We each have a natural preference in how we think: we can learn to use other styles, but they take more effort, so that under stress, such as in new, uncertain or complex situation, we revert to our preferential thinking style.
The researchers observed whether team members:
Consolidated existing knowledge, or created new knowledge.
Represented their own expertise, or orchestrated the expertise of others.
There was no judgment in making these classifications. One was not right or wrong. One was not better or worse. It was purely an objective observation to try to understand what made one team better equipped to solve problems.
The diversity that mattered was not demographic. It was invisible. It needed to be looked for. The teams who successfully and quickly solved the problem had more diversity in how they used knowledge, and in whose knowledge they represented. Whether someone used one style or another didn’t matter: it was the mix of styles that was critical.
The doctorate-holders were all the same type of specialist, even though their backgrounds were different. They were all brilliant at adding new knowledge within their areas of specialization, and in line with the mission of the biotechnology company. For as long as everything stayed the same, they would be successful. But when the company found itself in an unknown situation, they would struggle because they lacked cognitive diversity. Accordingly, they could not complete the task set by the researchers.
It was the group of middle-aged men who did better. They might not have looked diverse, but they were diverse in the only way that mattered in problem solving.
Just one more step
Reynolds and Lewis realized that they hadn’t yet found the whole solution. Occasionally, they observed teams that were cognitively diverse but still didn’t manage to solve the problem. Their behavior resembled that of the teams that didn’t do so well, with few team members contributing, mistakes being repeated, and taking a long time before testing ideas.
The missing ingredient was an attitude of curiosity, encouragement and enquiry. An atmosphere that was welcoming and nurturing of ideas. In short, the missing ingredient was psychological safety.
Reynolds and Lewis reverse-checked this by asking senior executives globally to describe their organizations, as well as rate them on:
How well they anticipated and responded to change.
How cognitively diverse they were.
How psychologically safe they were.
The most adaptable organizations were described as curious, encouraging, experimental, inquiring, and nurturing. Words like controlling, hierarchical, cautious, competitive, and reasoned belonged with descriptions of other, less resilient companies.
Intuitively, this makes sense. A team full of people with different styles of problem solving can’t be successful if they are shooting down each other’s contributions, and using logic too early to shut down a discussion. It’s not enough to consciously, actively seek out cognitive diversity; we also need to design and build our organizational culture so that it can flourish.
So, what does this mean for my organization?
It means two things:
Make sure you attract invisible, cognitive diversity as well as visible, demographic diversity.
Design and consciously build your organizational culture so that it doesn’t prevent your cognitively diverse team doing what they want to do naturally.
Attract invisible, cognitive diversity as well as visible, demographic diversity
An organization in which the majority of people fit a norm is called ‘functionally biased’ by psychologists. We have a natural tendency to recruit people like ourselves. Or people who resemble someone who has done a job well and we want to ‘clone’.
We are increasingly aware of this bias and we make efforts to be more diverse in our recruiting. Understandably, we focus our efforts on visible, demographic differences which are obvious to ourselves and others. We should continue to do this so we can execute strategies, understand customers, and operate smoothly. It is without question the right thing to do, for society as well as for our business success.
But it is still discrimatory. Non-inclusive. And sub-optimal for business. Missing out cognitive diversity means that your organization is sub-par on problem solving, as well as other business-critical behaviors associated with cognitive diversity such as innovation and rational decision making.
Design and consciously build your organizational culture
People who prefer to work and use information in different ways are not likely to work well together naturally. It takes effort for us to give others the benefit of the doubt when they approach a situation in a different way, and to support the direction they are proposing.
That curious, encouraging, experimental, inquiring, and nurturing culture that we need to start to create, to enable our cognitive mix to do its job, won’t happen on its own. Or because you say you want it to.
That culture needs to be designed for your organization, so that it enhances your existing culture and doesn’t over-ride the good elements that are there.
It needs to be implemented in a way that makes sense to your existing teams and ways of working. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all, but there are general principles that can be applied and underpin a customized approach.
What’s my next step to release the collective genius?
Start with your culture. You likely already have a bit of cognitive diversity in your organization and you will enable it to flourish. You will also make sure that you are ready to grow your cognitive diversity, but it is irresponsible to do this before your culture is ready to enable those people to succeed.
Start by taking the decision to prioritize increasing and enabling cognitive diversity in your organization. Make a senior leader accountable for ensuring this happens. And partner with an external expert who has done this before and can get you there quicker than you can on your own.
References
Original observations about cognitive diversity enabling team problem solving: Alison Reynolds and David Lewis, ‘Teams Solve Problems Faster When They’re More Cognitively Diverse’, Harvard Business Review, 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/03/teams-solve-problems-faster-when-theyre-more-cognitively-diverse.
Report about the need for psychological safety as well as cognitive diversity: Alison Reynolds and David Lewis (2018) ‘The Two Traits of the Best Problem-Solving Teams’, Harvard Business Review, 2018, https://hbr.org/2018/04/the-two-traits-of-the-best-problem-solving-teams.
I'm Lisa, and I help leaders create inclusive cultures that embrace all neurostyles. By empowering every team member to contribute at their best, while fostering mental well-being, you will boost innovation, retention, and talent acquisition—leading to enhanced business performance.
Click here to learn more about how my services can transform your team.
