Cognitive Diversity: The Immune System of a Team

Reflecting on Neurodiversity Celebration Week, NMITE's Chief Academic, Professor Beverley Gibbs writes her thoughts on cognitive diversity, and why the workplace of the future needs it!

Neurodiversity Celebration Week has brought into focus an opportunity to celebrate the fact that everyone’s brain works differently, and that differing ways of thinking can be respected and valued. These contrasts in the ways that different people think come about naturally, and can be recognised in conditions such as dyslexia, Tourette’s syndrome, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, ADHD, and autism spectrum disorders.

However, the phrase ‘neurodiversity’ is an inclusive idea, reminding us that all humans vary in their perception, learning, thinking and expression.

Here at NMITE, we know that neurodiversity amongst colleagues and students brings a sprinkling of gold dust. Even though life for unconventional thinkers can hold its own challenges, hand in hand with that are the great things that can be achieved when a group of people with different ways of thinking come together. This is part of the phenomenon called cognitive (or sometimes “deep”) diversity, and it can be even more powerful than more traditional diversity measures.

There are really solid business reasons to get to grips with neurodiversity – in lots of different contexts, cognitively diverse groups have shown the power of having a range of different mental models to draw on, and have been shown to out-perform carefully chosen collections of experts. Diverse groups are much more likely to be challenging one another’s assumptions and questioning conventional ‘truths’. This leads to groups that are more creative, more adaptable, doing better analysis, bringing customers and stakeholders to life, and making decisions more effectively. In fact, Forbes called cognitive diversity the ‘immune system’ of a team.

This has been tested scientifically, and groups with deep diversity really come into their own with tasks that are complex and require a system view. We’ve seen this in a range of contexts from human-machine interfaces, to decision-making in public policy, to open innovation.

What jumps out from this work is how valuable such diversity is in contemporary engineering and technology environments – complex, needing a system view, relying on creativity, and constantly questioning assumptions. Gold dust!

However, diversity is just one part of the story. Realising these benefits requires inclusion too - allowing colleagues and peers to safely express themselves and to know that their voice is valued. We need the humility and acceptance that enables each of us to learn from (and with) those who think differently. So, when you bump into someone who doesn’t see the world quite in the way that you do, see it as a learning opportunity, and perhaps the start of a fruitful collaboration.