Cognitive Diversity

Building Trust and Collaboration

Diverse thinking often exists within organisations, but organisations frequently fail to reap the benefits of different experiences, expertise, and perspectives because of lack of trust and collaboration between teams. This lack of trust can lead to frustration, conflict, teams pulling in opposing directions, and lower levels of performance, not to mention missed opportunities to innovate. So, what can leaders do about this? Higher levels of trust and collaboration can be built through several key growth mindset mechanisms, such as applying curiosity rather than jumping to judgement and blame when working with others, focusing on shared rather than individual objectives, and creating an environment where robust and respectful discussion and debate are encouraged. This working session aims to bring together teams who need to work together better, applying these techniques to lay the foundations for stronger trust, future collaboration, and performance.​

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The Power of Diverse Thinking

Teams with diverse thinking – a variety of experiences, expertise, and perspectives – perform better when working on complex problems and tasks than teams without it. They have higher levels of collective intelligence, which enables them fill in individual blind spots, be more creative, and make better decisions. Despite the benefits of diverse thinking, all too often we inadvertently discourage diversity of thought in the way we design our teams, manage meetings, and how we interact with others. So, as leaders how can we improve team performance by making the most of diverse thinking?​

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Building Psychological Safety

Teams perform best when there are high levels of psychological safety. That is, when people feel that they can speak up, share ideas, ask questions openly, as well as be open about mistakes and problems. When psychological safety is high, team members share more information, are less judgemental of others, are better able to deal with conflict, and collaborate more effectively. Managers have an important role in creating this type of environment through their words and actions.​

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Emotional Intelligence

When people think of what makes someone a high performer, they often think of intelligence, being smart, and being good at analysing data and problems. Cognitive intelligence or IQ is undoubtedly linked to performance. However, research shows that emotional intelligence or EQ is an even stronger predictor of performance. Leaders and individuals with stronger emotional intelligence tend to make better decisions, are able to resolve conflict better, and build better relationships. These are all skills that are critical to performing well as an individual and getting the best out of others. Importantly, emotional intelligence is a skill that can be developed with purposeful practise.​

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Strategic Alignment

Organisations consist of a collection of diverse individuals who have different skills, experiences, ways of working, and objectives. A key challenge for leaders is to bring people together behind a common purpose and strategy in order to deliver effectively on shared objectives. When there is misalignment, different functions, teams and levels pull in different directions. This results in underperformance, working in silos, conflict, and disengagement. Leaders play a critical role in creating alignment to avoid these pitfalls. They can do this by clearly communicating purpose (the why), communicating strategy (the what), and making sure systems are setup to execute well (the how). When leaders work on increasing alignment, both within and across teams, organisations are setup to deliver more effectively on their long-term purpose and objectives.​

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After Action Review

Learning from experience is a fundamental component of growth mindset. All too often we move onto the next task, project or problem without taking the time to reflect and embed learning. This can increase the risk of repeating the same mistakes or the risk of missing out on opportunities to keep evolving and improving.

The After Action Review (AAR) technique is designed to draw on collective intelligence when reviewing an event, project or initiative. The method involves comparing expected and actual outcomes, avoiding blame, getting to root causes that drive both successes and mistakes, and getting very specific about when and how to apply these lessons.

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Marginal Gains Method

Innovative organisations typically deploy a range of innovation strategies and techniques, focused on a mix of breakthrough and routine or incremental innovation. Whilst breakthrough innovation often gets a lot of attention, the power of incremental innovation should not be underestimated. Incremental innovation focuses on making small, iterative improvements or changes to an existing approach, process, product or service. Incremental innovation can be applied to many types of organisational objectives, such as improving customer satisfaction and retention, reducing number of errors, or improving the efficiency of a process, as well as many others. Importantly, incremental innovation is something that most employees can apply day-to-day. Innovation doesn’t need to be the preserve of a few. When combined, a collection of small changes can make a significant and measurable difference to performance.

As part of this working session, we apply the Marginal Gains technique to a key business objective. We enable the group to identify opportunities to make a series of marginal gains that have the potential to generate significant performance improvements (e.g. costs savings, increased revenue, better products and services).​

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Pre-Mortem Method

Most people are familiar with project post-mortems, where successes and failures are reviewed and identified after a project or initiative has been delivered. Imagine being able to bring this learning upfront in the process before the project or initiative has been launched, before the costs have been incurred, the time spent, the relationships strained, and foreseeable errors have been made. The Pre-Mortem method uses prospective hindsight to change the way people think, reduce overconfidence, and encourage diverse thinking and constructive challenge, in order to uncover risks more effectively and avoid failures and unintended consequences before they happen.​

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Assumption Reversal Technique

Past assumptions may limit the way we think. Reversing our assumptions and asking ‘what if?’ can open up new ways of thinking and lead to disruptive innovation. It forces us to think in different ways. When asking questions, we often focus on questions that help us understand the way things are today (i.e. What? How? When? What caused?). To generate disruptive ideas and innovation, we need to ask more ‘why?’ and ‘what if?’ questions. Assumption Reversal is a technique designed to apply curiosity and challenge the status quo using the power of ‘what if?’ questions.​

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Making Effective Decisions

Leaders are asked to make a multitude of decisions every day, and these decisions can have a real impact on business performance. As a leader, it is critical to be able to make both high quality and speedy decisions. This is by no means easy to do – many organisations suffer from slow decision-making or poor decision-making, or possibly both. Yet, decision-making is a skill that all leaders can develop and improve. Understanding the type of decision, who to involve, what decision-making tools to use, and how to combat decision-making biases can go a long way to improving the quality and speed of decisions, and ultimately team and business performance.

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