Cognitive Diversity Seeing and processing the world differently

When thinking about organizations or teams, we most commonly think about diversity in terms of gender, race, or age. But there is another form of diversity that is often overlooked – cognitive diversity.

Cognitive diversity is where a team or organizational members have different perspectives and different styles of processing information.

Scott E. Page, in his book The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, explores the concept of cognitive diversity.

He suggests that cognitive diversity has four dimensions: perspectives, interpretations, heuristics, and predictive models.

• Diverse perspectives: people have different ways of representing situations and problems.  They see the set of possibilities confronting them differently.
• Diverse interpretations: people put things into different categories and classifications.
• Diverse heuristics: People have different ways of generating solutions to problems. Some people like to talk through their thinking about problems; others prefer to write out their solutions first and then talk.
• Diverse predictive models: Some people analyze the situation.  Others may look for the story that lies behind it.

Resources

• Harvard Business Review: Teams Solve Problems Faster When They’re More Cognitively Diverse
• Harvard Business Review: Does Diversity Actually Increase Creativity?