Cognitive Diversity Seeing and processing the world differently

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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?

Posts that link to this post

•  Rebel Ideas: the Power of Diverse Thinking Matthew Syed (2019)
•  Open, Adaptive Strategy Make employees partners in the strategy process

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