Ep3 Cognitive Diversity & Inclusion

Dr Amanda Potter sharing her research on Cognitive Diversity - why it is critical for business and team effectiveness and how it is different from demographic or identity diversity.

In this episode, Amanda is being interviewed by Tim Hepworth.

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linkedin.com/in/amandapotterzircon

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TheCPO@zircon-mc.co.uk

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Timestamps 

Cognitive Diversity 

• 00:00 – Introduction to Cognitive Diversity 
• 00:49 – What exactly is Cognitive Diversity? 
• 01:03 – Demographic Diversity 
• 01:34 – It’s how we think; its all in your mind 
• 01:41 – Heuristics 101 
• 01:53 – Inside vs. Outside 

Importance of Cognitive Diversity 

• 02:09 – Why are we discussing it? 
• 02:32 – Own your consequences 
• 02:46 – Is inclusion an illusion? 
• 03:25 – Strengths 
• 03:56 – Is strengths the same as motivation? 
• 04:16 – Being meticulous and motivated 
• 05:00 – The application of strengths in organizations 
• 05:26 – They are outstanding & above-average 
• 05:56 – Banks like averages 
• 06:47 – Are strengths part of our personalities? 
• 06:58 – Personality vs. Strengths 
• 07:35 – Why talk about strengths over Cognitive Diversity? 
• 07:58 – Strengths as indicators 
• 08:12 – Benefits of Cognitive Diversity 

It sounds bad, but somehow its all good… 

• 08:32 – The 4 areas of a business that benefit from Cognitive Diversity 
• 09:29 – How do we achieve Cognitive Diversity? 
• 09:40 – Step-by-step guide 
• 10:00 – Accountability & Responsibility 
• 10:17 – Recruitment 
• 11:05 – Celebrate difference 
• 11:21 – Learn from our mistakes 
• 11:52 – Gain Cognitive Diversity, from frustration 
• 12:22 – Demographic or Cognitive Diversity? Why not both! 
• 12:57 – Cognitive Diversity in a Psychologically unsafe environment 
• 13:30 – Loss of Diversity, be more compliant 
• 14:02 – Less likely to learn 
• 14:34 – For your service, good or bad Diversity?... 
• 14:51 – A culture of homogeny 
• 15:14 – Is age a guarantee of success? 

Teams & Cognitive Bias 

• 15:54 – The Recipe for building a diverse team 
• 16:20 – Does personality count? 
• 16:35 –Introverts vs. Extroverts 
• 17:20 – Importance of Diversity 
• 18:13 – Making sense of the world 
• 18:33 – Causes of Shortcuts and Unconscious Bias 
• 18:54 – Trigger happy Amygdala 
• 19:48 – Keep an eye on Bias, but what about Age Bias? 
• 20:04 – Ending a career with less proactivity 
• 20:26 – Beginning a career with a enthusiasm 
• 20:45 – Undermining Cognitive Diversity 
• 20:57 – Profile Matching 
• 21:38 – Ethics of profile matching methodology 
• 22:08 – Ingroup vs. Out

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Transcript

Tim Hepworth: 0:00

Hello and welcome to the third episode of The Chief Psychology Officer with Dr. Amanda Potter, chartered psychologist and CEO of Zircon. Amanda has been working with global clients for over 20 years and has a wealth of business experience.

Dr Amanda Potter: 0:17

Hi Tim, thank you very much.

Tim Hepworth: 0:20

So, today, Amanda, we're going to be looking at cognitive diversity.

Dr Amanda Potter: 0:26

So, in our last podcast on psychological safety, I mentioned that cognitive diversity was one of the main positive influences in creating a safe environment where people feel prepared to challenge, to question, and to innovate. And this is a great topic for our third podcast in this series.

Tim Hepworth: 0:46

It certainly is. But to get us started, why don't you help me understand what exactly is cognitive diversity?

Dr Amanda Potter: 0:52

So before I answer that question, let's look at the difference between demographic or identity-based diversity and cognitive diversity. Demographic diversity is the more traditional way of looking at individual differences. So looking at people in terms of their race, their gender, their age, or maybe their social class. So of course, diversity is a great thing to research and look at and consider. And I'm a big fan, as a woman, of encouraging organizations to have greater diversity at all levels. And we are seeing businesses achieve a greater level of gender diversity in the boardroom in the most recent years. But actually, cognitive diversity is about the way people think, their perspectives, their heuristics, and their thinking styles. So heuristics are mental shortcuts. They're the things that help us to facilitate decision making and problem solving and enable us to come to solutions in a very quick way. So the real difference between demographic or identity diversity is that very often it's something we can see on the outside, whereas cognitive diversity is often hidden and it's what we think. So it's what is on the inside.

Tim Hepworth: 2:08

Okay, so that's a good definition of cognitive diversity, but why exactly are we talking about it today?

Dr Amanda Potter: 2:15

We work with a number of organizations at all levels, from the boardroom at the top of the organization down to the very entry-level employee. And at all levels, it is critical that we have diversity. When solving problems or innovating or decision making, what we need to do is make sure we take into account the various risks, consequences, and implications of any decisions that are made. When we include people in that decision-making process who have alternative or differing views and ways of thinking or approaching those problems, what happens is they slow down the process of problem solving. They are more likely to focus on the detail of the problem, they challenge each other, they question each other, which we heard about in the podcast on psychological safety, but they are more likely to think about the implications and the risks and the consequences. This enables more complex thinking as a team at any level of the organization. So one of the great ways we can look at cognitive diversity in organizations is to think about people's strengths. Strengths are energizers. They're the things that we enjoy doing, we practice, and therefore we gravitate towards. They start to become recognizable for us, part of our performance DNA. And people who know us will think of us first in terms of our strengths and how we show up as an individual or as a leader.

Tim Hepworth: 3:56

Okay. Strength sounds quite similar to motivation. How does it differ?

Dr Amanda Potter: 4:02

That's a great question, because many of our clients use those two terms interchangeably, and they're actually very different. Let me give you an example of being meticulous, which is one of our 30 strengths in our questionnaire. I personally would not describe myself to be meticulous, and that's because I'm not energized by it and it's not a strength. However, I am skilled at being meticulous. In other words, if you give me a whole day of reading reports, I'm able to do it, I'm able to find errors and correct errors, but I don't necessarily enjoy it. I am, however, motivated to do a good job. And that's because my clients require high-quality reports and standards from us. So a strength is different from a motivation because a strength is something you enjoy doing, you gravitate towards, and you don't even need to think about doing it. Whereas a motivation, there's a drive to do the work, but you don't necessarily enjoy it.

Tim Hepworth: 5:00

So strengths seem very important, but how are they actually used in organizations? How can we actually apply this knowledge?

Dr Amanda Potter: 5:07

So we recently did a piece of research looking at the proportion of organizations that are using strengths for talent assessment and development. And we found from a survey of 200 corporate and non-for-profit organizations, 73% of them are using a strengths-based approach. What that means is that they are looking at the individuals that are outstanding in certain ways. And Gallup would talk about positive spikes, individuals who have outstanding strengths that differentiate them from the average. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're buying and using a strengths questionnaire like the B Talent Strength questionnaire or our competitors' products. It just means moving away from an average competency approach for assessment. I can give you a really lovely example of this. For 12 years, we were a preferred supplier for a major global bank. We used to help them recruit 600 graduates a year. The first cutoff for that graduate assessment was is that candidate at least average? Do they get at least a three rating on all of the scores? If they got at least a three rating on all of the scores, they then made selection between the candidates to decide who would be selected. At that point, they would look at the outstanding strengths. What surprised me about this approach was that their very starting point for selection was are you average? They were trying to recruit excellent individuals into their organization, but using an average benchmark as their starting point.

Tim Hepworth: 6:46

So I think I'm nearly there with strengths. So are strengths anything to do with personality?

Dr Amanda Potter: 6:52

No, they're not. So strengths and personality are completely different. Personality is all about the enduring traits or characteristics or preferences that, in theory, stay with us throughout our lives. They adapt slightly over time, depending on the situation we're in. Whereas strengths are more towards a state. They're not as far over as emotional intelligence, which can change on a daily basis or even grows over time. But our strengths evolve much more significantly than personality. In other words, what we enjoy doing and the activities we gravitate towards change over our lifetime.

Tim Hepworth: 7:36

We started this podcast by telling everybody we're going to be talking about cognitive diversity. We spent a lot of time talking about strengths. Why is that?

Dr Amanda Potter: 7:46

Strengths are such a fantastic indication of cognitive diversity. So I didn't want to talk about cognitive diversity without really clearly understanding what strengths are. Because in my mind, they are one of the greatest indications that people will be thinking differently and gravitating towards different behaviors or thinking styles.

Tim Hepworth: 8:11

So what are the benefits of cognitive diversity?

Dr Amanda Potter: 8:15

Last year we asked our clients that exact question. So we went out to a hundred leaders across a whole variety of organizations to ask them that very question: what are the benefits of cognitive diversity? And the four things that we were asking them about were innovation, breadth of knowledge, improved problem solving, and trust and engagement. What we found from our research was that the majority of the respondents believed that the benefit of cognitive diversity was improved problem solving. In fact, 44%. The next largest option selected was breadth of knowledge. So 31% selected breadth of knowledge, 10% selected trust and engagement, and 15% disruptive innovation. So even though we predicted that disruptive innovation would be the greatest positive impact of cognitive diversity, our leaders that we interviewed and surveyed felt that actually it was improved problem solving and decision making which was the greatest benefit.

Tim Hepworth: 9:29

So that's the benefits of cognitive diversity and they seem relatively clear now. But how can we actually achieve cognitive diversity?

Dr Amanda Potter: 9:37

So I believe there are a number of clear steps that we can follow. Firstly, it's about awareness. How diverse are each of the individuals in a given team or department? What are their core strengths? How do they make decisions? And how diverse are they? Do they challenge one another? Do they question one another? The second point is around psychological safety, accountability, and responsibility. To what extent is everyone prepared to take responsibility for speaking up and playing to those strengths or making decisions in line with their preferences? The third thing we can do is once we're aware of the diversity in the team, is to recruit for cognitive diversity. At an individual level, if we recruit people who are curious, prepared to listen, and are active listeners, who are very good at questioning and also waiting for the answer, and are inclusive, then we're going to create the environment where diverse views are accepted. If we wanted to recruit diversity into a team as a result of understanding the strengths that are currently apparent within the team, we can then look for specific traits, strengths, or characteristics that would benefit that team and would challenge that team's thinking. The key is to encourage people to focus on difference, not to be driven by the need for consistency and consensus, but be prepared to experience the frustration of You may remember from the psychological safety podcast that when we make errors or we do something wrong or we fail, the nervous system releases acetylcholine and epinephrine. That helps us with understanding the degree of the error and helps us to pay attention. These in combination with dopamine, the motivation neurotransmitter, helps us learn. But the experience, the feeling we have is the sense of frustration. So the point I'm trying to make is that in order to benefit from cognitive diversity, we need to experience and understand that there will be a sense of frustration, that we might feel a sense of discomfort, and that people might appear to be disagreeing with one another. But what is actually happening is that people are learning from that experience. So what's better then?

Tim Hepworth: 12:16

Cognitive diversity or demographic diversity?

Dr Amanda Potter: 12:20

Both. So both are important but for very different reasons. Ethically it's the right thing to do to recruit for demographic diversity, but not for a box ticking exercise, but for inclusion. Cognitive diversity, however, is critical for innovation, for problem solving, and for business performance. There is an overlap between the two things, between cognitive and demographic, but it's not consistently the case. Demographic diversity can impact cognitive diversity, but not all the time.

Tim Hepworth: 12:57

You mentioned the psychological safety podcast, and that's a great one for people to check out if they haven't already done so. Can we benefit from cognitive diversity if a team isn't psychologically safe?

Dr Amanda Potter: 13:09

Whilst the two concepts are completely separate, psychologically safe teams embrace diverse ideas. And so we need to be courageous, we need to be brave, because otherwise the more diverse thinker that adjoins a team will be encouraged to comply with the majority. So, in other words, if a team is not psychologically safe and they are consensus-driven, if you recruit a diverse, curious thinker into that team in order to enhance the cognitive diversity of that team, what will happen is that individual is encouraged or pushed to comply with the majority and you can find them either changing their views or opting out. If we opt to work with people who are similar to us because it helps us to feel good about ourselves, what will happen is that we will be less likely to learn and less likely to challenge our thinking. So we actively need to face up to working with people who are very different from ourselves to experience that sense of frustration or sense of discomfort because that is critical for us to learn individually and collectively as a team.

Tim Hepworth: 14:34

Again, in the last podcast, you were talking about length of service and how that impacted psychological safety. What happens when there's a long length of service with respect to cognitive diversity?

Dr Amanda Potter: 14:48

Very interesting. What happens when teams have very long lengths of service is that they start to create a set of norms or a culture that defines how they operate and how they interact. And we get a sense of the team or organization being homogeneous. This can undermine cognitive diversity. And we found from our research, particularly using our decision styles questionnaire, that the greatest amount of diversity in decision making comes from putting teams of people together from different age groups and also from different seniority levels. What we've therefore found is that teams that have very long lengths of service tend to merge towards a homogeneous style of thinking and behaving. They tend to adopt very similar styles of decision making, and they seem to converge into a singular way of operating and are less likely to challenge one another. The key, therefore, is to build teams of people who come from different age groups, different social classes, different genders, and different lengths of service, because that will start to give us an indication that they might think differently to one another. But the key ones for cognitive diversity are age and length of service.

Tim Hepworth: 16:20

So can different personalities contribute to uh cognitive diversity?

Dr Amanda Potter: 16:25

I would not normally think about personality and cognitive diversity in the same sentence, but that was until I listened to one of the Huberman lab podcasts. Andrew Huberman on that podcast was talking about the difference between extroverts and introverts. And he was referring to the fact that extroverts actively seek social interaction more than introverts do because of the levels of dopamine they release. Extroverts need more social interaction because they release less dopamine, the motivational reward neurotransmitter, than introverts, which therefore means they seek out and require more interaction. So when you work in a team of extroverts, it means you will have a very different experience than when you work in a team of introverts, which in itself brings diversity.

Tim Hepworth: 17:20

And why is that important?

Dr Amanda Potter: 17:22

So we need diversity for divergent thinking. We are more creative when we expose ourselves to different ideas or diverse ideas. So working with people who do not look, talk, or think like you can very much allow you to avoid pitfalls of conformity, which of course would undermine innovative thinking. But the problem is diversity does not come naturally to us. And why is that? The issue is unconscious bias. If you have a brain, you have bias. We all succumb to it. It doesn't make us bad, it actually helps us to process information, because biases are shortcuts which help us to simplify, organize and structure the information that we see, hear and observe, and so on. Our brains want to make sense of the world and the people around us. So categorizing and labelling people and situations is our brain's way of speeding up our decision making and processing. But these shortcuts often mean that we make assumptions about people that are not accurate, that have significant impacts.

Tim Hepworth: 18:36

Are there any uh underlying causes to this bias and can I do anything about it?

Dr Amanda Potter: 18:41

Well, unconscious bias is the tendency to connect with people who look like us and think like us. Is that attraction or like me, like you bias? And when we look at the neuroscience research on bias, we can see from that research that the amygdala, which is responsible for fight or flight, plays a central role in helping us sort the information and understand the information. We know that 99% of the information that we process is subconscious, and the amygdala plays a central role in scanning that information and triggering the fight or flight response. When the information that is processed through the amygdala suggests that there are social threats because people might not look, speak or interact similarly to themselves, this is seen as a threat. The unconscious bias, therefore, is the immediate reflexive and defensive reaction to someone being different.

Tim Hepworth: 19:47

So bias is really something we need to watch out for. An obvious area that occurs to me is the question of age bias. Is this something that we need to concern ourselves with?

Dr Amanda Potter: 19:58

Most definitely, and in fact, I think these differences are far more interesting. Indeed, what we have found is that people who are moving towards the end of their career tend to be less competitive, tend to be less risk taking, and are less focused on taking on responsibility. They're more modest, they're more flexible, and they're more focused on building collaborative teams. Whereas people who are at the start of their career tend to be competitive, risk taking, they tend to want to drive for challenging results, and they're less interested in building harmonious teams or sharing responsibility for success.

Tim Hepworth: 20:45

What could actually undermine cognitive diversity though?

Dr Amanda Potter: 20:49

I think there's two things that could really undermine cognitive diversity and IC happening in organizations. The first one is profile matching, and I've mentioned it a couple of times. This is where organizations have a personality model or a strengths profile that they're going to assess and recruit against. Now, about 15 years ago, there was an example of a major retailer who profile matched using a leading personality questionnaire in the UK. A candidate was recruited and was employed by that organization, and then their profile results came back from the test publisher. They were then released two days after they started the job to be told that their profile did not match the required profile of the organization. That individual challenged the recruitment process and the profile matching methodology, and they won. Now, this example shows you that it's ethically the wrong thing to do to profile match. But more fundamentally, profile matching diminishes cognitive diversity because what you're doing is you are stopping the organization from recruiting people with all different types of profiles. Another risk that I see in organizations is creating in-group and out-group populations. I mentioned our women in the boardroom research that we conducted and the fact that the women C-suite leaders each identified male mentors and coaches to learn from because they needed to understand their diverse perspectives. But what we are seeing from some of our clients, and I've got one particular client in mind at the moment, is that clients who are particularly focused on diversity and inclusion are building fabulous programs like Black Inclusion programs. One of the decisions they're making as part of this, however, is that all of the coaches, the trainers, and the mentors on those programs are also black. And therefore we're not enabling those teams to truly be diverse and to understand different perspectives.

Tim Hepworth: 23:02

That can be quite contentious. What's your view on positive discrimination or positive action in recruitment?

Dr Amanda Potter: 23:09

So we know, of course, that positive action is permissible, whereas positive discrimination is unlawful. So let's just be clear about the two different terms. So positive discrimination is the practice of favoring individuals because they belong to a particular group. Whereas positive action is where you have two candidates who have both applied for the position who are equally proficient as one another. It is then permissible to recruit the person who possesses protected characteristics in terms of their gender, their age, or their ethnic origin. It is not okay to select a less capable candidate in order to fulfil a quota or purely because of their age, their gender or their ethnic origin. So in what way does that affect the culture of the organization and organizations that try to fulfil quotas or tick boxes or profile match are at risk of creating a culture that is more homogenized and lacks the diversity. And in my last podcast we talked about the risk of functional stupidity, where we encourage bright people to stop thinking for themselves.

Tim Hepworth: 24:29

Okay, let's let's talk about the actual dynamics of a team then. What happens if you have a strong or a dominant leader of a team?

Dr Amanda Potter: 24:37

Matthew Saeed in his book Rebel Ideas is fantastic at articulating this. So when you have dominance dynamics in the team, what can happen is it can shrink the collective intelligence of the room. And this is because each of the individuals tend to take on the ideas and the views of the most dominant or most senior person in the room, and they tend to parrot that person. The more junior people are less likely to speak up, and very often they look for the social cues from their colleagues and try to find the right answer before responding. So what we need in those situations is more of a meritocracy where all ideas are equal and everybody can contribute. One way organizations could do this is to encourage the more junior people to speak first and sequentially move up to the more senior people, or you could also encourage everybody to write down their ideas and have an innovation board.

Tim Hepworth: 25:41

You made reference to our last podcast. Our last podcast, of course, was on psychological safety. How does cognitive diversity link to psychological safety?

Dr Amanda Potter: 25:50

Do you know what? And I was delighted to find that 15 of our strengths have a significant impact on the environment of safety. What that means is that teams that have different strengths, in other words, that are cognitively diverse, positively impact the environment. Let me give you an example. So individuals who are compassionate and teams that ask questions are more likely to create an environment where people feel included. Teams that are attentive and compassionate and genuine are more likely to create an environment where people feel personally connected and know each other as human beings.

Tim Hepworth: 26:46

Well, we're getting close now to using up our time. Have you any final thoughts before we go?

Dr Amanda Potter: 26:53

I'd like to finish with the fact that cognitive diversity is only one of the stepping stones to success, and that another critical step is inclusion. That cognitive diversity alone without inclusion would not be sufficient.

Tim Hepworth: 27:11

Well, thank you, Amanda. Uh I've learnt a lot today. I hope everybody else has. If anything today has got you thinking, or if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, then Dr. Amanda Potter is on LinkedIn. Just search using your favourite search engine. Uh find her out. Get in touch. I'm sure she'd be very happy to hear your thoughts.