Joe Gerstandt | keynote speaker, freedom fighter, freak-flag flier

There is a great deal of evidence showing diversity (especially cognitive diversity) to be a powerful factor toward innovation, increased problem solving ability and better decision making for groups. Put another way, it is going to be more and more difficult with each passing day for teams and organizations to compete if they are not able to capitalize on cognitive diversity, or diversity of thought.

We can and should integrate this into our efforts to recruit talent and build teams and maybe even start thinking about actually redefining what “talent” actually means; but we should probably start by focusing on the cognitive diversity that we already have on board. Truth of the matter is that if we have a group of people together and we are discussing anything of any significance, there are going to be different perspectives. But often those different perspectives are not being shared.

And this is where human nature and some of the basic dynamics of difference show up.

Diversity, or difference, (in any of its many forms) always brings tension with it. That is why difference is generative in nature, it brings tension with it and that tension drives change. Groups with greater diversity always under-perform or over-perform groups with less diversity, and the difference maker is in how the group deals with the tension.

People tend to not share their perspectives on different issues at work, because they know that it will cause tension…so we opt for politeness rather than honesty.  And this is incredibly, incredibly wasteful.  We waste the many different perspectives, ideas and experiences that are already on the payroll because we prefer things to be nice, neat, orderly and less than honest with each other.

This requires us to be adults at work in adult relationships.

Technology will not fix this.  Your shiny new strategic plan will not fix this.    And unfortunately we are still not in the habit of developing and supporting leaders that are good at fostering open, honest, rich dialogue including a lot of different perspectives. In many organizations disagreement is viewed as a personal attack, especially when disagreeing with a supervisor.

So, for those interested in unleashing the beast…a few basic suggestions for drawing out, promoting and benefiting from difference of thought:

1. Look for it- if you do not have disagreement you should be very, very concerned because you have a lack of honest communication.
2. Include the what, why and how of respectful disagreement in new employee orientation and in all leadership development programs.
3. Assign someone the role of “devils advocate” in each meeting to practice and get in the habit of disagreeing respectfully.
4. Establish (together) ground rules for how to communicate in meetings…post those ground rules and review them occasionally.
5. Put time on the agenda(s) for open discussion.
6. Take turns chairing team / department meetings.
7. Examine and discuss case studies of teams / organizations that have made poor decisions.
8. Experiment and play and tinker with different formats for meetings / sharing information / making decisions:
   • Open Space Technology
   • Appreciative Inquiry
   • World Cafe
   • Theory U
   • Circles
   • Murderboarding
   • Improvisation
   • Storytelling
   • Social Media (blogging, twitter, yammer, wikis, etc.)

Do you have other tools or practices that you use to help drive candid dialogue, ideation and decision making?

Be good to each other.