Cognitive diversity: Matthew Syed on why “No one brain is enough”

Intelligence isn’t built on the intellectual brilliance of individuals but on collective cognitive diversity. This is the core idea behind the 2020 CMI Management Book of the Year. We talk to its author, Matthew Syed

The author of the 2020 CMI Management Book of the Year is a broadcaster and champion table tennis player who competed twice for Team GB at the Olympics. One judge of this year’s award said that the winning book, Rebel Ideas: The power of diverse thinking, “encourages people to think beyond the everyday” and that it “tackles the big picture in a way that can be applied to my organisation on a day-to-day basis”. Another says, simply: “It’s beautifully written”.

We caught up with Matthew Syed in mid-lockdown to talk rebel ideas, the power of collective intelligence and whether the UK’s response to the COVID-19 crisis would have been different with a more cognitively diverse team overseeing it.

Matthew Rock: Can you give us a quick summary of what Rebel Ideas is all about?

Matthew Syed: My sense is that a lot of people say “diversity matters” but deep down, they think that it doesn’t matter that much or that it can actually be antithetical to the performance of an organisation. If you’re hiring diverse people, rather than the best people, it almost sounds like it’s opposed to meritocracy, which is an extremely important attribute in organisations. In the book, I argue that when it comes to complex decisions, strategic decisions, coming up with new ideas, making forecasts and predictions, it’s crucial, first of all, to have a team, because no one perspective is enough, no one brain is enough. But when you can optimise the cognitive diversity – that is to say, the different insights, perspectives and information – then you get a stronger result. The evidence on this is overwhelming, but the real point of the book is that this evidence is very deeply misunderstood.

MR: In what way?

MS: The major problem is that we tend to think about diversity almost exclusively in demographic terms – differences in gender, race and social class. But I think that the key concept is “cognitive diversity” – different thoughts and perspectives and insights.

These two things are often related, because our identities inform our experiences and the way we make sense of the world. But there are contexts where you can have people who look diverse but who think in exactly the same way because they’ve been in an organisation for so long that they reach for the same metaphors, the same historical precedents to reason through problems. You’re not going to find that they’re ahead of the curve. They’re going to be disrupted and they’re going to miss the big picture.

MR: You wrote the book before the COVID crisis hit. How might the ideas be updated in the light of COVID-19?

MS: I’ve looked very closely at the UK government’s response to COVID. I think one of the problems is that there was insufficient diversity in the key SAGE group, the scientific advisory group for emergencies. SAGE was full of clinical academics, modellers and mathematicians but didn’t have enough front-line public health experts on communicable diseases. Why is this relevant? The reason is that all of the planning documents were based on the idea that a dangerous epidemic would follow the contours of pandemic flu. And pandemic flu spreads through the population – it’s pointless trying to contain it. So you get to herd immunity quite quickly. All the documents published up until March 2020 started with lines like, “We are assuming for the purposes of this paper that we are dealing with pandemic flu”. But, of course, we’re dealing with a coronavirus. The key question, then, is whether the coronavirus is different in some significant policy way? The answer to that is yes, because in South Korea and elsewhere in Asia, they’ve shown that it’s containable via mass testing and contact tracing. We didn’t model that as an option and it wasn’t even considered. That’s why testing capacity wasn’t ramped up in those crucial early weeks. All of these decisions were based on the fundamental idea that this was going to be like pandemic flu.

Now it may well be that in the future we don’t find a vaccine and that the virus does spread through the population, but there’s no doubt that as of today, we would have been in a better place had we had a more cognitively diverse group at SAGE.

MR: There are times when a sense of unity and common purpose are invaluable. George Orwell talked about the “emotional unity” of the British public during World War II. In a time of crisis, how can you avoid groupthink but keep a sense of common purpose?

MS: I think these are two fundamentally different issues. If it’s only one person determining the strategy, it’s very possible that it will be a poor strategy. This is why leaders put a team together to give them advice. That's where diversity is important.

Having made a decision, however, you want to have unity of purpose. So I draw a distinction between evaluation – where you need diversity – and execution, where you need unity of purpose.

MR: Looking beyond this crisis, is there a case to be made for leaders to dial down their dominance characteristics?

MS: The best leaders in the world at the moment know how to pivot between leadership styles. So when they’re talking to the group, they have the humility to listen in order to make a better choice. But once a decision has been taken, they know how to galvanise and to occasionally dominate. They pivot depending on where they are in the decision cycle.

MR: Are there organisations where you see these kinds of positive habits taking hold?

MS: I’ll take it away from business [to] sports. I remember interviewing the golfer Nick Faldo and asking what quality was important as a golfer. For example, do you need to be supremely confident? And he said, “It’s very naive to think that you need to say, ‘I’m going to hit this ball. It’s going to be fantastic. It’s going to go in the hole.’ Instead, when you’re deciding on what shot to play, you need to be highly realistic, humble, and rational at that point.

But once you’ve decided to do something, then you need to be confident. You need to galvanise yourself in order to execute the shot.

The best surgeons, for example, are very confident when they’re wielding the scalpel and very humble when they re-evaluate what they could have done better after the operation has finished.

Matthew Syed was speaking to Matthew Rock

You can watch the full interview with Matthew Syed by going to managers.org.uk or by searching CMI’s social media channels. To find out more about his consulting business, Matthew Syed Consulting, visit matthewsyed.co.uk

And the award goes to...

“I’m very gratified to win this award. It’s a wonderful thing. I wrote the book feeling that diversity is an issue of huge significance. Obviously it has a significance in terms of morality and social justice, but I also think it’s probably the key factor that drives high performance in business and management, particularly in the field of innovation, but also beyond.” – Matthew Syed, author of Rebel Ideas: The power of diverse thinking (John Murray, 2020), winner of the 2020 CMI Management Book of the Year, awarded in association with the British Library and sponsored by Henley Business School