Cognitive Diversity and Board Composition

2 responses to “Cognitive Diversity and Board Composition”

1. 

   jurvetson

   Dec 5, 2015 at 12:58 am

   Some suggestions I wrote for MLab Management 2.0:

   Four tenets jump to mind if we consider the Wisdom of Crowds as an emergent phenomenon, operating at a higher level of abstraction:

   1) team (thinking style) diversity is more important than individual ability

   2) disagreement is more important than consensus

   3) and the voting policies and selection mechanisms that you put in place are more important than the coherence or even the comprehensibility about what you do.

   4) The role of upper management is to tune the parameters of communication

   Hire and build organizations to sustain group (hive) learning over individual learning, by consciously assembling teams of MIN 3 and MAX 7 with very diverse approaches. Number of teams you assign depends on the range of probability that you’ll get a very different, compelling answer out of one of them.

   And from my rumination 10 years ago: I’d posit that diverse group performance comes not from convergence to the mean on a single parameter scale, but the factoring of diverse and orthogonal perspectives. Diversity brings more variables into the multivariate regression of teams.

   According to Scott Page, “People in diverse groups are less happy. Their views are challenged, and they feel like the outcomes were manipulated. Based on their experiences, they will self-report that it was not better than when they were on a homogenous team.”

   As you increase diversity, complexity goes up, but then it drops and you get the central limit theorem. There is a sweet spot with just the right interplay between agents. Also, there is not one dimension that perspectives lie along. Diversity captures orthogonal perspectives and more adjacencies. The better the perspective, the less rugged the landscape (in terms of finding the global optimum and not getting trapped in local optima). Consultants can hop across local peaks without being any smarter or more experienced in their client’s business. The goal is not regression to the mean.

   Page’s conclusion that diversity is as important as ability seems pretty profound.

   His argument for diversity in complex adaptive systems seems to be to be the underpinning of that popular book by Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds.

   If a group of diverse people routinely beats the experts, where does the learning occur? It seems to be at the system level, and not the individual level. The decision may make no sense to the individual members, but the decision making process does. The “wisdom” of the process could be taught to others, but not the outcomes.

   This generalization about emergence seems to hold for evolution, brains & neural networks, hives, and cultural memetic drift (more on this). In interesting systems, the emergent phenomena are at a different layer of abstraction, and may only be recognized by “in-process” or nodal members by pattern or proxy.

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2. 

   jurvetson

   Sep 7, 2017 at 8:46 pm

   and an NPR interview just came out on the subject

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