True diversity means looking for the knife in a drawer of spoons

Tim Harford – The Undercover Economist

Teams with diverse capabilities perform better than teams which are too homogeneous. That much isn’t – or shouldn’t be – controversial. But this post adds two succinct insights to that starting point. The first is that despite the known value of diversity, recruitment and team formation tends to optimise for convergence rather than divergence – and that’s got a lot to do with the fact that diversity is a property of teams, not of individuals. So the more people are recruited in groups, the easier it should be to ensure that between them the successful candidates cover the full range of the needed skills and experience. The second is that homogeneous teams tend to think they are performing better but actually to be performing worse than teams which include a divergent outsider. A degree of social discomfort is a price which turns out to be well worth paying for better performance.

This is one of two articles worth reading together – the other is Geoff Mulgan’s on collective intelligence – as they cover some closely related ground from quite a different starting point.

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