Waching daily Feb 1 2019

is a diversity good or bad for innovation?

today I want to take you through two fascinating research studies which I've recently found

which give us evidence behind whether or not having a diverse group of people performing on an

innovation task is better than people who have the same perspective

now the first study was done by Professor Brian Uzzi and it looked at whether or not

there's evidence behind whether or not people with the same background perform

better at innovation or creativity tasks than people who have different backgrounds

so what he did is he looked at lots of research behind whether or

not people who've worked together previously or haven't worked together

previously produced the most creative, innovative and successful outcomes

what he found, especially with his seminal work on the research of American

musicals on Broadway, was that he found that the teams that performed the best

when it came to producing new creative output had a mixture of both people

who've worked together previously, but also people who hadn't worked together

previously and ironically enough the ratio that he found seemed to be

approximately 50% people who worked together previously and 50% new blood

there's a couple of reasons for this: when people work together they start to

begin thinking the same way, and when they get success, they start

to think "if it's worked for us previously it'll work for us again in

the future" so groups that work together over and

over and over again, especially ones that have seen a bit of success, begin to

think that the way that they work previously to get to successful a

successful result will end up getting in them a successful result again in the future

however this has a limited shelf life

eventually people actually start to

get fixated on the same way of doing things and it ends up with them being

less and less creative over time

so what you want is a team if you want to be as

innovative as possible is to have a constant mixture of people

who've worked together on products and projects previously, and also an influx

of new blood who bring new perspectives, new information, new knowledge and

especially new ways of approaching problems that the existing team hadn't

thought about

the second piece of research that I want to talk to you

about today is whether or not just having different people different types

of people actually counts as being diverse enough

a fascinating study that

got published in the Harvard Business Review recently asked "does having people

who are of different ages, genders, ethnicities in the team actually end up

leading to problems being solved for innovative creative challenges?"

and the fascinating result of 100 experiments showed that if you have people who are

different ages, different genders, different ethnicities, this by itself

does not mean that the team is going to actually be able to solve the problem

more than a team that is more homogeneous, more than a team that is

composed of very similar people

so if it's not the outwards differences and

outward diversity that ends up helping a team be successful in divergent thinking

and thinking of new solutions, then what actually is it?

well the authors of the research paper suggests it's not the outward diversity it's actually the

cognitive diversity, the way that people think needs to be different from one another

so what they determined cognitive diversity to be, through a

follow up series of experiments, was they assessed the way that people use their

knowledge, whether or not they prefer to use existing knowledge or compare

knowledge within the group and develop new knowledge, and the way that they

discuss this knowledge as well

what they found very strikingly is that

groups with a higher degree of cognitive diversity, where there's people with

different ways of thinking, are much more likely to come to innovative successful

outcomes significantly faster than people who all think the same way

they quoted two very interesting examples: one was a group of

R&D scientists for a biotechnology company who all were PhD candidates and

who all had a very scientific background. they did not manage to solve the

challenge in the time allocated because all of them approached it in the same

way and the challenge required a difference of approaches within the group

similarly with a group of IT consultants, they didn't actually even

manage to come close to finishing the challenge because instead of

collaborating within the group, each individual started thinking about how

they should best develop the solution in their own minds

the teams that actually

managed to develop the most accurate effective and innovative solutions were

the ones that had a mixture of people with different cognitive styles

so what are these two scientific studies teach us?

well first of all they teach us that

it's important to have a mixture of new blood and existing blood (people who've

worked together previously and new people who haven't worked together at

all) to keep the team able to produce constantly innovative and creative output

but within that group as well you need to make sure that you're not just

filling it with people who think the same way. you need to be making sure that

you fill it with people of differences of perspectives, differences of ways of

approaching problems, and different experiences

those two studies and those two ways of building diversity within your group are actually going to be what

results in you having the highly innovative groups and the most creative

groups overall

so if you found this interesting my name's been Nick Skillicorn

from idea to value.com make sure you like subscribe and share this video

with people who think that you need to have more diversity in your groups and

make sure you go to www.ideatovalue.com for the best training on the Internet

the best premium training on the internet, around building your innovation

and creativity capabilities make sure you check out my channel to see all of

the previous videos that I've done and I'll speak again with you soon

thank you

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