Ability diversity or cognitive diversity: what yields the most accurate decision-making group?

According to a study published on the Information Science Journal, it was proven through unique empirical research that while ability diversity decreased group decision errors by approximately 4%, cognitive diversity was much more effective as team decision errors were reduced by approximately 13% thus putting into question the popular belief that reliance on using more capable members to create high performance homogeneous groups may lead to better team decisions. The final conclusion of the study was that a much better strategy is to create groups of members that ‘think differently’ and cooperate to produce a group decision

So, group composition really improves decision making? Certainly. Yet, the traditional approaches should be augmented. At a software tech firm, for example, forming coding teams that produce error free, innovative work would require more than just the lumping together of the brightest programmers and then setting them on a problem. It takes more diversity than that.

A good first step for our software firm would be to compose the group from, say, two bright computer programmers, two physicists, and two mathematicians. This would give you a group formed from members with diverse abilities. Yet, according to the new research, this would only reduce the team’s decision errors by about 4% because their cognitive abilities are still so similar.

What is needed is not only diversity of skills and high intelligence, but also diversity of thinking style. The most difficult trick of all turns out to be in identifying thinking styles. A good second step comes from the research of Professor Thomas Malone of MIT. Putting a few women on the team would improve the overall social sensitivity of the team thereby increasing its collective intelligence.

Questions to ponder:

• Is your organization postured to make savvy team decisions or is their effectiveness limited by lack of diversity (ability and cognitive)? 
• How does the composition of group membership differ between most accurate and least accurate decision-making groups? 
• Can you even identify your most and least accurate groups?

Here is an interesting and related video:

If you are struggling to find ways to identify thinking styles, one way is to examine management decisions.


The research article cited above: West, David, and Scott, Dellana. "Diversity of Ability and Cognitive Style for Group Decision Processes." Information Sciences 179 (2009): 542-58.33

When the whole is greater than the sum of its parts: The intrinsic benefits of Group Think

New Study by Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Union College documents how collective intelligence of groups surpasses the cognitive abilities of the individual group members and that the tendency to cooperate effectively is linked to the number of women in a group.

The authors of the study confirmed the hypothesis that groups, like individuals, have a consistent ability to perform across different types of cognitive tasks and that the effectiveness of a group can, in fact, be predicted in many situations. Because the effectiveness of a group is derived by how well its members work together, it was also proven that in groups where one person dominated, the group was less collectively intelligent than groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed. Moreover, it was noted that groups containing more women demonstrated greater social sensitivity (social sensitivity is how well group members perceive each other's emotions) and greater collective intelligence compared to teams containing fewer women.

By extrapolation, the study postulates that it’s possible to improve the intelligence of a group by changing its members, by teaching them better ways of interacting or by giving them better electronic collaboration tools. The bottom line is that it is not the individual intelligence that will make the group succeed, but how the collective intelligence is harnessed together with the right mix of social sensitivities.



Questions to ponder:

• Based on the findings of this latest research, how do you encourage group thinking in your business?
  
• Or do you encourage it at all?
  
• Do all of your teams look alike or are their demographics such that you too can predict the effectiveness of the group?
  
• How do you help your groups to sharpen their thinking and therefore to improve their effectiveness?
• Finally, do you have tools in place to measure the effectiveness of your teams?
  

We will be discussing these questions and more on our Facebook page.