Excerpt 3: from Chapter 6

Work with Diverse Groups of People
During World War II, the Allies were fighting a losing battle against the German navy. When a German submarine spotted an Allied convoy, it would send a coded signal to other German submarines in the area. These submarines would then gather into a group formation, known as “wolf packs,” and attack the ship with punishing success. The Germans were amazingly effective; between 1940 and 1941 they sank more than fifty ships a month, leading to total casualties exceeding fifty thousand.

The Allies were helpless against these attacks because they were unable to break the German coding system, which was produced via a coding machine known as the Enigma, the most formidable of ciphers. British intelligence therefore built the most formidable of code-breaking groups, headquartered in a large Victorian mansion called Bletchely Park. Although cryptologists had traditionally come from the field of linguistics, this group also contained mathematicians, scientists, classicists, chess grand masters, and crossword addicts, all of whom worked together under supreme secrecy. Together this diverse team managed to break the Enigma and, as a result, turned the tide of the naval battle.

There is little doubt that diverse teams, like the one at Bletchely Park, have a greater chance of coming up with unique ideas. I don’t mean diversity only in terms of disciplines, but also in terms of culture, ethnicity, geography, age, and gender.

Diversity in teams allows different viewpoints, approaches, and frames of mind to emerge. Diversity is also a proven way to increase the randomness of concept combinations. It is often said that one of the reasons for the United States’ unparalleled innovation rate is its very diverse population. People who have experienced the innovative power of diverse teams tend to do everything they can to encourage them.

Steve Miller is such a person. He is the former CEO and chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell, the world’s fourth-largest company. If you talk to Miller about innovation for any length of time, it becomes clear that he believes diversity is a critical ingredient. Globalization has made it a necessity for a multinational like Shell. “You begin to find that you get some really neat ideas generated from creating a culture where people of different ethnicities, cultures, backgrounds, [and] countries … come together,” he says. “Invariably you find that the best ideas come from this mosaic of players working together in a team on a project. They will come up with an answer that is different from what any one of them would have come up with individually.”

Working with a diverse group of people, then, is a great way to increase creativity. Even though this may seem like an obvious truth, it is remarkable how seldom we use it. People tend to stick to their own disciplines and domains. They stick to their own ethnicities and cultures. Miller often sees managers who logically understand that a team with people from different backgrounds can be more creative since “you can intellectually work your way through that.” But most people have a difficult time going from understanding the logic of such an argument to actually applying it, Miller says. He believes it is easier to do if you have actually seen the power of diverse teams, “because then you really know that it works.”

Why are we so hesitant about working in diverse teams? The reason is at least in part a function of human nature. Humans have a tendency to stick with people who are like themselves and avoid those who are different. Psychologists have a name for this tendency. They call it the similar-attraction effect. Donn Byrne of the State University of New York at Albany, a pioneering social psychologist in this area, developed a test to study it. Here is how it worked: A group of college students were asked to indicate their attitudes concerning twenty-six topics ranging from premarital sex, sit-coms, and student and professor needs to legalization of marijuana. The researcher collected the answers, and it seemed like the experiment was over.

Two weeks later the participants were informed that they were now in a new study, one that investigated how well people could predict each other’s behavior. The students were given scales that showed another subject’s attitudes toward the previously mentioned issues. They were then asked to rate the subject in categories, such as how they felt toward this stranger, if they would like to work with this person, and so on. But there were no “other subjects” (which is why this technique is called the bogus-stranger technique). Instead, when the experimenter had prepared the scales, he had invented other subjects with attitudes either similar or dissimilar to the student in the experiment. It turned out that in every instance, the student showed attraction toward the bogus stranger if the underlying attitudes were similar to his or her own. The student liked the bogus stranger better, wanted to work with that person, and evaluated the other person more positively in every way.

What is surprising about these results is not that people are attracted to people who are similar; this is something we know from personal experience. What is surprising is how predictable this effect is. Dr. Byrne found that as the proportion of similar attitudes increases, attraction increases. The effect is so predictable that it can be expressed through a regression equation.