Boosting your business with diversity of thought

Leonardo Da Vinci:  All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

​How can we gather a breadth of perception to solve our most challenging problems at work? What can we learn from the Netflix $1 million prize and the Lehman Brothers collapse?
 
Between 2006 and 2009, Netflix ran a $1 million prize competition for teams to improve its movie recommendation algorithm by 10% or more. For the first two years progress was slow, until teams around the world starting combining their very different approaches together. The eventual first and second place teams reached the 10% goal by incorporating ideas that, on their own, seemed radically far from accepted mainstream wisdom. One team used an algorithm that took account of the fact that people rate movies they saw a long time ago differently to how they rate them if they saw the movie recently. Another team discovered that users rate films differently on Fridays, Sundays or Mondays. Individually, those approaches were terrible at predicting which movie a user might want to rent next, but when combined with other standard measures they gave their teams the winning edge.
 
There are many different ways of looking at diversity:

• The Michigan Student Study from 1990-1994 showed that ethnically diverse brainstorming groups produced more effective ideas than mono-racial groups.

 

• Diversity could include areas of expertise or country of origin. The Netflix prize-winning team included statisticians, machine-learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel.

 

• Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and future president of the European Central Bank, has been quoted as saying “Lehman Brothers was not the best idea. If there had been more Lehman sisters, it probably would have ended up in a safer place.” She cites evidence that banks with more diverse boards are less risky, safer for investors and avoid too much “group think”.

 
All these measures of diversity - gender, race, personality type, team role, job title, nationality - are really proxies for the most valuable type of diversity, diversity of thought. It is diversity of thought that will help your company to create new products, services or solutions, ahead of your competitors.
 
So how can you create a diverse team?

• Many organisations such as Accenture and the Bank of England have started to address some of these challenges by introducing career returners’ schemes. These programmes actively seek out individuals who would previously have been told that the gaps in their CVs were ‘red flags’. Some companies have realised that a five-year gap for childcare, eldercare, travel or retraining, may actually provide some of the diversity of skills, thought and experience, that could give their projects a boost.
• Review recruitment practices that prevent diverse people from applying or gaining positions. CVs that strip away indicators such as photos, names, age, gender, religions or other personal protected characteristics, give you a better chance of hiring someone who has the necessary skills rather than someone who ‘looks right’.
• Measure diversity to create benchmarks and see how you compare against your competitors.
• Encourage people to think creatively and have healthy disagreements on ideas. Embrace the differences in approach instead of trying to control everything.

 
Here at Da Vinci’s Workshop Ltd we have more than ten year’s experience helping companies to understand how to broaden their recruitment and retention processes, how to form and nurture diverse teams and how to encourage innovative thinking.
 
Links to further reading:

https://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474
https://oami.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/MSS-FINAL-GUIDEBOOK1.pdf
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sianbeilock/2019/04/04/how-diversity-leads-to-better-outcomes/#7f29516365ce
https://www.wired.com/2009/09/how-the-netflix-prize-was-won/
https://www.npr.org/2019/03/08/701409797/lagarde-keeps-an-eye-out-for-dark-clouds-on-the-economic-horizon?t=1562767557217
https://www.beapplied.com/post/how-to-anonymise-cvs

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