Who should read this book?
Policy Makers: because they operate in very complex environments that require different perspectives.
Higher management: because they need to understand how to foster diversity as it will impact overall results.
Why you should read this book (or not)?
It is a good book, not a fantastic book though.
I had a couple of great insights and some AHA moments reflecting on past situations.
Overall, most of what I read in the book, I knew already and many elements I had read in other books. Although the book explains well how diversity (or the lack of) impacts different situations, it does not provide practical advice for individuals to promote diversity of thought.
Some stories are rather long. I like that. I had the impression that the story about the tragedy on Mount Everest and about Covid-19 was biased and missing a scientific approach.
Interesting extracts
“Homogenous teams were mirroring each other’s perspectives. And although they were more likely to be wrong, they were far more confident about being right. They were not challenged on their blind spots, so didn’t get a chance to see them. They were not exposed to other perspectives, so became more certain of their own.”
“The prestigious individual may have conferred an advantage on someone else, but she benefits from the broader adoption of generosity across the group. This is particularly important where helping each other amplifies the overall pay-off – so-called ‘positive sum’ environments. (…) Dominance hierarchies (…) Accentuate zero-sum behaviour. Politicking, back-stabbing, and quid pro-quos, along with constant vigilance about internal competition. (…) This explains why prestigious human leaders tend not to bare their teeth or or wave their arms. On the contrary, they use self-deprecation as a rhetorical device to signal a different dynamic. They explain their ideas thoroughly, because they know that colleagues who understand, and endorse, them are more likely to execute them with judgement and flexibility. They listen to those around them, because they recognise that they are not too smart to learn from others.”
“The desire for secrecy made sense. The executives didn’t want other firms stealing their ideas. (…) By severing their engineers from broader network, they inadvertently stifled the interplay of diverse insights, fusing, recombining, jumping forward in unpredictable ways: the complex dance of innovation.”
“When outside sources of information have been systematically discredited, the belief-information process itself undergoes distortion. In a world where trust is, in a certain sense, prior to evidence, this can be perilous. (…) Echo chambers are structures of strategic discrediting, rather than bad informational connectivity. (…) Members are exposed to media from outside; if the right disagreement reinforcement mechanisms are in place, that exposure will only reinforce the echo chambers’ members’ allegiance.”
“The standardised cockpit was the root cause of the alarming incident rate, causing multiple crashes. (…) Sure enough, when planes were designed to enable pilots to vary the height of the seat, the distance of the joysticks and so on, incidents plummeted. Moreover, the cost of creating this flexibility was minimal compared with the savings on incidents, not to mention the human cost of injuries and fatalities.”
“Give people autonomy to create their own spaces, and they come up with something better than almost anything else you can give them. (…) The uplift in productivity can be divided into two components. The first is the autonomy element. People were choosing rather than being dictated to. They felt empowered, so were more motivated. This element is less to do with the choice and more to with the act of choosing. But the second element was shaped not by the act of choosing, but by the power of personalisation. People could design spaces that they liked. They could mould the space to their own characteristics. This may sound like a small thing, but it is actually a very big thing. It was an approach that took diversity seriously.”