We don’t talk enough about cognitive diversity

More identity-driven diversity has overwhelmed the work discourse.

We tend to have a lot of discussions about diversity in a business context, although probably less about cognitive diversity. That will be the subject of this post. But let’s briefly mention the overall idea of diversity before we get rolling. It’s clearly pretty important to have diverse workplaces — McKinsey, among other places, has proved that — but it feels like a lot of lip service from the mouths of executives. Despite how much we discuss diversity, there are still more CEOs in North America named “John” than female CEOs in total. And don’t even get me going on pay transparency: we’re a long way off on that front.

So. The broader point here is that we tend to discuss diversity a lot, but we don’t necessarily act on anything to do with diversity. I think it’s likely the same set of issues for cognitive diversity, but let’s explore a little bit.

What is cognitive diversity, really?

You can likely figure it out from the title. “Cognitive” usually references “thinking” for most people, and diversity usually references “differences among those in a room.” So, cognitive diversity would be teams/organizations with a lot of different viewpoints and ways of…