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they, as groups, tackled a series of tasks, such as playing checkers, solving logic puzzles, and debating the ethics of complicated moral problems. She gave each group a collective intelligence (CI) score based on how well they navigated these challenges. She also assessed each group's average intelligence (AI), meaning she averaged the individuals' scores across metrics traditionally considered to be indicators of success.

      The groups that had the highest CI scores, meaning they performed the best on this series of tasks, were more diverse, had higher social sensitivity scores, and took steps to ensure that everyone in the group had a chance to contribute. The groups with the highest AI scores performed worse.

      The same groups were then given a more complicated second round of tasks. Those groups with higher CI scores again outperformed groups with high AI scores in these more challenging scenarios.

      Wooley concluded that when complementary intelligences were combined, they amplified one another, and outperformed teams with higher average scores in historically valued areas. While one team member may have had a technical understanding of a problem, another may have had unique experiences that revealed certain solutions wouldn't work in certain contexts, and a third may have had the social intelligence to make sure the two of them communicated their ideas clearly to each other. Alone, these forms of intelligence weren't as effective as when brought together. Just as players who got on base helped home run hitters score two runs instead of one, those with undervalued talents brought the intelligence of the collective to its full potential.

      The power of a diverse collective has proven key to helping ball clubs and businesses multiply their impact. As a society, what are we missing out on by overlooking the undervalued? One Wall Street pacesetter believes that harnessing the power of the collective could have kept us from reliving the largest financial crash since the Great Depression.

Lehman…Siblings?

      Sallie Krawcheck, the founder of the Ellevate Index Fund, has been called by many the “most powerful woman on Wall Street.” She is also known for her widely public firing from Citigroup. In Krawcheck's assessment, her dismissal wasn't due to her gender, but to the problem of “groupthink,” which she ascribes to the lack of diversity on Wall Street. Her firing came after she pushed Citi's then-CEO, Vikram Pandit, to reimburse Citi's clients who lost large sums on investments that Citi had marketed as low risk.

Her assessment: She was punished for speaking out against the majority opinion. Wall Street's lack of diversity, she argued, created a “false comfort of agreement” from pervasive groupthink.

      “There is no doubt in my mind that was a cause,” Krawcheck told CBS MoneyWatch. “I didn't see evil geniuses who perfectly foresaw the crisis, and I was at the table. They really believed what they were saying—that the risk was dispersed, that they didn't have much on their balance sheets.”

      Krawcheck became one of the first high-profile figures to speak out publicly about how different the economy of 2008 might have looked if, instead of the Lehman Brothers, we had had the Lehman Siblings at the helm. She believed that greater gender diversity, which tends to correlate with greater cognitive diversity, would have helped to avoid the groupthink that caused the bubble to burst.

      In 2012, a research scientist named John Coates, who formerly ran a derivatives trading desk, wanted to follow up on this theory. He found that male traders were significantly influenced by something called the Winners Effect—when men are “winning,” their testosterone levels spike, increasing their appetite for risk and willingness to take chances, even if the odds say not to. When they are losing, their testosterone levels are reduced and they become more risk-averse, even if the odds say they should bet.

      Women, on the other hand, appear to be largely immune from this Winners Effect.

      Coates wondered if greater gender diversity could help prevent booms and busts, and played it out in experimental market simulations. The answer to the hypothesis was a resounding “yes.” Simulations with exclusively male or exclusively female traders revealed substantially larger speculative bubbles in all-male than in all-female markets. In some cases, all-female markets even produced negative bubbles with prices below fundamental value.

      A follow-up experiment showed that evenly mixed gender markets fell somewhere in between, where healthy markets thrive. Balancing the genders and risk-taking tendencies of a group could help prevent another 2008.

Beyond Diversity to Inclusion

      “I don't know how the world's going to progress.”

      When I think back to my first conversation with Sanaika, the challenge in those words still resonates.

Inclusion-minded businesses are rising to meet the challenge by showing us that progress is possible. An analysis of the S&P Composite 1500 found that companies that embrace gender-balanced leadership teams have been evaluated as more innovative, and the returns on their innovations outpace those of their less gender-balanced competitors. Scientific American has published research demonstrating that racial diversity delivers similar benefits.²⁵ Another study from North Carolina State University found that firms that have embraced pro-DEI policies are producing more products and registering more patents per year than firms that haven't implemented inclusion-minded practices.²⁶

As some business leaders have experienced, though, a diverse workplace alone does not automatically yield these benefits. In his book, Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking, Matthew Syed notes that diversity can actually lead to greater conflict, friction, and stagnation.²⁷ Leaders are often disappointed when they put in the work to build diverse teams, wait for collective intelligence to “happen,” and instead see groupthink or tokenism persist.

      This doesn't mean that diversity isn't worth pursuing. It just means that diversity is the first step.

      Billy Beane didn't recruit undervalued players and let them sit on the bench. Coates's experiment didn't include female traders but deny them access to high-value accounts. The businesses that benefit from diversity take steps to ensure that voices like Sanaika's aren't just in the room—they're included.

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      These companies have gone beyond diversity to inclusion by embracing one key perspective shift: They've ditched outdated approaches to DEI, and instead, they've adjusted their cultural levers. In the next chapter, we'll start to explore the promise of this design-based approach.

Notes

      1 1. “Women in the Workforce: United States (Quick Take),” Catalyst, October 14, 2020, https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-in-the-workforce-united-states/.

      2 2. William H. Frey, “The Millennial Generation: A Demographic Bridge to America's Diverse Future” (Brookings, January, 2018), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/2018-jan_brookings-metro_millennials-a-demographic-bridge-to-americas-diverse-future.pdf.

      3 3. “Older People Projected to Outnumber Children for First Time in U.S. History,” US Census Bureau, March 13, 2018, release no. CB18-41, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/cb18-41-population-projections.html.

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