As the debate around diversity in our teams and organizations has developed in recent years, the general heuristic has been that diverse teams are usually great for coming up with novel ideas, but they’re not so good for efficient coordination.

Research from Stanford suggests that this heuristic is unduly simplistic and that teams can modulate how they apply variety or consistency of thought to any given task.

Team dynamics

They researched the communication between teams on Slack, with hundreds of thousands of messages sent between various software development teams, all of whom were working remotely.  The researchers used computational linguistics tools to ascertain how the ideas shared by the teams diverged or converged over time.

The results revealed that teams were pretty good at modulating their cognitive diversity to fit the specific needs of the particular task they were working on.

“The diversity level doesn’t jump around on these teams but undulates,” the researchers say. “It changes by phase of the software project. Teams that become cognitively divergent for ideation but more convergent for coordination are the ones most successful in delivering their projects on time and to the satisfaction of the customer.”

Adapting to circumstances

The best results seemed to emerge when teams tapped into their diversity during the ideation stage but then dialed it down during the coordination stage.  Being able to do this was crucial to the success of the team, as if teams maintained high diversity throughout, they had a 37% lower chance of success compared to teams with below-average diversity.

Suffice to say, monitoring cognitive diversity in real-time is far from straightforward, and the researchers caution anyone tempted by people-analytics vendors that promise to do just that.

“Cognitive diversity is just one thing that we’re measuring imperfectly that affects the performance of teams,” they say. “We’re still a long way. If people were to think, ‘OK, we don’t need team leaders now that we have this,’ we’re so not there yet.”

Instead, the best approach is likely to require managers to tap into what cognitive diversity exists in their team during the ideation stage before reining it back in and striving to find common ground once the team enters the delivery phase.