Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Lisa Colledge, CEO and Founder of Lisa Colledge Consulting, which helps institutions to enable their existing cognitive diversity and create original solutions.

You are constantly striving to enable your institution to be the best it can possibly become.

One approach is to increase the diversity of your research, student, and administrative bodies; it is the right thing to do, and it feels logical that increasing your diversity will contribute to your mission to have significant societal impact.

Doubtless you’ve attracted some of the best research brains as tenured researchers and collaborators. Perhaps you’re stimulating cross-disciplinary research by providing dedicated research facilities and securing major grants. Maybe you’re actively engaged in cross-sector enterprise activities such as academic consultancy and knowledge transfer partnerships (KTPs).

You’ve monitored and improved your representation of diverse genders, ethnicities, sexualities, educational backgrounds, people with disabilities, and so on. Your strategy to connect diverse minds and catalyze breakthroughs that improve society seems robust, and many people are diligently executing and monitoring it. But are you removing all blockers to provide an equal opportunity for everyone to contribute their best to your institution’s success?

Is your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion strategy optimized to make your institution the best it can be?

It makes sense that leaders started to improve their institution’s diversity by targeting the obvious imbalances that they could see, and setting representational targets, but positive discrimination never felt completely fair to me. First, people in the target groups are not enabled to succeed simply by being recruited; it is not uncommon for people in under-represented groups, who have enthusiastically started new positions, to leave days or weeks later because the team culture they found themselves in didn’t enable them to contribute their value and they felt their mental wellbeing eroding. Secondly, this approach is not inclusive of groups who don’t fall into one of the representational targets that have been prioritized: we can’t build and sustain a truly inclusive research culture if any group is disadvantaged.

I was looking for an approach that offered everyone an equal opportunity to succeed, including those historically well-served by institutional cultures. I realized that I needed to focus beyond diversity, to inclusion into an enabling culture — but inclusion motivated by which characteristics? I found my answer while researching how to enable my son, who is autistic with learning difficulties, to engage more happily and productively in society. Simple adjustments in the behavior of his direct family were transformative, such as enabling him to say his first words two days after I started to receive coaching. His mental calmness and ability to learn grew, while our family found more energy to make the effort to replace old habits with new behaviors. We have all become better at enabling each other.

Autism is just one type of neurodivergence, which affects about 30% of people when we include other types, such as dyslexia, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and dyscalculia. Having experienced the rapid transformative effect of behavioral changes on my son and realizing the prevalence of neurodivergence stimulated me to spend my last few years as a corporate employee experimenting and validating that the outcomes of even the first steps on a longer journey to raise awareness and upskill inclusive behavior were as transformational in business as in family life.

But there was one thing I couldn’t understand: why should adjustments designed to enable the 30% of people who are neurodivergent result in everyone in a team feeling happier and more engaged? 

Cognitively diverse teams need to be activated for their collective genius to emerge

I found the answer by looking at the research into what makes teams excel at solving problems. Researchers found no correlation between problem-solving ability and any kind of diversity that they could see: in one example, a homogeneous-looking team of middle-aged European men solved a strategic problem that defeated a group of researchers of mixed gender, age and ethnicity at a startup biotechnology company. The only kind of diversity that made any difference was invisible: cognitive diversity.

Cognitive diversity is a mix of thinking styles. It includes everyone, without exception, because we each have a preferred style of using information, and skills we naturally excel at; we can learn to work in other styles and to develop other skills, but it’s tiring and frustrating. Neurodivergence is a diagnosis at the extreme of cognitive diversity, where people are so highly specialized in one way of using information that their mental health is vulnerable when they are forced to work outside it.

I’ll illustrate why cognitive diversity is one of the keys to problem-solving by describing some strengths associated with two neurodivergences:

• Dyslexics tend to be highly original. Their brains are structured to recall memories with rich context, and to hold them in their consciousness and out of autopilot. They can recombine distant concepts in novel ways. You will find a much higher proportion of dyslexics in entrepreneurship than in the general population, and in creative university courses like engineering than in law.
• One well-known autistic trait is highly rational decision- Autists tend to be less distracted by irrelevant information, such as ‘optimism bias,’ which causes others to give more weight to information that increases the chance of a positive outcome, than that indicative of a negative result. Autists naturally gravitate towardsemployment where logic is rewarded, such as Silicon Valley.

Teams that mix this originality and evaluation of ideas with other cognitive strengths, such as designing a plan and inspiring others to participate in executing it, have the potential to be great problem solvers. Your institution’s strategies to contribute meaningfully to Grand Challenges and strategic initiatives by bringing together people with different cultural backgrounds, educational experiences, subject expertise, and skill sets, are right. However, researchers found that this is only half of the problem-solving recipe; cognitively diverse teams couldn’t always combine their different thinking styles effectively, and then their behavior resembled that of cognitively similar teams.

The missing ingredient was the right team culture. Our cognitive strengths come at a cost: dyslexic brains that are original aren’t well suited to sustained detail focus, which tends to be an autistic trait; objective decision-making doesn’t partner with an intuitive understanding of social dynamics, and the ability to inspire others to execute a plan. Cognitively diverse team members need to be trained to build a nurturing culture — one that values what each person offers and compensates where they struggle, enabling their collective genius to emerge. This is a significant driver of employee engagement and mental health across all diversity dimensions; Gallup reports that employees in the most engaged quartile of corporate organizations have 68% higher wellbeing and 78% lower absenteeism than those in the least engaged quartile, and this impact extends well beyond neurodivergent employees.

A cognitively inclusive culture is a competitive advantage

I have led cultural change programs in a corporate setting and observed what happens when team members are upskilled to nurture and reinforce each other’s inputs, and don’t feel pressured to be good at everything. In one example I led, the employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) increased from -33 to +30 over a three-year period, which encompassed Covid lockdowns and a major restructure. Everyone I have spoken to who has knowledge of working in a research environment confirms their sense that there is a higher proportion of neurodivergent people working in research teams than in the general population.

Employees in teams with such high eNPS ratings are happy and engaged; they ensure that your institution succeeds at its mission. Gallup reported 15% higher productivity, 23% greater profitability, and up to 51% lower employee turnover in the most engaged corporate organizations. In the world of research, we can expect cognitive inclusion to accelerate and amplify the societal impact of cross-disciplinary research teams; to improve the identification of the most promising disclosures by innovation offices by enabling focus only on their merit and not on the pressure of social expectations; and to broaden the talent pool from which researchers and students can be drawn.

Cognitive inclusion mimics evolution’s solution to adapt to change

You can be confident in investing in prioritizing cognitive inclusion because it is how evolution has made humans able to adapt to any environment. We specialize in thriving when faced with change, rather than living in one environment, because we are fantastic at exploring, evaluating options, and exploiting opportunities. These skill sets demand different cognitive skills, and our skulls don’t have enough space to hold them all, so we evolved a two-part solution, as described in the new Theory of Complementary Cognition: each individual is innately specialized in one skillset, and we are all social. As a result, we thrive together, or not at all.

The hallmarks of a cognitively inclusive culture are comfort in taking interpersonal risk such as sharing concerns, admitting mistakes, and trying out ideas; and trust that your teammates, direct reports, manager, and leadership will act fairly. Typical behaviors include respectful curiosity; a willingness to answer questions; nurturing others’ efforts; prioritizing the good of the team over that of the individual; and a focus on outcomes instead of how something is done.

The beauty of this culture is that it naturally enables people of all ages, backgrounds, (dis)abilities, ethnicities, genders, and sexualities to contribute their best and have equal opportunities to thrive, while also attracting the best new talent —including neurodivergent talent — to further strengthen the cognitive mix.

Make your culture an asset that enables the diverse potential you’ve invested in

Cultures tend to emerge unconsciously, but they are tangible assets that can be designed, built, and measured. Designing and executing cultural change programs, and ensuring they’re sustainable, is a skill that you can build in-house or bring in through consultancy.

If you decide to invest in designing and building a cognitively inclusive culture, you will build a core capability that drives your institution’s mission by improving wellbeing and mental health, and releasing the full potential of your diverse research teams to contribute to solving society’s most challenging problems.