2018 ILA AGM Conference : Diversity of thinking, teams and high performance

There are half a dozen main approaches to understanding and addressing any challenge, Juliet Bourke of Deloitte Australia told ILA’s AGM on 5th June. She believes decision-making groups need to represent these views to maximize the chance of harnessing collective wisdom. Ensuring gender, ethnic, and cultural diversity goes a long way to achieving this.

After thinking about her 25 years experience in business and using research for her recent book*, Ms Bourke has identified six broad and equally valid approaches to any challenge:

• Outcomes: what is the vision, direction and sense of purpose?

• Options: what are the alternative courses of action, what’s been done before?

• Evidence: what is the data?

• People: are the right people in place to deal with this challenge?

• Process: how can we reach our goal, what steps must be taken?

• Risk: what could go wrong and how do we plan?

She argued that most experienced professionals can use all six, but under pressure we all tend to default to one or two. She believes this can be why organisations fail to embrace opportunities and commit more errors than they should.

She warned that in her research she found that the overwhelming majority of senior level people in organisations tended to default to the “outcomes” and “options” approaches. “This is understandable as the other approaches tend to be driven out of people as they climb to the top of organisations,” Ms Bourke said. These are the more direct ways of thinking, and there is a natural, understandable bias towards people who take successful decisions. However this is perhaps a market failure, as the alternative approaches can have important contributions to make, but can tend to be crowded out.

Interactive session and experience sharing 

To reinforce this message Ms Bourke placed six flip-charts around the room, with each dedicated to the different approaches. She then asked ILA members present to identify themselves with one of the six, and come together for five minutes to flesh out how they like to approach questions. These ideas were distilled and noted on the flip-chart.

After reviewing the answers given, she asked people to assess their experience in each group, and the consensus was that there was a meeting of minds. “We like talking to people who are like us, because we think our way is the best. When we meet people with other mindsets we too often just wish they’d stop talking,” she said. Particularly for people who take an outcomes or processes approach, the insistence on viewing the problem from different directions can be frustrating. This is a natural reaction but one that needs to be resisted if the other equally valid approaches are to be considered.

Ms Bourke argued that diversity was an effective way to cut through our natural tendency to group-think. We all know how group dynamics change when even one member of the opposite sex is introduced into an all male or all female group. A similar phenomenon occurs when people from different backgrounds, cultures and ethnicities are present. “We find it hard to listen and ask questions of other people, but when there’s diversity we are more likely to ask new questions,” she added. She suggested that this was an advantage for Luxembourg that culturally diverse committees and boards are the norm, even if more can be done.

This is not to say that she believes that groups must achieve consensus before a decision is taken. Ms Bourke sees a key role for leadership to be able to first encourage the flourishing of debate, but then there must be a distillation of this collective wisdom before action is taken. She also believes that more diverse decision making will boost trust across and beyond an organisation about how strategy and policies are arrived at. Staff are more likely to be motivated, and clients and the public are more likely to be positively engaged.

*”Which Two Heads Are Better Than One? How diverse teams create breakthrough ideas and make smarter decisions”, published by the Australian Institute of Company Directors