A doctor consulting with a patient has to inform them that they have a malignant tumour. This is not a pleasant task, particularly as the prognosis isn’t good. However, some recent research with a new ultrasonic ray has shown that it can blast the tumour away. The problem is that whilst the ultrasonic ray can destroy the tumour it also destroys all the surrounding tissue and may result in the death of the patient. If they reduce the intensity of the ray then there will be no damage to the surrounding tissue, but the tumour will not be destroyed and the patient may die anyway. What should the surgeon do?
This is the thought experiment proposed by Mathew Syed in his book Rebel Ideas which looks at teams in complex problem solving and “cognitive Diversity”.
Diversity is a term that has had a lot of focus in the last 30 years, particularly in the workplace. What we often miss though is that there are many different types of “diversity”, not all of them effecting when putting together a problem-solving team.
Most of us tend to think that diversity means ethnic, racial, sexual, demographic and gender diversity. What we miss is that there is also cognitive diversity. Cognitive diversity is often more important to consider when building a team and solving problems than other forms of diversity. That’s not to say that social, demographic or any other diversity isn’t important to consider, it’s just that when we want to construct a problem-solving or creative team, cognitive diversity has the potential to yield more successful results than other diversities.
Cognitive diversity is often more difficult to identify and is often enveloped into social or demographic diversity. The point is that a range of different thinking approaches to a problem will yield a broader range of potential solutions and approaches to the same problem.
Most thinking, particularly when it comes to problem-solving is linear. By that I mean most received wisdom says that if it’s going to be a relay race (no diversity pun intended), then you are best to have four Usain Bolt’s in your team than a “diverse” team. However, complex creative problem solving is not often linear and requires a different approach.
As with the Enigma machine code breaking team at Bletchley Park during World War II, complex problem-solving required a more diverse range of cognitive skills. The code could note be solved by a simple linear method, the problem needed to be approached from several, different fronts.
Alistair Dennison, who assembled the team of code-breakers at Bletchley Park, hired not only, as you might expect mathematicians, logicians and cryptographers, but also crossword enthusiasts, historians, philosophers, philologists, classical scholars and even approached J.R.R. Tolkien (who didn’t join the team in the end) in order to get a “diverse” team of intelligent minds in order to break the enigma machine codes by applying different viewpoints and approaches.
What Dennison realised is that you can have a team of individually intelligent people who have a narrow field of reference, they may be individually intelligent, yet may be collectively stupid. This is a phenomenon called “knowledge clustering”. A group of people who think similarly or perhaps come from similar backgrounds will view the world with a similar outlook and similar perspectives.
If you have a group of problem solvers who all come from similar backgrounds, say mathematics and logic, who have a complex problem to solve, they will all come at the problem from a similar starting point.
If, however, you introduce some cognitive and social diversity into the group you have a better chance that the problem will be viewed from several different angles. And this adds to the richness of the possible approaches and eventual solutions.
Imagine for instance that you commute to work everyday by the underground or subway and are asked to join a focus group, of similar people on similar commutes, to discuss ways to improve the your daily commute (if only!). The chances are that you will all see the problems and solutions in a similar way and may not arrive at any broader more meaningful solutions.
However, let’s say that you are asked to spend the day in a wheelchair or become a child and still do the same commute. Now your perspective changes and things that weren’t obvious before suddenly become massive issues. Problems like getting up and down stairs or getting on and off trains.
Now, this may lead to solutions that are advantageous to different perspectives, that neither had considered previously. It’s a method for teams to begin to break down assumptions. The broader the range of experience and approach, the broader the range of possible solutions.
The point here is that we don’t know what we don’t know and we are all locked in our habitual modes of thought and frames of reference. Our frame of reference doesn’t easily translate into a wider problem-solving frame. This is perspective blindness. Our frames of reference may be limited even if we think we are broad-minded.
“Everyone has theories – the danger is of those people who are not aware of their theories”.
John Cleese.
There is a famous story about two young fishes swimming happily along in a fish tank when they are passed by an older fish who greets them “good morning, how are you both today? The water’s lovely today isn’t it?” the two young fish swim on by and one turns to the other and says; “what the hell is water?”.
We don’t know what we don’t know and unless someone or something from another perspective shows you a different view, your frame of reference remains the same and limited.
Cloning isn’t a solution either (the Usain Bolt relay team), not in complex problems anyway.
When we try to recruit people from the same or similar backgrounds we often end up with a lot of consensus, probably a lot more harmony, but, undoubtedly less innovation in problem-solving. Not all problems are linear, they are often complex and need several different points of entry to generate a diversity of potential solutions.
Spike Milligan
The obvious counterargument to this is the cliché; “A camel is a horse designed by committee”. Well, not if you have the right, cognitively diverse committee. You only have to look at the results of political leadership when privileged like-minded individuals, with what seems like all the right intellectual credentials, make decisions based on their (narrow) viewpoint.
In 1990 in the UK, the community charge (Poll Tax), and there were riots. It was seen as saving money for the wealthy and moving the expense onto the poor.
The green paper of 1986, Paying for Local Government, produced by the Department of the Environment from consultations between Lord Rothschild, William Waldegrave and Kenneth Baker, proposed the poll tax.
The team failure here was a lack of diversity. Rothschild, Waldergrave and Baker all had similar backgrounds, all being Oxford or Cambridge educated. They lived in a privileged world. They were an intellectual and political force to be reckoned with and seemed, on the surface, to have all the required experience, skills and knowledge. However, they weren’t sufficiently “diverse” in order to see that the Community Charge would be unacceptable to the larger population, who’s life experience was vastly different from theirs.
Diversity doesn’t mean that you don’t need leadership in a team. You do! But recognizing the value of diversity in teams, may influence the assembly of the right kind of team and the style of leadership required to fit the problem to be solved.
Complex problems, unlike linear problems, benefit from cognitive and social diversity.
In an experiment carried out in 2001 by Nisbeth and Musada, they assembled two groups of participants one from the USA and the other from Japan. They asked them to watch a short video of an underwater scene. They were then asked to describe what they had seen.
The participants from the USA described in detail the 3 fish they saw swimming and were specific about the details.
The participants from Japan described the context in which the fish were swimming.
What the experimenters realised was that the groups were seeing the scene from their different, cultural perspectives.
Those from the USA were more individualistic and focused on objects and weren’t so aware of the context and environment in which the scene took place.
Those from Japan were less interested in the objects and the details and more in the context and the environment.
This seemed to reflect the difference in cultures. Japan is more focused on the society and the group and the USA is more individualistic both in goals and in outcomes. Both saw the same scene from different frames of reference, each has its own frames of reference and each its own blindness. This suggests that we all see the same scene differently but are highly influenced by our frames of reference, we are not all the same. If you combine the two different viewpoints, the more different the better, you get a richer picture of what is going on.
Back to the original question…
What should the surgeon do?
It appears that there is no ideal outcome.
Let me tell you a brief story.
A general is laying siege to a castle and wishes to storm and capture it, but he knows that there are landmines surrounding the castle which will allow only a light load to pass without exploding. The general, who is a wise, decides to split his army into many small units and spreads them all around the castle thereby being able to cross the landmines because the weight is more dispersed, but still focused on the same objective. He seizes the castle.
The analogy (hopefully) suggests the solution to the surgeon’s problem. Set multiple rays of low intensity at the same focus thereby attacking the tumour from many angles simultaneously, killing it and not destroying the surrounding tissue.
So perhaps surgeons and military men should get together more often!
Diversely simple and highly effective!
