Guest Blog: What 9/11 taught me about diverse teams

In this guest blog, Rebecca White of Hasler-White Inclusive Facilitation reflects on the importance of diversity, including cognitive diversity, not just for high performing teams but because it makes for a more fun workplace.  

Rebecca set up Hasler-White Inclusive Facilitation after 11 years running an award-winning social enterprise as she wants to share her learning with other leaders of small charities and social enterprises - through an entrepreneurial lens. At Hasler-White Inclusive Facilitation she's always looking to support executive as well as non-executive leaders and because Rebecca facilitates using highly inclusive and participatory methodologies, can include and involve beneficiaries too.  Whether it's workshops, mentoring or consultancy, Rebecca supports from a place of having walked the busy walk and understands the importance right now of developing charities and social enterprises to be more financially sustainable. Example workshops include Theories of Change, Impact Management, Getting the best from your Board, traded income, social investment, income diversification, inclusive recruitment and more.  Find out more about Rebecca's services here.

9/11 is a date etched in our memories, all of us recalling where we were at the time. For me, an early autumn term school day had just finished in South Croydon and I was sat in my form room marking books. The sounds of teachers’ voices in the corridor alerted me to something with an urgency and uncertainty to it. With no smartphone to reach for, the rest is a vague memory of rolling news. It was the 11th September 2001.

I probably listened to the car radio on my rush hour commute home to Lewisham as the full scale of the horror started to unfold during a morning rush hour in New York. I still haven't watched the footage. It sits in the part of my brain that can’t quite process it. This is alongside the murder of James Bulger, Victoria Climbié and currently, the Australian woman found recently guilty of poisoning her relatives with deadly mushrooms. No amount of rational thinking will help me understand or empathise.

And then around 2018 a theory grabbed my attention. It related not to the day itself, but to the events and people leading up to it. It was in the writing of Matthew Syed and his book, Rebel Ideas. He discusses how a lack of cognitive diversity at the CIA meant that warnings about the attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the thwarted attack on a plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, claiming nearly 3000 lives in total, were missed.

The CIA, always incredibly competitive to get into, was made up of predominantly white, male and middle class Americans. This meant they missed or misinterpreted signs, intentions and motivations that might have alerted them to actions leading up to the al- Qaeda attacks. In 1998 the CIA did not have a single case officer who spoke Pashto (one of the main languages of Afghanistan). Officers had even been misled by Osama Bin Laden’s clothing, assuming an unkempt appearance equated to a disorganised organisation. They couldn’t have been much more wrong.

Quite simply, a lack of the cognitive diversity that occurs with a greater breadth of minds and experiences accompanied by an absence of cultural understanding meant vital signs were missed.

Because it turns out that great minds don’t think alike.

Great minds think differently. Being surrounded by cognitive diversity, for all its challenges, leads to broader discussions, better conclusions as well as innovative solutions. Group think, in teams and on boards is unlikely to result in innovation, aspiration and inspiration, let alone bring challenge to assumptions or be able to solve complex problems.

We (rightly) focus a lot on racial and demographic diversity, but looking at this through the lens of cognitive diversity and populating teams with this breadth results in high-performing teams and organisations. It’s not easy, it takes time to bear fruit, lots of planning as well as resource and cross-organisation commitment.

All of these were challenges I faced and more. Whether it’s the time to build partnerships in more diverse communities, the cost of placing job adverts in publications that reach broader audiences or gaining traction in a world that still thinks it’s okay to ask your mates to be on your board and not advertise jobs at all - having a plan for how you’re going to tackle it and what you’re going to tackle as well as why, is the first step.

And it doesn’t just start with recruitment.

So whilst during my time running a social enterprise, I didn’t achieve the levels of diversity I aspired to, thanks not just to introducing inclusive recruitment practices, but creating over the lifespan of the organisation a culture where it was safe to challenge, we were curious about people’s backgrounds and recruited from outside the sector, a relative cognitive diversity was achieved. This made for a more fun workplace too, with the risks we took and the ideas that were invited against a backdrop of ‘safe’ failure. Employees describe it as a ‘difficult organisation to leave’. They know that not all workplace cultures are equal, diverse or inclusive.

9/11 and its legacy that many still experience the aftershocks of today, is a lesson in diverse team-building, the importance of inclusive recruitment as a means of achieving it and developing a workplace culture that nurtures it for all its benefits - and because it’s makes for more interesting, fun and engaging work environment.

Having worked with organisations that are at risk of being populated by clones, the enduring and cataclysmic events of 9/11 should remind us that great minds do not think alike.

If you would like to know more about how Hasler-White Inclusive Facilitation can help, please contact Rebecca.