I recently spent two days with The Wilf Ward Family Trust, meeting adults with learning and physical disabilities and their carers, many of whom are exploring pathways into trusteeship and board-level involvement.
It made me think more deeply about cognitive diversity and the power of differences in perspectives, as well as the diversity of thought processes among individuals with frontline and lived experience, and how different their problem-solving strategies might be.
What is cognitive diversity, and why does it matter on boards?
Cognitive diversity refers to the differences in how people think and the range of ways they approach problems, make decisions, process information, and see the world.
It comes from lived experience, professional background, upbringing, culture, education, and personality. You’ll see it when someone asks a question no one else thought to ask or sees a solution others would miss.
It’s not just about who’s in the boardroom; it’s about how they think, challenge, and contribute once they’re there. Cognitive diversity is central to effective boards and better governance decisions. It’s the main benefit of having a diverse board.
When recruiting trustees, we aim to build inclusive boards by bringing together people from diverse genders, age ranges, cultural backgrounds, social contexts and lived experiences.
But are we always focused on maximising the cognitive range of the team?
And if we are extending the range and breadth of perspectives, how do we maintain that, protect it, and make the most of it?
In Matthew Syed’s book Rebel Ideas, he says, “even when groups start out with diversity, this can be squeezed out by a process of social osmosis as people converge upon the dominant assumptions…”
Why diverse voices aren’t enough on their own.
Not only do we need diverse people, but we also need to enable them to contribute fully and be heard. Then we need to optimise the dynamics of diversity by ensuring creative thinking, debate, and positive challenge are always present in board interactions, or the benefits can be lost. Groups tend to become increasingly clone-like, regardless of the differences they start out with.
Good teams bond. They have confidence in each other. However, individuals with overlapping frames of reference can become collectively myopic. In other words, when focusing on a complex problem, they focus on a relatively small area of the problem space and are collectively, yet unknowingly, blinkered to reinforce confidence in their decisions. They might be missing the point, or many points. They don’t know what they don’t know.
Cognitive diversity drives better decision-making.
Groups of people who bring insights from different areas possess higher levels of collective intelligence. They have wider coverage of the problem space and view the challenge from more perspectives. They are potentially more aware of what they know and what they don’t know.
Sometimes, less diverse groups could, consciously and unconsciously, set out to deliberately exclude people who are different from them; they perhaps don’t see the value in what they might bring, and just don’t invite them in.
Practical steps to build a more inclusive board.
Bringing this into the board environment, could it be better sometimes to step back and ask, “where are the gaps in our collective understanding”? Consider what perspectives might not have been considered and then how we can gather these views. This will likely shift the conversation and improve both the group’s decision-making dynamics and appreciation of diversity.
If you think about your team or board of trustees now, who is not being heard effectively? Who could you invite in to stretch the thinking?
When recruiting, will you now consider how cognitively different a new trustee might be?
How do you recruit and appoint trustees with lived experience, front-line insight, or both, to contribute to your board?
Once you’ve appointed your trustees, embedding and sustaining cognitive diversity on a board takes consistent effort. It means quality onboarding, regularly reviewing how decisions are made, who’s contributing, and whose thinking might be overlooked. Culture needs to reward challenge, not just cohesion.
We are working with The Wilf Ward Family Trust to develop a succession plan for their board of trustees, support their staff in exploring trusteeship, and collaborate with the individuals they support to consider how they can bring their perspectives into the boardroom as well.
If you’re interested in this work and want to understand more about what we are doing, feel free to contact me. I’d love to chat about how our board recruitment experts can support you to bring cognitive diversity and lived experience into your boardroom.
