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The Science of Strategic Thinking: Maintain Transient Diversity for Optimal Group Problem Solving, with Kevin Zollman, Game Theorist and Co-author, The Game Theorist’s Guide to Parenting
When a group of people is approaching a problem, there are two ways that that group can fail. One way is that the group can not think of all the relevant possibilities and jump on board with a single solution too quickly without really exploring all the different ways that they might solve it and all the different contingency plans. In that way groups fail because they’re not sufficiently diverse. You have too many people that look at the problem in exactly the same way and they all end up jumping on board with a solution that isn’t the best solution.
Another way that groups can fail is that they can be, in a certain sense, too rigid. Even though they have a bunch of diverse members, they can never agree on a solution because they’re constantly fighting about which is the best solution and which is not the best solution.
So one of the things that I advocate is that groups do best when they have something that I call transient diversity. That is, they’re diverse enough so that in the beginning they don’t all jump on board with one solution too quickly, but they’re not so set in their ways that when the best solution comes up they can’t all jump on board with that one. So it’s very important that groups both be diverse in the way that they come and approach the problem and in the way that they think about problems, and in what their educational backgrounds, knowledge, and life experience is, but they also can’t be so rigid that they can’t see that someone else has a really good idea. So it’s important when you put together groups that you find the right set of personalities that are diverse from one another but not set in their ways so that they can optimally maintain that transient diversity: diversity in the beginning, but that is abandoned once the really good solution is put on the table.