Can Change Agents Embrace Diversity?

I was tipped off yesterday by a very cool blog called Egonomics about a forthcoming book which could provide a nice follow up to The Wisdom of the Crowd.  University of Michigan professor Scott Page’s book, THE DIFFERENCE: How The Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Teams, Schools, and Societies, purports that crowd wisdom must feature diverse perspectives in order for the collective logic to create innovative breakthroughs. As change agents are increasingly called to lead diverse groups, and the government’s diversity levels match most companies, it bespeaks an great viewpoint of harnessing innovation that the government considers outsourcing to third parties. There is much for change agents to consider here.

I have not yet read the book, but I like what Page has to say. Here are two excepts from chapters that are avalible on the web:

“The existence of smart mobs like those created by InnoCentive and of wise crowds like those described by Surowiecki is not in dispute. Without collective intelligence, decentralized markets and democracies would have little hope of functioning effectively. Yet we do not fully understand the causes of successful collective performance. We tend to think that it rests in ability, that if we make the individuals smarter, we make the group (or mob) smarter, the crowd wiser, and the team more effective. That logic certainly holds true (with some caveats). But here I show that if we make the individuals more diverse, we get the same effects: better teams, smarter groups, wiser crowds. Unpacking this second, subtler logic takes up the bulk of what follows.”

“Our investigation of how individual diversity aggregates culminates in the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem. This theorem provides conditions under which collections of diverse individuals outperform collections of more individually capable individuals. As mentioned in the prologue, this result was not something expected or desired. It just popped out of some experiments with agent-based models that I ran as an assistant professor at Caltech.”