REBEL IDEAS
THE POWER OF DIVERSE THINKING
Matthew Syed, whiff-whaff champ turned sports hack turned performance guru, continues his successful franchise of Gladwellian self-help books with this one. In
Rebel Ideas, David Rowan reported in Syed’s own paper the Times, ‘he takes a simple concept — that diverse teams tend to make better decisions — and entertainingly weaves together stories from commerce, counterterrorism and collaborative workplaces to argue persuasively that cognitive diversity boosts collective intelligence’.
Even clever people, in other words, can collectively be ‘perspective-blind’ if they share a
common worldview and aren’t subject to having it challenged. Syed looks at examples everywhere from fashion (why did Gucci ‘get’ Instagram and Prada fail to?) to national security (how come the CIA didn’t see the threat from Al-qaeda?) to show how diversity of staffing in terms of gender, race and cognitive style, ‘breaking down walls’, outside-thebox thinking and all that jazz can yield tangible rewards for organisations.
Rowan approved of the broad line of Syed’s arguments and the clarity of their expression, but noted that a number of the examples and citations were familiar from other similar pop-science books, so queried ‘Syed’s claim that his highly readable synthesis amounts to what he proclaims as a fresh, new “diversity science”’: ‘How rebellious can an idea be when it’s widely entrenched within the bestseller lists?’