Diversity of Thought
Hacking Life By Reducing Group Think
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Nobody is superior, nobody is inferior, but nobody is equal either. People are simply unique, incomparable — Osho
All of us are creatures of habit. Some more so than others. It is hard to break habits especially when you live in a bubble with a set routine and a regular set of people who see the world through the same lens as you do. The danger with living and working in the same ecosystem is that we become victims of group think. We do not question the world in our immediate vicinity and simply take it for granted. Ultimately, we end up reacting to change instead of becoming the agents of change.
Bitcoin’s biggest contribution was to force a change in mindset. It is a Proof of Concept (PoC) that shook the foundations of finance, economics and accounting by re-thinking currencies and monetary policy, cross-border money transfers and recording transactions immutably.
Understanding that disruption is natural and keeping a close watch on emerging technologies will prevent us from bringing the disruption home to our personal lives. This article walks through simple habits that can be implemented in our daily lives to reduce and overcome the danger of homogeneous thinking by increasing exposure to diversity of thought.
Divided We Conquer
One of the most remarkable experience I had as an internal consultant at an international Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) giant in India was to witness a diverse team in action. The corporate function that created these teams for specific projects which were in different countries relied heavily on the Belbin Team Roles model to create teams. The process behind creating a diverse team of professionals in executing a project in a foreign country was fascinating. It had three main objectives:
- Create a team of professionals with different backgrounds that could lead to a diverse set of eyes looking at the problem to come up with a holistic solution.
- Rotate functional expertise e.g. allow an HR professional to review finance. There would always be a finance expert on the team that the HR specialist could consult should he/she run into a…
