Enthusiasts vs Sceptics - building cognitively diverse teams

There have been a few posts on LinkedIn recently on the Stockdale paradox (a selection here: Joe Terry's post, Giles Desforges's post) – so named by Jim Collins (Good to Great) after Jim Stockdale, an American POW in Vietnam who said it was the optimists who did not make it out of the POW camps but rather those who – whilst having an unwavering faith that they will prevail in the end – were also confronting the brutally honest facts of their circumstances. I have also been mulling thoughts on diversity of thought (or cognitive diversity) and so through some weird neural connections I thought of this piece.

Whilst the Stockdale paradox seems a compelling one for an individual, business is a team game and my experience is that in most scenarios, some will be optimists (let’s call them enthusiasts) and others sceptics (I don’t like the sound of pessimists as it has too much negative finality) – and of course most people will be on a range between extremes (in fact, I have lately started seeing people refer to themselves as sceptical or optimistic realists). A typical scenario is one where a senior leader (our enthusiast) will want to embark on a new direction – a new strategy, a new operating model, a new organisation, etc. – representing a change. There will be other enthusiasts who sign up to the new goal or new approach without much reservation but there will also be many sceptics – you will recognise them as they are the ones pointing out the hurdles, the challenges, where things could go wrong, why something won’t work.

I have often seen how people on the opposites of the ‘enthusiast to sceptic’ range tend to dismiss the other (more often figuratively but at times, literally), effectively lowering the cognitive diversity of the group, often at a disservice to the desired achievement. Both enthusiasts and sceptics have homework to do – here is my take on these.

The job of the enthusiasts is to keep an open mind and to understand that the sceptics are on the same team. Keeping an open mind is hard – I have memories when I wanted to be right rather than wanting the right answer. Enthusiasts will often call the sceptics glass half empty – except that the sceptics have been turning up and delivering for years so the more negative connotations of ‘half empty’ are of course non-sensical. The benefit of keeping an open mind to the challenges brought out by the sceptics is both a greater organisational commitment to the goal and a higher probability of success. In short, enthusiasts should actively seek out the sceptics and explore their views, treating them as partners in pursuit of the goal. Importantly, as the enthusiasts tend to be in positions of power (it is hard to be a sceptic and a leader of a new idea), they need to make it clear that they welcome different views – otherwise fear will seal the lips of the sceptics.

If enthusiasts have some homework, so do the sceptics – they need to articulate their thoughts in a more nuanced way: either highlighting their agreement to the goal but expressing their desire to help remove hurdles along the way, or stating why the goal is wrong (not only that it is wrong). Instead of sulking in a like-minded group about the brazenness of the enthusiasts, they should actively engage and challenge them. They need to be constructive – not only highlighting the obstacles but also making viable recommendations as to how to remove them. It requires them to be willing to take the risk of speaking out which is uncomfortable. They also need to be self-aware to the fact that they will be seen as a sceptic – and that can be a scary place particularly in a more mercurial, autocratic organisation – and accordingly they must have the ability to self-regulate. If you are a sceptic on everything that you hear from your boss, you might soon find yourself in a tight spot.

Ironically, we can all be enthusiasts or sceptics – it may depend on our position in an organisation (I may be a sceptic vis-à-vis the new CEO’s vision but an enthusiast towards my team about changes I want to drive in my area of the business); it may also be in direct correlation to how far away the stated goal is from our comfort zones, or how lively our imagination is. I don’t believe anyone is fixed either way but rather we are shaped into a specific disposition by the context in which we find ourselves and past experience.

Ensuring you have enabled a mixed team with a range of ‘enthusiast to sceptic’ attitudes will help you achieve more as a team and as a business and you can rightfully claim to have made a right step in cognitive diversity.

In case you want to read more on the broader topic, the following HBR article is helpful in articulating the case for cognitive diversity much more professionally than I could. Teams solve problems faster when they are more cognitively diverse