Unlocking the secrets of how we make Cognitive Diversity work in a changing world

Introducing Sense Worldwide’s Research & Development Initiative

Since Jeremy Brown founded Sense Worldwide in 1999, we have used cognitive diversity to drive tangible success across more than 450 innovation projects for industry-leading brands such as PepsiCo, Nike, Sonos, GE, and Bupa.

Cognitive diversity is defined by Harvard Business Review as “…differences in perspective or information processing styles. It is not predicted by factors such as gender, ethnicity, or age… [It is] how individuals think about and engage with new, uncertain, and complex situations”. For 25 years, Sense Worldwide has been developing a strong knowledge base in the fields of cognitive diversity, creativity, and innovation, mostly through intuition and practical experience.

By leveraging The Sense Network – our cognitively diverse community of over 4,000 people worldwide with anomalous, creative perspectives – we work with companies and brands to conduct breakthrough research and co-creation projects. Our goal is to enable our clients to make creative leaps into the future with confidence.

When we formed our Research & Development initiative, we started to use science and analytics to translate our intuitive knowledge into facts and observations. We sought evidence of what we had learned anecdotally over 25 years. Since 2021, we have been working in collaboration with graduate students at a global top 10 university, to spearhead our research into what it takes to deliver breakthrough innovation.

This research has allowed us to measure certain cognitive traits and understand the effects of other moderating variables, such as Creative Intelligence, psychological safety, and conflict. In the age of AI and synthetic users, this knowledge has become invaluable. We will be able to better understand team composition and dynamics, creativity, what makes outlier perspectives unique and valuable, and use this knowledge in conjunction with AI’s powerful scalability.

 

Project Babylon: Quantifying cognitive diversity and its contribution to successful early-stage innovation

Our first major breakthrough was from Project Babylon. In many ways, this two-year collaboration with a global university was the foundation of where we are today. Though Project Babylon encompassed several stages of work, a large part of the project was concerned with quantifying the notion of cognitive diversity and its contribution towards early-stage innovation success. Our findings on this subject were illuminating. By using machine learning and NLP techniques to predict personality traits, The Sense Network was shown to over-index on intuitive personality types. We also observed that a higher level of cognitive diversity was present on the most successful and innovative project teams.

Using statistical hypothesis testing, we were able to confirm our hypothesis that the mean cognitive diversity scores on the most innovative projects were higher by 0.15 than on less successful projects. Our tests showed this difference to be statistically significant.

 

 

Logistic regression also revealed that cognitive diversity acts as a predictor of innovation success and that the two variables have a statistically significant, positive relationship. In fact, it was the single best predictor of innovative success among all other variables used. When used as the sole predictor in the regression, the diversity scores retained a p-value (the probability that the results occurred due to chance) of less than 0.01, when industry standard accepts less than 0.05. This result indicates a high degree of statistical significance and empirically proves cognitive diversity to be a driver of innovation within our projects.

However, there was one major limitation that we could see – we were measuring cognition directly through existing personality measures. With our fresh insights from Project Babylon, we knew the next step was to develop our own validated measure of cognitive traits specifically formulated for innovation design stages. This is where Project Rosetta began.

 

Project Rosetta: Developing and validating a proprietary measure of cognitive traits

An individual’s cognitive traits and information processing styles determine how they think and approach innovation. Similar to personality traits, these are relatively stable over time, though people may find themselves responding differently depending on the environment. Therefore, different innovation stages – from early to late – require different mindsets and levels of cognitive diversity within a team.

1. For discovering new ideas, you need people to go wide and see beyond the obvious. By bringing a range of radical, diverse perspectives, they can intuitively uncover hidden connections and possibilities. 
2. When you are trying to define a problem, you need people to go deep into the problem or challenge at hand. It’s important to have empathy for consumers and to be able to identify their latent needs, using their insight to create a vision for the future. 
3. When you are ideating, you need to be able to seek answers to unsolved questions, and to transform ideas into tangible solutions. The team can collaborate by stretching, challenging, and building on the ideas of others. 
4. Finally, when you need to evaluate those solutions, you need people to select, test, and transform the best ideas with an understanding of the bigger picture. This is where being able to apply valuable specialist knowledge about the market and industry is key.

We looked extensively into the existing literature around trait-based measures of cognitive styles. Not only are there a number of factors which can make up an individual’s cognitive style, there are also an abundance of variables which can act as moderators on the relationship between cognition and innovation. These may include team dynamics (such as conflict and collaboration), organisational values, leadership, and psychological safety. For purely capturing the traits of an individual’s cognitive style, we went through several rounds of development and validation before determining four traits which can be measured on a scale:

• Apply: Do you prefer to apply ideas incrementally or radically?

• Evaluate: Do you prefer to evaluate ideas by emotion or logic??

• Synthesise: Do you prefer to go wide or go deep with your ideas?

• Attend: Do you prefer to focus on solutions or problems?

By measuring these cognitive traits at the individual level, we can calculate the cognitive diversity score for a given group or team. We know from our research with the university during Project Babylon that increased cognitive diversity contributes to successful, innovative outcomes. The analysis from Project Rosetta, however, based on data collected using our newly validated measures, revealed that the traits themselves do not act as particularly strong predictors of innovation on their own. This is an important distinction.

These results demonstrate how the value of certain cognitive traits matters most when they come together in the right diverse mix, rather than the inherent traits themselves. In simple terms: every individual brings unique value, but it’s the team they are a part of that matters most if you want to achieve breakthrough innovation.

 

Creative Intelligence: Dimensionalising creativity and fostering a culture that drives innovation

In parallel to our research on cognitive diversity, we also explored the concept of Creative Intelligence. IQ and EQ are well-established measures, and we were interested in whether there could be something similar for creativity – CQ. We define CQ as “the ability to understand, interpret and act with imagination”. To make this more tangible, we developed five distinct dimensions that are the building blocks of Creative Intelligence.

• Expand Your Mind: Explore outside your boundaries to discover future possibilities beyond the obvious and your current viewpoint.

• Challenge Your Default: Reframe your business challenges. Mix it up to see the world and opportunities from a fresh perspective.

• Seek Out Diverse Perspectives: Invite other perspectives into your silo to uncover, explore, and interpret the unexpected and unknown.

• Build Your Creative Confidence: Learn to deal with the uncertainty of the future. Jump into the deep end and get comfortable with ambiguity.

• Adopt An Experimental Mindset: Test, learn, and iterate. Stress-test scenarios and develop your strategic responses to market shifts with future users.

We ran a large scale research study to collect data and validate our measure. The subsequent analysis revealed that Creative Intelligence and innovation have a correlation of 92% across hundreds of data points. After running several reliability tests and regression models, we found that over 90% of the variance in innovative activities (the dependent variable) can be explained by the following: cognitive traits, Creative Intelligence, team dynamics, and various control variables. We can therefore make highly accurate predictions about innovation because of this relationship.

 

Takeaways

This knowledge and IP is enabling us to intelligently design teams full of diverse, creative, and reflective individuals. As Generative AI changes the landscape of work, it is vital to understand where the balance between human input and AI lies. This will allow us to explore the unexpected and unknown. While AI has the power to produce accurate knowledge at speed and scale, there is the risk of overlap, repetition, and groupthink – the very thing that cognitive diversity prevents. Humans can provide empathy, lived experience, real understanding, context, and nuance.

Our pioneering work in cognitive diversity and CQ gives us a unique advantage in understanding these factors. This ensures that we harness the strengths of both, avoiding the pitfalls of redundancy and fostering an environment where innovation thrives. Our research, supported by our collaboration with a world-leading university, has proven that cognitive diversity drives innovation, and has unlocked powerful knowledge by enabling us to measure cognitive traits and Creative Intelligence.

 

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Sense Worldwide enables companies to see, think and act differently to identify growth opportunities, disrupt categories and create cultural relevance. The Sense Network is a community of 4,000+ creators from over 1,300 cities worldwide. It is through their divergent perspectives that you will understand the future and develop a breakthrough strategy. By collaborating with us you are harnessing cognitive diversity at scale.

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