My guest this week is Matthew Syed. Matthew was formerly the British table tennis number one and is now a journalist the best selling author of books such as “Bounce” and “Black Box Thinking”.
Matthew’s new book, “Rebel Ideas” has just been published. In the book, he explores a topic that we’ve looked at a few times on the show, the importance of diverse thinking in teams and organizations.
In the interview, we discuss:
- When and why diversity matters and how it contributes to success
- Diversity of background, perspective, and thinking
- Rebel ideas that challenge, cross pollenate, diverge and augment.
- An example of the CIA being individually perceptive but collectively blind
- The danger of assimilation to the dominant assumptions of a business.
Matthew also shares his advice for recruiters and suggest ways we can all have more rebel ideas
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:14]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 209 of the Recruiting Future podcast. My guest this week is Matthew Syed. Matthew was formerly the British number one table tennis player and is now a journalist and best selling author of books such as Bounce and Black Box Thinking. His new book, Rebel Ideas has just come out and in it he explores a topic that we’ve looked at a couple of times on the show, the importance of diverse thinking in teams and companies. In our conversation, Matthew talks us through his research with some great examples and has a lot of advice to share for talent acquisition and HR professionals.
Matt Alder [00:01:58]:
Hi Matthew and welcome to the podcast.
Matthew Syed [00:02:01]:
A very good morning.
Matthew Syed [00:02:02]:
Thanks for having me on.
Matt Adler [00:02:03]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Now, for the very few people out there who may not have come across you and your work before, could you just give us a quick introduction to you and what you do?
Matthew Syed [00:02:15]:
Well, I have quite a complex background. I’ll give you a brief overview. I used to be a sportsman, a table tennis player. I was a British number one for 10 years and then retired from table.
Matthew Syed [00:02:26]:
To tennis, moved into journalism with the Times.
Matthew Syed [00:02:29]:
But I think probably the biggest thing I do is write books and the first one was bounce in 2010, then.
Matthew Syed [00:02:36]:
Black box thinking in 2015.
Matthew Syed [00:02:38]:
I wrote a children’s book called you are awesome last year and my new book, Rebel Ideas is sort of around the same theme. It’s about performance and finding an edge in a competitive world.
Matt Adler [00:02:52]:
Absolutely. And I think what you’re sort of talking about in Rebel Ideas is a. Is a very relevant topic for everyone in the audience. Could you just. I suppose, Beth, the best place to start is why have you written this book and what’s it about?
Matthew Syed [00:03:05]:
Well, I became interested, very interested with my background in sport, in the nature of teamwork, and my initial idea was.
Matthew Syed [00:03:14]:
To write a book about what distinguishes.
Matthew Syed [00:03:17]:
The very good teams or the great.
Matthew Syed [00:03:20]:
Teams from the just good teams.
Matthew Syed [00:03:23]:
And the more I researched this area.
Matthew Syed [00:03:26]:
The more I kept coming back to.
Matthew Syed [00:03:28]:
The concept of diversity. And it seemed to me that the.
Matthew Syed [00:03:32]:
Distinguishing feature of the truly great teams.
Matthew Syed [00:03:36]:
The truly great organizations, the really collectively intelligent human groups, is that they both were diverse, but also had the right kind of diversity. And occasionally I’ve been to HR conferences and other conferences, and diversity, I felt was being talked about very positively and passionately, but often, occasionally anyway, in rather vague terms. And I wanted to try and drill down into precisely why diversity matters, when it matters, and how it contributes to the success, the innovation, and the intelligence of teams and institutions.
Matt Adler [00:04:14]:
So in the research for the book, I mean, how did you research the book? Who, who, who did you speak to? Where have you sort of gone to, you know, work ideas through and find the kind of evidence for them?
Matthew Syed [00:04:25]:
Oh, well, gosh.
Matthew Syed [00:04:26]:
So researching the book, it’s a combination of looking at the scientific papers, so the academic literature with randomized controlled trials.
Matthew Syed [00:04:36]:
And observational studies with some minimum level.
Matthew Syed [00:04:39]:
Of rigor, and of course, on the.
Matthew Syed [00:04:41]:
Other hand, trying to find really compelling real world examples to show that the.
Matthew Syed [00:04:47]:
Research cashes out in the real world. And I enjoy that a lot. It’s just so interesting. And I think I’m probably a bit like you, in a lucky position of having access to senior leaders at business level and in governments and the academics who research them. And so it’s bringing all of these.
Matthew Syed [00:05:05]:
Different threads together to create, I hope.
Matthew Syed [00:05:08]:
And you can be the judge of this, a book that reflects the complexity of the topic, but also does it in a, in a digestible and fun way.
Matt Adler [00:05:15]:
So what are the sort of, sort of the headline learnings from the, from the book you mentioned? The sort of the right, the right kind of diversity, you know, tell us a bit more about that.
Matthew Syed [00:05:24]:
Well, interestingly, I was at a business conference when somebody was on the platform.
Matthew Syed [00:05:30]:
Talking about the importance of diversity.
Matthew Syed [00:05:33]:
And there was a lot of nodding heads. And I think people intuitively get that this can be really important. But one of the questions was, if you’re hiring a sprint relay team, surely.
Matthew Syed [00:05:44]:
You should hire the fastest runners.
Matthew Syed [00:05:47]:
And if the fastest runners are of the same gender, race, religious background, sexual orientation, social class, why would that matter? And if you were going to diversify that team and by application hire slower runners, you probably wouldn’t win the Olympic Games. And there was a bit of an atmosphere in the room and this observation.
Matthew Syed [00:06:14]:
Was made, but I must say, I.
Matthew Syed [00:06:15]:
Found myself nodding my head. It seems to me that in certain contexts, diversity really doesn’t add to performance at all. And sprint relay is one example. Scott Page of Michigan University has come up with a lot of different examples where diversity really doesn’t matter that much. But when you move from quite simple.
Matthew Syed [00:06:37]:
Linear, separable tasks to highly complex tasks.
Matthew Syed [00:06:42]:
That I think, is when diversity really starts to have profound and often counterintuitively large effects. So if you take, for example, economic forecasting, which is a great area to.
Matthew Syed [00:06:54]:
Study because people give precise predictions, you.
Matthew Syed [00:06:56]:
Can measure them on how accurate they are and you can slice and dice the data. In economic forecasting, diversity turns out to be incredibly significant. And a very good experiment by Jack Sol. Just go through it briefly.
Matthew Syed [00:07:13]:
A psychologist from Duke University took the.
Matthew Syed [00:07:15]:
Top forecasters in the world 258 them.
Matthew Syed [00:07:18]:
He measured their track record, their forecasting accuracy.
Matthew Syed [00:07:21]:
The most accurate forecaster was about 5% more accurate than an average forecaster, which isn’t terribly surprising. You would expect there to be some variation. But then he took the top six forecasters and put them in what you might call a nominal team and took the average of their forecasts and compared it with the accuracy of the top forecaster. Now, in a running race, to go back to the sprint relay example, the time of the fastest runner, by definition, is faster than the average time of the top six runners. Is that fair? Yeah, unless it’s a dead heat. But with the economic forecasting, the average of the top six forecasters, it wasn’t.
Matthew Syed [00:08:04]:
1% more accurate or 5% more accurate or 10% more accurate.
Matthew Syed [00:08:09]:
It was 15% more accurate than the top forecaster.
Matthew Syed [00:08:13]:
Now, this is a dramatic and powerful effect.
Matthew Syed [00:08:16]:
And why does it happen? It hinges on diversity of perspective.
Matthew Syed [00:08:19]:
The six different economists have diverse models.
Matthew Syed [00:08:23]:
Different ways of making sense of economic phenomena. Each of those models contains useful information. And so if you bring them together, you get this big uplift in forecasting, accuracy providing you can eliminate the errors and the errors are eliminated by the technique of averaging. And it was just the. I think Jack, the psychologist who did this, was just shocked at the level.
Matthew Syed [00:08:45]:
Of uplift that diversity brings to a.
Matthew Syed [00:08:48]:
Complex domain like forecasting. And just to finish this off, when it comes to areas outside forecasting, like.
Matthew Syed [00:08:56]:
Innovation, creativity, problem solving, I think diversity.
Matthew Syed [00:09:00]:
Has an even stronger effect.
Matt Adler [00:09:02]:
So leading on from that, I’m guessing, obviously that’s why the book’s called Rebel Ideas. Why Rebel?
Matthew Syed [00:09:10]:
Well, I don’t mean in that title. Yes, it’s an interesting one.
Matthew Syed [00:09:13]:
I didn’t mean that people should rebel.
Matthew Syed [00:09:15]:
For the sake of it. But it was to contrast teams that are similar, where the constituents of the teams are similar in a certain meaningful way. We’re drawn, I think, to people who often think like us and occasionally who.
Matthew Syed [00:09:33]:
Even look like us.
Matthew Syed [00:09:34]:
Psychologists sometimes call it homophily. It feels quite validating to be surrounded.
Matthew Syed [00:09:41]:
By people who reflect our views back.
Matthew Syed [00:09:43]:
To us and who corroborate our perspectives. It makes us feel a bit smarter. And so I think there is an.
Matthew Syed [00:09:49]:
Unconscious drift within organizations towards clusters of people who think in very similar ways.
Matthew Syed [00:09:56]:
And therefore are not providing what I would call rebel ideas that challenge, cross pollinate, diverge and augment. And I try and bring to life how teams that do have a certain.
Matthew Syed [00:10:11]:
Minimum level of rebelliousness within the team tend to perform much better.
Matt Adler [00:10:15]:
And did you come across any sort of really interesting examples of this in, in the research that you were doing?
Matthew Syed [00:10:22]:
Well, there are lots and lots of examples. I think perhaps the one that I start the book with is a CIA which had in the build up to 911 and the CIA had very rigorous and state of the art recruitment procedures. They tested potential analysts on all sorts of different dimensions of intellect, reasoning, analysis. They obviously did background checks, polygraph checks as well. And they did hire exceptional people. All of the ex CIA analysts that.
Matthew Syed [00:10:54]:
I interviewed were remarkably bright, highly committed.
Matthew Syed [00:10:58]:
Patriotic to the American cause and so on, just what you would hope for. But because of this thing called homophily, these analysts tended to look and think in quite similar ways. They were largely white, male Protestant, west coast American liberal arts graduates. So there may have been some uncomfortable, there will have been some unconscious bias in the recruiting. And it’s fascinating how these very bright people shared the same blind spots in a complex challenge.
Matthew Syed [00:11:32]:
I think all of us would have.
Matthew Syed [00:11:34]:
To admit that we don’t know everything. And that’s why we need to work with people who have different backgrounds, perspectives.
Matthew Syed [00:11:41]:
And meaningfully useful information that impinge on.
Matthew Syed [00:11:44]:
The problem we’re trying to solve. And the CIA just didn’t have that. And so they were talking to each other about the threat of Al Qaeda, they were agreeing with each other, therefore they’re becoming more confident about their judgment. But they were missing the bigger picture. And I sort of build a chronology about what was actually happening in the Middle east and elsewhere and what the.
Matthew Syed [00:12:11]:
CIA were thinking given the recent release.
Matthew Syed [00:12:14]:
Of their confidential deliberations. And I think it is indisputable that they were effectively. The phrase I use is individually perceptive, but collectively blind.
Matt Adler [00:12:26]:
I mean that’s a Fascinating example from an employer recruitment HR perspective. What would your advice be to companies in terms of what they can do to make sure they have this kind of diversity of thought within their business in terms of who they recruit, but also how they structure teams and run the company?
Matthew Syed [00:12:51]:
Basically, yes, I think there are vast implications. I mean, if you just go back to the economic forecasting for a sec, and sorry to go back to that, but you can get very clear, Draw very clear inferences from this. Say, for example. Right, so I’m going to do the. You’re going to get bored of this.
Matthew Syed [00:13:07]:
But the contrast between sprinting and economic.
Matthew Syed [00:13:09]:
Forecasting, for the last time, I promise. If you took Usain Bolt, the fastest runner in the world, or the equivalent to whoever it is today, and cloned Usain Bolt, and you got four of them in a relay team, that’s quite a good relay team, isn’t it?
Matthew Syed [00:13:29]:
Because every member of your team is.
Matthew Syed [00:13:31]:
Faster than every single runner in any other team, as long as they can pass the baton effectively. Not as easy as it sounds, frankly. But anyway, you’re going to win every single race. But say you’ve got the most accurate economic forecaster and could clone that forecaster and you put four or say six of them in a team, on the surface, it looks like an incredible team.
Matthew Syed [00:13:54]:
Every individual in your team is more.
Matthew Syed [00:13:56]:
Talented than any individual in any other team because every individual is more accurate. But if you go back to what I said earlier, the cloned group would be 15% less accurate than a diverse group of six economists who might be individually less talented.
Matthew Syed [00:14:17]:
That, I think, is of fundamental significance.
Matthew Syed [00:14:20]:
To people who work in recruitment. Because the reason, by the way, is.
Matthew Syed [00:14:25]:
All of these six clones use the.
Matthew Syed [00:14:27]:
Same model of the economy, so they make the same error and they share.
Matthew Syed [00:14:31]:
The same blind spots.
Matthew Syed [00:14:32]:
When you bring diverse economists together, I mean, this is a mathematical truism, you’re.
Matthew Syed [00:14:37]:
Going to get an uplift in forecasting accuracy.
Matthew Syed [00:14:40]:
I mean, in prediction markets it’s called the wisdom of the crowds. And it’s a well established thing. But it tells me, I think, and I think it ought to show that.
Matthew Syed [00:14:51]:
Meritocracy in and of itself is a.
Matthew Syed [00:14:53]:
Flawed way of hiring, because meritocracy just looks at how talented individuals are. But if you are hypothetically a software company and you have a valid tool that measures the potential of your recruits and you hire the most talented recruits, it is possible that the most talented recruits went to the same university which say, for example, had a high reputation for software training, and they left that university having Studied under the same professors.
Matthew Syed [00:15:30]:
Using the same models, the same heuristics.
Matthew Syed [00:15:33]:
They share the same perspectives, perhaps even the same worldviews, that could be a collectively highly unintelligent team. So being able to take a step back and to recognize that the ability of a group is a function both of the individual ability of its members and their collective diversity, that I think is the key insight. But that diversity has to be germane to the problem. Of course, with economic forecasters, you want accurate forecasters, you have different models with an indifferent. In other contexts, you would want different types of diversity where those diverse dimensions impinge directly on the problem the organization faces.
Matt Adler [00:16:16]:
I mean, that’s really interesting. And I think the interesting thing for me is in lots of the conversations I have on the podcast and with clients and things like that, I’m starting to see that way of thinking coming in. And it is very different from before because, you know, I’m thinking back 10 years or so, and people were trying to recruit, literally people with the same background and the same. Because they felt they kind of get identical performance. So it’s, it’s. It’s interesting to see that shift. But there’s obviously quite some way, quite some way to go. Final, final question. From a, from an individual perspective, in terms of someone’s, you know, some of someone’s career and wanting to perform a certain level of, of anything, are there sort of any lessons that individuals can take from, from these ideas?
Matthew Syed [00:17:03]:
Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I think perhaps there is in that. That phenomenon where I think we do feel more comfortable surrounded by people who think in the same way as us, who are corroborating what we think, who are reflecting and mirroring our perspectives, it’s to just see a potential alarm bell when that’s happening too much. It may well be that we’re surrounded by people who are just a bit too much like us, that we’re recruiting people who think very similar to us, or that we have started to assimilate the dominant assumptions of the business and that we haven’t got enough room for these rebel ideas, these divergent perspectives. I think it’s very easy how it happens, but just being aware of the danger and seeing loyalty not as people.
Matthew Syed [00:17:56]:
Just agreeing with us, but occasionally challenging.
Matthew Syed [00:17:59]:
Us to see constructive dissent as a potential positive for an organization. I mean, if we move. I mean, I’ve talked a lot about prediction, but if you move from prediction to, say, for example, a very important area for businesses, which is innovation and creativity, the very intuitive way to see this is if you, for example, got a team together and asked each of the members of the team to come up with creative ideas to, for example, solve the obesity crisis. And each individual came up with 10 really useful ideas. So you’ve got 10 members in the team, each one of which has come up with 10 useful ideas. You might think that you know you’ve got 100 useful ideas, but each of these people thinks in the same way and they all come up with the same 10 ideas. You only have 10 useful ideas overall. Whereas if you have 10 people who are different from one another who come.
Matthew Syed [00:18:54]:
Up with 10 different ideas, you’ve got a hundred useful ideas, which is almost a thousand percent more useful ideas.
Matthew Syed [00:19:00]:
So you can have groups who are individually identical in terms of talent. But when you get that collective diversity, it has radical implications for creativity and innovation. And in the future, I think innovation is going to be almost. I mean, there’s a big shift in.
Matthew Syed [00:19:17]:
The structure of innovation today that it’s.
Matthew Syed [00:19:20]:
Mostly this diverse recombinant innovation rather than incremental innovation. And I think that for individuals who are in the innovation space, just recognizing there are people who think differently, who may have slightly different specialisms, who may come from a slightly different background, who might have ideas that can usefully cross pollinate and really lift the level of the level of innovation.
Matt Adler [00:19:45]:
So where can people find you and find the book.
Matthew Syed [00:19:48]:
Well, thank you. The book is called Rebel the Power of Diverse Thinking. Hopefully that will be available in all good bookshops. And I have a website and you can find that just by googling.
Matthew Syed [00:20:02]:
Matthew Syed.
Matt Adler [00:20:03]:
Matthew, thank you very much for talking to me.
Matthew Syed [00:20:05]:
Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:20:07]:
My thanks to Matthew Syed. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app which you can find by searching for recruiting future in your app store. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
