Today, I spoke with Scott E. Page, who is a professor at Michigan and is extremely knowledgeable when it comes to diversity.  For the benefit of my blog readers, I asked Scott a lot of questions on how diversity in teams is crucial to building a strong personal brand.  One of the main conclusions you’ll see is that if you supplement your skills with a diverse team, you will be able to solve problems faster and smarter.

Scott, what is the real power in diversity?

Image Credit: Allstate.com

I think everyone recognizes that solving hard problems and anticipating the future in a complex world requires enormous cognitive capacity. Given a cognitive task, we have two options:

• we can hope one person has the ability to accomplish it


• we can choose to rely on a team or a collection of people

As the task becomes harder, the team or collection becomes the better choice. Why? Diversity. Each person brings a unique set of tools, representations, and heuristics to bear on a problem. The value of diversity should be obvious: if you have cognitive diverse people, you