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When you want to wow people with a new recipe, you look for ways to combine different kinds of ingredients that will make your dish shine – whether it’s spices that don’t normally go together or foods that don’t normally end up in the same skillet.

The same goes for building innovative teams. If you keep bringing together the same people with similar backgrounds and ideas, you limit yourself to the same outcomes. But if you bring in diversity – in all respects of the term, not just what is traditionally measured – you open yourself up to discovering new, exciting ideas.

When I put together my teams, I look for people who think differently – not just differently than the norm, but differently from each other. They have a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, experiences, skills, personalities, and strengths. I find this makes my teams stronger as a whole. The diverse combination helps us be more innovative and puts us in a better position to problem-solve.

Research backs this up

My personal experience has helped me better understand how diversity spurs innovation, and there’s a whole body of research that supports this thinking as well. For example, a study by the Boston Consulting Group (1) showed that diversity in gender, country of origin, career path, and industry background are all highly linked to innovation among managers. Also, when researchers at North Carolina State’s Poole College of Management Gender looked at the hiring policies of large, publicly-traded companies in the United States, they found that companies with policies that encourage the retention and promotion of workers across the race, sexual orientation, and gender spectrum were more innovative and released more products. (2)

Other studies have shown that diversity enhances decision-making. For instance, there was a great Harvard Business Review article by Alison Reynolds and David Lewis that discussed evidence showing that teams that include different viewpoints or thinking styles (that is, cognitive diversity) solve problems faster. (3) Also, a study by several Witten/Herdecke University academics on the decision-making behaviors of board directors demonstrated that “deep-level diversity” (i.e., differences in background, personality, and values) contributed to a higher degree of creativity. (4)

Assessing how diverse a team is

Clearly there’s plenty of evidence out there that diverse teams are more innovative. But how do you assess how diverse your team is besides looking at gender and ethnicity?

One of the tools we use is a game that explores people’s personalities and innate strengths. The game uses playing cards that display words describing specific personality features – such as “creative,” “analytical,” “empathetic,” and “logical.” The suits, colors, and numbers all have meaning as well and are used to group the cards into different types of overall personalities. These groupings help capture how individual team members think, how they prefer to work, and how they tend to work with others.

As individuals collect cards for themselves and choose cards for their teammates, it prompts discussions and helps them learn more about themselves and their colleagues. One of the “ah-ha” moments is often the discovery of how multi-dimensional their teammates are. This exercise can also help with identifying any gaps on a team so those can be filled in as part of the journey to becoming more innovative as a whole.

The growing importance of having diverse teams

Today’s environment requires fresh thinking, new combinations of skills and experiences, and a higher level of teaming and collaboration. Disruptive technology is going to continue to evolve at a rapid pace, and businesses and individuals will need to not only keep up but also embrace the evolution and seize opportunities to change. Having the ability to think innovatively will continue to grow in importance, and building diverse teams will take on even more significance.

How has your business spurred innovation through diversity?

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(1) Rocío Lorenzo, Nicole Voigt, Karin Schetelig, Annika Zawadzki, Isabell M. Welpe, and Prisca Brosi, “The Mix That Matters: Innovation Through Diversity” (The Boston Consulting Group, 2017).

(2) Roger C. Mayer, Richard S. Warr, and Jing Zhao, “Do Pro‐Diversity Policies Improve Corporate Innovation?” (December 18, 2017).

(3) Alison Reynolds and David Lewis, “Teams Solve Problems Faster When They’re More Cognitively Diverse,” Harvard Business Review (March 30, 2017).

(4) Mariateresa Torchia, Andrea Calabrò, and Michèle Morner, “Board of Directors’ Diversity, Creativity, and Cognitive Conflict: The Role of Board Members’ Interaction,” International Studies of Management & Organization, vol. 45, no. 1 (2015): p. 6-24.

This article represents the views of the author(s) only, and does not necessarily represent the views or professional advice of KPMG LLP.