Rebel Ideas- the Power of Diverse Thinking

by Matthew Syed

None of the hijackers were stopped by security because the airport authorities had not been alerted to the threat. The hijackers were permitted to take knives up to four inches in length into the cabin, because intelligence analysts had not grasped the fact that these were the weapons that would enable them to turn jet airliners into deadly missiles.

  The first two planes took off just before 8 a.m. At 8.15, the controller in the Boston Air Traffic Control Center noticed something odd: American Airlines Flight 11 was deviating to the left, over Worcester, Massachusetts, when it should have been turning south. At 8.22, the plane’s transponder stopped emitting signals. Six minutes later, the plane banked steeply, as if seeking out the Hudson River Valley. At 8.43, the plane swept over the George Washington Bridge with a deafening roar.

  It was now converging with the North Tower like a bullet.

  The last thing to do is remember God, and your last words should be that there is no God but Allah and that Mohamed is His prophet. You will notice that the plane will stop and then start flying again. This is the hour in which you will meet God. Angels are calling your name.

  VII

  The September 11th attacks were a preventable tragedy. The critics of US intelligence were right about that. But the problem was not that the CIA missed obvious warning signs. This is where critics fell prey to ‘creeping determinism’, as defenders of the agencies have long claimed. The warning signs were not obvious to the CIA and, ironically, would not have been obvious to many of the groups who sat in judgement over them, many of which themselves lacked diversity. The dearth of Muslims at the CIA is merely one illustration, then, albeit an intuitive one, at how homogeneity undermined the world’s foremost intelligence agency. It provides an insight into how a more diverse group would have created a richer understanding not just about the threat posed by Al Qaeda, but dangers throughout the world. How different frames of reference, different perspectives, would have created a more comprehensive, nuanced, and powerful synthesis.

  A startlingly high proportion of staff at the CIA had grown up in middle-class families, endured little financial hardship, or alienation, or extremism, or the signs that might act as precursors to radicalisation, or any of a multitude of other experiences that might have added formative insights to the intelligence process. Each would have been assets in a more diverse team. As a group, however, they were flawed. Their frames of reference overlapped. This is not a criticism of white, Protestant, male Americans; quite the reverse. It is an argument that white, Protestant, male American analysts are being let down if they are placed in a team lacking diversity.

  Consider that the most devastating testimony came from within the ranks of the CIA itself, albeit long after the event. Carmen Medina, a former deputy director who, at the time of her appointment, was one of the few women to make the upper echelons of the agency, fought for diversity during her thirty-two years at Langley, mostly in vain. In a remarkable interview in 2017 for The Cyber Brief, a small digital platform for cyber experts – an interview that barely registered in news circles – she pierced to the heart of one of the greatest intelligence failures in American history. She said:

  The CIA has not met its own goals for diversity. If the composition of the US national security community is such that almost everyone has one world view, we are not in a position to understand our adversaries and anticipate what they are going to do. So, I think it’s important that the intelligence community understand and be home to a wide range of views and outlooks about the world.

  She went on: ‘If you really consider differences of opinion and dissenting views and different experiential bases, what you get is a richer and more accurate view of the world.’

  Perhaps the bitterest irony is that even if the CIA had sensed the warning signs emanating from Afghanistan and beyond, and had decided to infiltrate the Al Qaeda network (the group had operatives in more than twenty-five countries), they would have struggled to do so. Why? Because the lack of diversity among CIA analysts was mirrored by a lack of diversity in the field.

  Intelligence expert Milo Jones notes that the CIA had few analysts who could read or speak Chinese, Korean, Hindi, Urdu, Farsi or Arabic, together making up the languages of more than a third of the world’s population. According to the academic Amy Zegart, only 20 per cent of the graduating class of clandestine case officers in 2001 were fluent in a non-Romance language. As late as 1998, the CIA didn’t employ a single case officer who spoke Pashto, one of the principal languages of Afghanistan. In many ways, this underpinned the mystification of the 9/11 Commission. ‘The methods for detecting and then warning of surprise attack that the US government had so painstakingly developed in the decades after Pearl Harbor did not fail; instead, they were not really tried.’32 The most expensively assembled intelligence agency in the world never got off the starting blocks.

  It is worth noting that many of the TV dramatisations of 9/11 pointed to a different culprit: poor communication between the intelligence services due to inter-agency rivalry. There were, indeed, many crucial moments, not least a heated meeting between the CIA and FBI in May 2001, when the former refused to disclose information about Khalid Muhammad Abdallah al-Mihdhar, who would go on to become one of the five hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77. Some argue that had the CIA shared what they knew, the FBI would have realised that Al Qaeda operatives were already within the borders of the United States.

  But while it would be wrong to downplay these and other problems,33 it would be mistaken to characterise them as the root cause of the failure. The deepest issue was more subtle; a problem that existed in plain sight for decades, and which Carmen Medina herself put her finger on, albeit too late. Speaking in 2017, she said: ‘[The lack of diversity] is such an irony because if any organisation needs an effective way of dealing with differences of opinion, it has got to be the intelligence community.’

  And this is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all. Milo Jones has argued that the failures that characterised the build-up to 9/11 have been repeated throughout the history of the CIA, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Iranian Revolution and the failure to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union. ‘Each of these failures can be traced, directly and incontrovertibly, to the same blind spot at the heart of the agency,’ Jones said when we met in London. And this shows why both sides of this long and sometimes bitter debate – both those who defended the intelligence services and those who attacked them – have overlooked the key issue. The detractors were right to say that the threat was obvious in hindsight. The defenders were right to respond that the CIA hired highly talented people, and the threat was not obvious to them.

  What is certain is that no blame should attach to any individual analyst. They were not lazy, or asleep on the job, or negligent or any of the pejoratives typically used to explain underperformance. They didn’t lack insight or patriotism or work ethic. Indeed, it could be argued that no single intelligence analyst lacked anything at all. What they lacked emerged only at the level of the group.

  The CIA were individually perceptive but collectively blind. And it is in the cross-hairs of this paradox that we glimpse the imperative of diversity.

  2

  Rebels Versus Clones

  I

  Midway through 2016, I received an email from David Sheepshanks, the chairman of the National Football Centre, inviting me to join the Football Association’s Technical Advisory Board. This group was set up to advise Martin Glenn, the chief executive, Dan Ashworth, Technical Director of the England men’s and women’s elite teams, and Gareth Southgate, the England men’s head coach. I found myself joining a group that included Manoj Badale, a British Asian founder of high-tech start-ups, Sue Campbell, an administrator in Olympic sports, Sir Michael Barber, an educationalist, Stuart Lancaster, former head coach of the England rugby team, Sir Dave Brailsford, a cycling coach, and, later, Lucy Giles, the first female college commander at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

  The objective of the group was clea
r. The England men’s team had underperformed in major competitions for decades, most recently in the defeat to Iceland in the 2016 European Championship. This led to much soul-searching about why a nation that had done so much to popularise football around the world had failed to win either the World Cup or European Championship for more than fifty years. Some called it a mental block. Others pointed to technical deficiencies in coaching. Still others worried about the influence of the Premier League. Most agreed that England struggled with penalty shoot-outs, knocked out of the World Cups in 1990, 1998 and 2006 and the European Championships in 1996, 2004 and 2012. Indeed, no team had lost more penalty shoot-outs at World Cups and European Championships than England.

  Perhaps understandably the English football community had grave misgivings about the group that had been assembled. After all, the board contained many people who were not, themselves, football experts. Indeed, Graeme Le Saux, a former England international, was the only football insider. Writing in The Times Henry Winter said: ‘The FA does not need experts in cycling, rugby union and table tennis to advise it on why a bunch of footballers are so hapless at tournaments.’ In truth, this was one of the politer comments. The idea was that figures such as Lancaster, who had spent a lifetime in rugby, and Badale, whose experience was drawn from the world of technology, knew less about football than people such as, say, Harry Redknapp or Tony Pulis, both managers of multiple football clubs. ‘Redknapp knows far more about football than those who are supposed to be advising the FA,’ one football journalist said. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  The striking thing about such comments is that they were indisputably true. Redknapp has probably forgotten more about football than Badale will ever know, and Pulis’s knowledge of the game far exceeds that of Barber and Campbell, let alone Lancaster and Giles. Indeed, when I read Winter’s column, I couldn’t help nodding along in agreement. How could this group possibly assist Southgate, not to mention Glenn or Dan Ashworth?

  And yet this is why the experience of being on the board proved to be so eye-opening. None of the members was paid, but as we got to know each other, we came to look forward to the meetings, regarding them as the most unusual of educations. The most exhilarating moments occurred when someone in the room said something not known to anyone else; when they offered an insight drawn from experiences that were, in some way, unique. In other words, when they offered what we might call ‘rebel ideas’.

  Moments such as when Lancaster offered a perspective on selection before a major competition based upon his experiences at the 2015 Rugby World Cup. Or when Brailsford shared details on the use of large data sets to improve diet and fitness. Or when Giles offered insights about building mental fortitude from her knowledge of the army. Or when Badale talked about the techniques used by tech start-ups to drive innovation. Or when Barber talked about turning abstract ideas into practice drawing upon his experiences as the first head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit under Tony Blair. The precise details of these contributions are confidential, but this isn’t really the point. The point is that this was a group brimming with cognitive diversity. Indeed, I have little doubt that by altering the composition of the board from time to time, it can continue to offer useful advice in a competitive world.

  I also found myself wondering what would have happened if the FA had, instead, recruited Redknapp, Pulis and others with deeper experience of the game. This group would undoubtedly have had more impressive credentials. Indeed, every brain in the room would have been overflowing with footballing know-how and experience, a paradigm of what is often considered a wise group.

  But would it have been effective? The problem is that Redknapp and Pulis know very similar things. Their frames of reference overlap. They were each socialised into the dominant assumptions of English football, about a way of playing and coaching, and much else besides. They know a lot about football, but – crucially – they know very little that Southgate doesn’t already know. Their presence would almost certainly have led to a mirroring dynamic, inadvertently entrenching the latent assumptions within the English game. This is the classic signature of homophily. A group of wise individuals would almost certainly have become an unwise board. The problem wouldn’t have been with any single person; the problem would have emerged from the whole.

  Diverse groups express radically different properties. It was fascinating to see how people who were not expert in football were nevertheless able to pierce through to some of the underlying weaknesses, whether in recruitment or coaching methods, or bring a fresh perspective to media relations or preparing for a penalty shoot-out. Rebel ideas were often rejected. Exchanges were robust. But these almost always led to divergent thinking and more sophisticated solutions.

  The group is by no means perfect, I should emphasise. There are many gaps in our understanding. And there have been moments when the discussion has not flowed at all smoothly. Any group would benefit from some change to its methods and operation. Collective intelligence should always evolve.

  But it was this experience, above all else, that got me thinking about the theme for this book. It was clear that diversity has underrated power; something I had never previously grasped. Yet I also found myself wanting to become clearer about how and why. Experiencing the dynamics of diversity is one thing; knowing how to make it work in different contexts, different industries – knowing how to truly optimise it – is quite another.

  I began going to conferences on diversity, and meeting people who work in the field. I attended sessions for HR professionals, chief executives, even political leaders. But what struck me most forcibly from these interactions was that although diversity is a buzz topic, people often meant different things by the same term. Some talked about gender diversity, others about neurodiversity, others about racial diversity. Often, people didn’t define what they meant, or specify why it mattered. There seemed to be fuzziness in the debate.

  And this is why it seemed important to seek a science of diversity. I wanted to uncover concepts that explain both why homogenous institutions tend to fail, often without realising why, but also why diverse teams are capable of becoming more than the sum of the parts. Concepts that help to explain why diversity is coming to the fore across all branches of academia, and starting to dominate the strategies of cutting-edge institutions, in business, sport and beyond.

  With this in mind, let us spend this chapter injecting a little more precision into what we have learned so far. We will look at the contours of collective intelligence, how it emerges and the barriers that can prevent organisations from realising their potential. Above all, we will see why teams of rebels beat teams of clones.

  II

  We can express the basic idea of diversity science in visual form. Suppose the rectangle in Figure 1 represents the universe of useful ideas; that’s to say, the insights, perspectives, experiences and thinking styles relevant to a particular problem or objective. We might call this the ‘problem space’.

  With simple problems, one person might possess all this ‘information’. Diversity is unnecessary. But with complex problems, no one person will have all the relevant insights. Even the smartest individual will have only a subset of knowledge. We can represent a smart person, David, with the circle. He knows a lot, but he doesn’t know everything.

  But we can now see the dangers of homophily. In Figure 2, we can see what happens when a group of people come together who think in the same way. Every individual is smart. They each have impressive knowledge. But they are also homogenous. They know similar things, and share the same perspectives. They are, so to speak, ‘clone-like’. This, of course, was the basic problem at the CIA.

  Think how comforting it is to be surrounded by people who think in the same way, who mirror our perspectives, who confirm our prejudices. It makes us feel smarter. It validates our world view. Indeed, evidence from brain scanners indicates that when others reflect our own thoughts back to us, it stimulates the pleasure centres of our brains. Homoph
ily is somewhat like a hidden gravitational force, dragging human groups towards one corner of the problem space.

  These dangers are as ancient as mankind itself. They were certainly well understood by the Ancient Greeks. In Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle writes that people ‘love those who are like themselves’. Plato notes in Phaedrus that ‘similarity begets friendship’1. The phrase ‘birds of a feather flock together’ is derived from the early pages of Book One of Plato’s masterpiece The Republic. Indeed, if you look closely enough, the danger of intellectual conformity is an abiding preoccupation of Greek culture. And this is why Figure 2 is worth keeping in mind, for it represents a pervasive problem in the world today: groups of people that are individually intelligent but collectively, well, stupid.

  *

  The Poll Tax (Community Charge) has been surrounded by infamy since it was first introduced by the British government in the late 1980s. The centrepiece of the policy was a change in local taxation from a levy charged upon property to one paid by individuals. It had numerous defects that should have killed it off at birth. It was almost impossible to collect. It was impractical to deliver. It was also regressive, falling disproportionally upon households in modest, low-rated dwellings.

  Some households would prove to be more than £1,500 worse off when the policy was enacted. Many more were at least £500 worse off. In 1989, this represented a substantial proportion of combined household income. Meanwhile others, a small minority, were no less than £10,000 a year better off. This inequity would have knock-on effects. Protests were inevitable, exacerbating the inherent difficulties of collecting the tax. Non-payment was pretty much baked into its conception. As the tax was implemented, the results were as predictable as they were disastrous. As one source put it: ‘the burden of collecting the tax precipitated a virtual collapse in the finances of some city authorities’.