by Matthew Syed
Knight then took a third group and changed the set-up once again. For this group, subjects were allowed to individualise their workspace. They could choose their own prints, their own plants, configuring the space to their own tastes, personalities and preferences. ‘They were told to make themselves at home,’ Knight says. We might call this the personalised condition.
Now, from the outside looking in, many of the spaces in the personalised condition looked just like those in the lean and enriched conditions. After all, some people actually like a minimalist space, while others like an enriched space. On average, the latter was superior to the former when it was imposed upon subjects – but this was only on average. And this was the key point about the new condition: these new spaces were personally chosen. They were non-generic. Like the cockpits with adjustable seats and pedals, and the customised diets created by Eran Segal, these workspaces fitted around the dimensions of the particular worker.
The results, when they came back, were remarkable. Productivity soared. It was almost 30 per cent higher than in the lean office condition – and 15 per cent higher than the enriched condition. These are large effects. ‘Give people autonomy to create their own spaces, and they come up with something better than almost anything else you can give them,’ Knight says. ‘One participant said: “That was smashing; I really enjoyed it. When can I move in?” ’
The uplift in productivity can be divided into two components. The first is the autonomy element. People were choosing rather than being dictated to. They felt empowered, so were more motivated. This element is less to do with the choice and more to do with the act of choosing. But the second element was shaped not by the act of choosing, but by the power of personalisation. People could design spaces that they liked. They could mould the space to their own characteristics. This may sound like a small thing, but it is actually a very big thing. It was an approach that took diversity seriously.
VI
The pioneering work of Eran Segal and his colleagues has been turned into a high-tech start-up called DayTwo. Although currently operating in a limited number of countries, the objective is to take the approach worldwide. The process is simple. You provide a stool sample and the results of a blood test. This enables the DayTwo lab to test your microbiome and to assess your blood sugar levels. This is then fed into the algorithm, allowing researchers to provide personalised food recommendations along with a searchable database of glucose predictions for 100,000 meals and drinks. This isn’t as systematic as the experiment conducted in 2015, which measured blood sugar responses to every meal in addition to information on microbiome, but it nevertheless signals a direction of travel. Diet, like other branches of human science, is moving away from standardisation and towards personalisation.
Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine and one of the most respected medics in the world, was so intrigued by Segal’s research that he volunteered to take a full test, tracking every meal and intake of liquid to determine blood-glucose response, as well as having his gut microbiome tested. Within weeks, he learned more about his own unique responses to food than would have been possible from trialling any number of standardised diets. He not only discovered that he has an unusual microbiome, but that he experienced severe blood glucose spikes for food he had been eating for years. ‘My gut microbiome was densely populated by one particular bugger – Bacteroides stercoris, accounting for 27 per cent of my co-inhabitants (compared with its average of less than 2 per cent in the general population),’ Topol wrote in the New York Times. ‘I had several glucose spikes as high as 160 milligrams per deciliter of blood (normal fasting glucose levels are less than 100 . . .).’
This was not just a discovery with implications for his health and longevity, but also one that enabled him to make sense of the contradictions in dietary advice. ‘Despite decades of diet fads and government-issued food pyramids, we know surprisingly little about the science of nutrition. The studies have serially contradicted one another,’ he wrote. ‘Now the central flaw in the whole premise is becoming clear: the idea that there is one optimal diet for all people.’
In April 2019, scientists from DayTwo met with the senior leaders of the National Health Service in London. Further research is taking place, not just in Segal’s lab but elsewhere, seeking to build more evidence.22 The goal is to use not merely the microbiome and genome to make dietary recommendations, but other personal factors such as medication, sleep and stress. Topol writes:
What we really need to do is pull in multiple types of data . . . from multiple devices, like skin patches and smartwatches. With advanced algorithms, this is eminently doable. In the next few years, you could have a virtual health coach that is deep learning about your relevant health metrics and providing you with customized dietary recommendations.
Yet diet is merely one branch of this conceptual revolution. In almost all areas of our lives, we will find ourselves moving from the era of standardisation to the era of personalisation. If this transformation is guided with wisdom, it has the potential to improve health, happiness and productivity, too. As Segal puts it: ‘Diversity is a part and parcel of humanity. It is time to take it seriously.’
7
The Big Picture
I
We have covered everything from the failures of the CIA to Rob Hall’s heroism on the summit of Everest, and from the curious history of wheeled suitcases to the dangers of political echo chambers. We have seen that when it comes to innovation it is better to be social than smart, and how a fixation with averages can obscure individuality, a point that illuminates the deep flaws in dietary science, not to mention the alarming crashes of the US Air Force in the late 1940s.
All of these examples and stories, experiments and conceptual explorations, articulate the same, underlying pattern. They evoke the power of diversity – along with the dangers of neglecting it. The success of organisations, as well as societies, depends on harnessing our differences in pursuit of our vital interests. When we do this well – with enlightened leadership, design, policy and scientific insight – the pay-offs can be vast.
And yet, it is worth coming back to what continues to be one of the biggest obstacles in this journey. We have called this the clone fallacy: thinking in a linear way about complex, multidimensional challenges. This is one of those fallacies that seems obvious when stated, but which lurks across society. This is the obstacle, more than any other, that prevents people from pivoting from the individual to the holistic perspective.
Today, the major focus remains individualistic. We are preoccupied with helping individuals to become smarter, more perceptive, more able to guard against biases. We noted that the fine work of the likes of Gary Klein and Daniel Kahneman are written from this standpoint. And yet while this perspective is important, we should never allow it to obscure the holistic perspective.
The organising concepts in this book are holistic. The collective brain. The wisdom of crowds. Psychological safety. Recombinant innovation. Homophily. Network theory. The dangers of fine-grained assorting. The content of these concepts emerges not from the parts, but the whole. This is crucial in an era where our most pressing problems are too complex for individuals to solve on their own; an era where collective intelligence is moving front and centre.
In this final chapter, we will complete our journey into diversity science by widening the lens fully. We will see that diversity doesn’t just help to explain the success of individuals and institutions, but sheds crucial light on the evolution of our species. This will provide the ultimate contrast between the individualistic and holistic perspectives, and a renewed repudiation of the clone fallacy.
We will also look at three more practical implications that emerge from what we have learned in this book. This will remind us that for all the exciting ideas and concepts associated with diversity science, it holds immediate lessons that can be used to transform the way we live, work and structure societies.
II
Our species do
minates the planet. We thrive in virtually any habitat. If we include our domesticated animals, we account for 98 per cent of the world’s terrestrial vertebrate biomass. We create powerful technologies, theories and art. We communicate with sophisticated languages. Our cousins, the chimpanzees, are confined to a small band of tropical African rainforest, but we obey no such constraints. As Kevin Laland, Professor of Behavioural and Evolutionary Biology at the University of St Andrews, says: ‘Our range is unprecedented; we have colonised virtually every habitat on earth, from steaming rainforests to frozen tundra.’
It raises the question: why are humans so successful?
If you close the book and think about this for a few moments, you are likely to come up with an intuitive answer. Humans are intelligent. We have big brains. These enable us to solve problems that elude other animals. They help us to come up with new ideas, whether theories, technologies or ways of communicating. This means that we are uniquely capable of subverting nature to our will. The basic idea is:
Big Brains lead to Great Ideas (i.e. technologies, culture, institutions).
But we will explore the possibility that this framework, which has long dominated our world view, is not just wrong, but the inverse of the truth. It emerges from the individualistic perspective, placing the human brain at the centre of the analysis. We will see that the appropriate perspective is holistic. Indeed, we will suggest that the direction of causality might be the other way around:
Great Ideas lead to Big Brains.
This may sound a little odd, but tracing out the argument will take our analysis of cognitive diversity to its zenith. We will see that diversity is not just the ingredient that drives the collective intelligence of human groups, but is the ingredient that has driven the unique evolutionary trajectory of our species. Diversity, in a real sense, is the hidden engine of humanity.
To see why, consider that our ancestors had brains that were around the same size or slightly smaller than Neanderthals, a point that has been made by, among others, Joseph Henrich, Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. This implies that our ancestors may have been less intelligent than Neanderthals. As Henrich puts it: ‘In primates, the strongest predictor of cognitive abilities across species is brain size. Consequently, it is not implausible that we were dumber than the bigger-brained Neanderthals.’
But our ancestors had a critical but overlooked advantage: we were more social. We lived in larger, more densely connected groups. This difference turned out to be of seismic consequence. Why? Consider that if there is a group of fellow animals nearby, there are also animals from which to potentially learn. Even if each member of this social group has only rudimentary ideas about such things as finding food, making tools, or whatever else, the density of such ideas means that any one person – even a smart person – can learn more from the group than they could figure out in a lifetime on their own.
This means, in turn, that natural selection will start to favour good learners; that’s to say, people who are skilled at observing what others are doing, and picking up ideas. These skills were not important for Neanderthals because they didn’t have a sufficiently dense social group from which to learn. The point isn’t that Neanderthals had inferior ideas to our ancestors. Rather, it is that learning from others is costly (time that could be spent hunting, etc.) and there aren’t enough ideas to repay the investment.
Once natural selection starts to favour good learners, however, the trajectory of evolution itself starts to shift. For if people have the skill to learn ideas from the previous generation, and then add a few more to pass down to the next, ideas are now beginning to accumulate. No single idea conceived by an early human is more sophisticated than any single idea conceived by a Neanderthal, but the overall corpus of knowledge is now growing – and recombining.
For Neanderthals, innovations typically die when their creators die. Individuals are discovering new things, but they are not being shared across social groups, or down generations. With the ancestors of humans, on the other hand, individual brains are being connected, within social groups and through time. Innovations are less likely to be lost. On the contrary, they are likely to be augmented. This is the dynamics of information spillover through evolutionary time.
To go back to the terminology of Chapter 4, our ancestors were not smarter than Neanderthals by virtue of their individual brains. They were smarter by virtue of their collective brain. As Henrich says:
Neanderthals, who had to adapt to the scattered resources of ice-age Europe and deal with dramatically changing ecological conditions, lived in small, widely scattered groups . . . Meanwhile the African immigrants [our ancestors] lived in larger and more interconnected groups . . . The extra edge created by more individual brainpower in Neanderthals would have been dwarfed by the power of social interconnectedness of the collective brain sizes of the Africans.
Think back to the difference between the Geniuses and the Networkers in the thought experiment in Chapter 4. We noted that the Geniuses were smarter than the Networkers but they were less likely to be in possession of new innovations. Innovation is about the interplay between individuals and the networks they inhabit. As knowledge accumulates, it feeds back into the collective brain, and, indeed, into natural selection itself.
Indeed, this process has proved so powerful that the transition from a collection of individual brains to a true collective brain represents what biologists call a ‘major transition’. This is where a step-change in complexity is permitted by some alteration in the way information is stored and transmitted. Classic examples are the transition from prokaryotes (unicellular organisms) to eukaryotes (organisms whose cells have a nucleus enclosed within membranes) and from asexual clones to sexual populations.
The human collective brain represents our planet’s most recent major transition. This has led to an accumulating body of ideas, but also a feedback loop that has altered genetic evolution itself. Why? Because the expanding corpus of ideas (sometimes called ‘cumulative culture’) created a selection pressure for bigger individual brains to store and categorise this rapidly growing body of information.
Over the last five million years, human brains grew from around 350 centimetres, comparable to a chimp, to 1,350 centimetres, with the bulk occurring in the last two million years. This expansion only hit the buffers 200,000 years ago due to constraints of the female birth canal, a key part of the primate body plan. If the baby’s head grows too big, it can’t get out (or is liable to kill the mother in trying to do so). This is why natural selection favoured intense cortical folding, high density interconnections, infant skulls that remain unfused in order to squeeze through the canal, and rapid post-birth expansion.
So, humans do indeed have impressively big brains, but note the direction of causality. The accumulation of ideas is driving the expansion of brains, not vice versa:
Great Ideas (via accumulation and recombination of simple ideas) lead to Bigger Brains.
As Laland puts it: ‘Once population size reached a critical threshold, such that small bands of hunter-gatherers were more likely to come into contact with each other and exchange goods and knowledge, then cultural information was less likely to get lost, and knowledge and skills could start to accumulate.’1
So, why didn’t chimps and other animals join humans on this evolutionary pathway? Why is it only humans who have what biologists call dual inheritance (we inherit both genes and an ever-growing body of ideas)? The reason is that the emergence of collective brains faces a chicken and egg problem. We have already touched upon the logic. Brains designed for learning from others are expensive. From an evolutionary perspective, such brains only make sense when there is already a decent body of ideas out there to acquire. And yet without the ability to learn from others, there won’t be a sufficient volume of ideas in the local environment to justify this cost. This represents a fundamental constraint on the emergence of collective brains. Henrich calls it the ‘start-up problem’.
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Gorillas, for example, could never justify this cost because they live in single-family groups with only one male and several females. Orang-utans are solitary and do not pair-bond, which means that young orang-utans often grow up with only their mother to learn from. Chimpanzees are more inclined to group-living, but studies of infant and juvenile chimpanzees show that they only have access to their mothers as role models.
This is why these animals lack anything more than rudimentary technology. New innovations tend to die with their creators. They inherit genetic capacities, but they do not inherit a body of accumulating ideas. To the extent that Neanderthals were en route to true collective brains, they were out-competed by the ancestors of modern humans when the latter left Africa. These other groups couldn’t compete not because they were individually less intelligent, but because they were less collectively intelligent.
This perspective also helps to explain the nature not merely of human brains, but of human bodies. Once ideas became a stable part of the environment, they started to drive genetic evolution itself. Take the invention of fire, one of the greatest rebel ideas in our species’ history. We do not know who first managed to create fire, but we do know that humans were able to teach this skill to each other, and to their children. That’s to say, fire became part of the cultural ecology for early humans, passed down from generation to generation.
But this meant, in turn, that we didn’t need such big guts to detoxify food. The food was already partially detoxified by the process of cooking. Natural selection, therefore, started to favour humans with smaller guts, freeing up metabolic energy required for the growth of our brains. We didn’t need such large mouths and teeth, or such strong jaws, or colons, or intestines, all of which started to adapt to a culture with fire and cooking. Henrich says: