by Matthew Syed
A Giving Attitude
Successful collaboration requires a particular attitude. One has to be willing to offer one’s insights to others; to share one’s perspective; to impart one’s wisdom. It is only by giving that we gain the opportunity, in turn, to receive. In fact, perhaps the most powerful evidence for the growing importance of diversity is that people with a giving attitude are becoming ever more successful.
Consider a study of more than six hundred medical students, which found that the individualists – those focused on their own progress, and who cared little for others – performed very well in their first year. These ‘takers’ were good at extracting information from those around them, and by offering little in return they were able to focus on their own progress. Those who were more generous with their time and were willing to offer insights to their fellow students, the ‘givers’, got left behind.
But here is the curious thing. By the second year, the more collaborative cohort had caught up, and by the third year had overtaken their peers. By the final year, the givers had gained significantly higher grades. Indeed, the collaborative mindset was a more powerful predictor of school grades than the effect of smoking on lung cancer rates.
What was going on? The givers hadn’t changed, but the structure of the programme had shifted. Adam Grant writes in his book Give and Take:
As students’ progress through medical school, they move from independent classes into clinical rotations, internships and patient care. The further they advance, the more their success depends on teamwork and service. Whereas takers sometimes win in independent roles where performance is only about individual results, givers thrive in interdependent roles where collaboration matters. As the structure of class work shifts in medical school, the givers benefit from their tendencies to collaborate more effectively . . .
This is a finding that keeps re-emerging across the social sciences: people with a giving approach are flourishing. This is not a hard-and-fast rule: we can all think of people who have a taking attitude, who hate sharing credit, but who have nevertheless achieved marvellous things. The world rarely fits into neat categories. But the evidence suggests a broad pattern in favour of a giving approach. It also shows that the most successful givers are strategic, seeking out meaningful diversity, and cutting off collaborations if they are being exploited. This enables them to benefit from the upside of successful teamwork, while reducing the downside of partners who free-ride. As one researcher put it: ‘the giver attitude is a powerful asset when allied to social intelligence’.
This willingness to give, to collaborate, has longer-term effects, too. You can see this in an experiment led by Professor Daniel Levin of Rutgers Business School when he asked more than two hundred executives to reactivate contacts that had been dormant for at least three years. The subjects asked two of these contacts for advice on an ongoing project at work. They were then asked to rate the value of this advice when compared with reaching out to two people on the same project.
Which contacts provided fresher insights, better ideas, stronger solutions? The answer was clear. The dormant ties offered advice that was significantly higher in value. Why? Precisely because they were dormant, these contacts were not operating in the same circles, or hearing the same stories, or having the same experiences. The dormant ties were effectively offering a diversity bonus – and it counted for a lot.
People who give are able to construct more diverse networks. They have a wider variety of dormant ties. They have access to a greater number of rebel ideas. By giving in the past, givers enjoy greater scope to reach out for ideas when it matters. As one executive put it: ‘before contacting them, I thought that they would not have too much to provide beyond what I had already thought, but I was proved wrong. I was very surprised by the fresh ideas.’
The willingness to share, to offer knowledge and creative ideas, pays huge dividends in a world of complexity. It is the glue of effective collaboration, not just in the moment, but over time. The benefits compound. As Grant writes: ‘according to conventional wisdom, highly successful people have three things in common: motivation, ability and opportunity . . . [but] there is a fourth ingredient: success depends heavily on how we approach our interactions with other people. Do we try to claim as much value [for ourselves] as we can, or do we contribute value . . .? It turns out that these choices have staggering consequences for success.’
V
Today, we stand on the brink of a revolution. Diversity is often regarded as a politically correct distraction, an issue of morality and social justice, but not of performance and innovation. It is often debated in vague terms, people talking past each other. Our conception of diversity is not just incomplete but often radically defective.
It is only when we start to absorb the truths of diversity science that our perspective starts to shift. We begin to see intelligence as not merely built upon the intellectual brilliance of individuals, but upon their collective diversity. We see that innovation is not merely about the insights of particular people, but the networks that permit their recombination. And we see that the success of humanity is less about individual brains than the emergent properties of the collective brain.
These conceptual truths have practical implications, too. Think back to our discussion of homophily. We noted that this operates like an invisible gravitational force, pulling teams and institutions towards homogeneity. We unconsciously enjoy being surrounded by people who think in the same way, who share our perspectives, who corroborate our prejudices. It is comforting and validating. It makes us feel individually smart even as we are becoming ever more collectively stupid.
But could there be any more powerful way to combat homophily than through an understanding of diversity science? For why would we wish to surround ourselves with like-minded people when this undermines the objectives of the group? Why would we enjoy the experience of having our views serially corroborated when it means that we are learning nothing new? Why would we crave cultures of conformity when this silences the rebel ideas that catalyse innovation?
The very meaning of collaboration changes when we start to think about diversity in a new way. Honest dissent is not disruptive, but imperative. Divergent opinions are not seen as a threat to social cohesion but as a contribution to social dynamism. Reaching out to outsiders for new ideas is not an act of disloyalty but the most enlightened form of solidarity. For without the innovation driven by recombination, how can any group keep pace with a fast-changing world?
To put it another way, you can only build a culture of diversity when you have first grasped the concepts of diversity. Bridgewater, one of the world’s top hedge funds, grounds new recruits in the holistic perspective. They read a set of principles that, among other things, articulate diversity science. This is why people are considered loyal not when they agree, parrot and validate, but when they honestly disagree, challenge and diverge. They are applauded not when they stay rigidly within institutional boundaries, but when they seek new ideas. As Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, says:
. . . great cultures bring problems and disagreements to the surface and solve them well, and they love imagining and building great things that haven’t been built before. Doing that sustains their evolution. In our case, we do that by having an idea meritocracy that strives for meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical truth and radical transparency.
What is true at the level of organisations is also true at the level of societies. Cultures that encourage new ideas, foster dissent and have strong networks through which rebel ideas can flow, innovate faster than those held back by cultures of intellectual conformity. As Henrich has put it:
Once we understand the importance of collective brains, we begin to see why modern societies vary in their innovativeness. It’s not the smartness of the individuals . . . It’s the willingness and ability of large numbers of individuals at the knowledge frontier to freely interact, exchange views, disagree, learn from each other, bu
ild collaborations, trust strangers, and be wrong. Innovation does not take a genius or a village; it takes a big network of freely interacting minds.
These insights have been associated with radical thinkers and philosophers since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks, but they are today supported by formal theories and extensive data. The contribution of diversity to the dynamism of societies has, in this sense, moved from the terrain of intuition to hard science. Diversity is the ingredient that can help us to solve our most pressing problems, from climate change to poverty, and help us to break free of the echo chambers that are coming to disfigure our world. John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century English philosopher who stands as one of the most eloquent advocates for diversity, said:
It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar . . . Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.
VI
Let us finish this book where we started. For in the years after 9/11, the CIA started to wake up to its crippling homogeneity. One sign of this awakening was the hiring of Yaya Fanusie, an African-American Muslim who grew up on the West Coast and graduated in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, before winning a Fulbright scholarship and securing a postgraduate degree from Columbia. He converted to Islam in his early twenties, becoming a devout believer. I interviewed Fanusie on an early spring morning, seeking to learn about his experiences at the CIA. He said:
When I joined the agency in 2005, I was initially staffed in economic analysis, not counterterrorism. In some ways, that made sense given my background in economics. Just because I am a Muslim doesn’t automatically mean that I should work on jihadist counterterrorism. But I came to feel that I might be able to provide unique insights, given my background. After the July 7th bombings in London, I asked to be transferred into the section combating Al Qaeda.
Fanusie quickly made his mark. After a briefing in the White house Situation Room, his suspicions were aroused by Anwar al-Awlaki, an American Muslim preacher born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents. Between the mid-1990s and 2001, al-Awlaki had been an imam variously in Denver, San Diego and Northern Virginia. Some of the 9/11 bombers had worshipped at his mosques. After he left the United States in 2002, he went first to the UK, then to Yemen. His sermons became ever more extremist. Fanusie says: ‘He was a great storyteller, interweaving American English with classical Arabic. His lectures were often hours in length. He was implicated in a kidnapping plot in 2006, at almost precisely the moment that I moved into counterterrorism. It was clear that he was focused on reaching young Western Muslims in particular.’ Fanusie conducted an exhaustive survey of his historical sermons, spotting clear warning signs. He said:
Awlaki laid out an argument for Muslims to join the jihadist cause. These were not random musings, as some had supposed, but strategic directives. I could see the way that he was taking aspects of teaching, and cleverly moulding them to the psyche of the millennial Western Muslim. After his release from prison, he started his own blog. He was in full recruitment mode, pulling in young Muslims from the US, Europe and elsewhere to Yemen. He literally weaponised them.
One Nigerian follower set his underwear on fire over Detroit one Christmas Eve in a failed airline plot. It wasn’t fully understood by the intel community how one army major named Nidal Malik Hasan, conflicted and self-tortured by his role in the US military, sought out Awlaki for advice. And when Major Hasan opened fire on his fellow servicemen and women at Fort Hood, killing thirteen and injuring dozens, Awlaki posted on his blog that Nidal Malik Hasan had done the right thing.
Fanusie – a devout Muslim and American patriot – continued to analyse al-Awlaki’s teachings, creating a dawning awareness of the threat he posed to the West. ‘He was telegraphing his passes through his blogging and media interviews . . . But you had to know what to look for. The key thing was to see what was happening, to see what he was building towards, so that we were in a better position to thwart his aspirations.’
In April 2010, al-Awlaki was placed on a CIA kill list by President Barack Obama. On 30 September 2011, he was eliminated while in hiding in south-east Yemen in a strike carried out by Joint Special Operations Command, under the direction of the CIA. By this time, he was believed by the US government to be one of the most dangerous figures in the world, described by one Saudi radio station as the ‘bin Laden of the Internet’.
In 2015, Scott Shane, national security reporter for the New York Times who wrote a book on al-Awlaki called Operation Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone, said:
He was by far the most popular, most influential English-language recruiter for al-Qaida and for the whole jihadist cause . . . He just became one of the most powerful and effective voices persuading people to join al-Qaida . . . He sort of pioneered a do-it-yourself approach in a very explicit way . . . If you need to know how to build a bomb, [he had] articles on that. In some ways, he pioneered what we’re now seeing from the Islamic State, from ISIS, in terms of encouraging people in the West not to wait for instructions but to just go ahead and come up with an attack.7
I ask Fanusie about the case for diversity in intelligence. He says:
It is often said in intelligence circles that too few minority candidates apply to the CIA. Also, when you have candidates with significant foreign national (non-US citizen) connections in their family background, there will often be counterespionage concerns that impact the hiring process. Recruiters tend to recruit candidates whose background resonates with them, usually because of common experiences, culture and outlook. It is no coincidence that I was recruited by a black woman.
Is there a risk that hiring diverse candidates might dilute the quality of the CIA? I ask. Fanusie replies:
You should never hire people just because of their cultural or ethnic background. That would be a dangerous mistake. But when you widen the net of recruitment, you also broaden the pool of talent. It gives you the chance to hire outstanding people who are also diverse. And this has knock-on consequences. With more high-class people from minority backgrounds, it encourages new people to apply, broadening the pool still further.
The CIA has made strides towards meaningful diversity since 9/11, but the issue continues to dog the agency. An internal report in 2015 was damning about the lack of diversity in senior positions. As John Brennan, then director, said: ‘the study group took a hard look at our Agency and reached an unequivocal conclusion: CIA simply must do more to develop the diverse and inclusive leadership environment that our values require and that our mission demands.’
As for Fanusie, he is now Senior Fellow for the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is a leading thinker on intelligence, a regular speaker at international conferences, and the founder of a podcast which moves beautifully between his own journey as a black American Muslim and some of the most pressing issues of global security. When he left the CIA in 2012, he received a plaque signed by Michael E. Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
It thanked Fanusie with the words: ‘You regularly had impact at the highest levels of the US Government’.
Crossword Solution
Crossword 5,062
Daily Telegraph, 13 January 1942
Acknowledgements
As a kid who grew up to a dad born and raised in Pakistan, and a mum from North Wales, diversity has been part and parcel of my life. The idea for this book started to form when I realised that diversity is not just about race or cultural background but has implications that span everything from business to politics and from history to evolutionary biology.
I am hugely grateful to a wonderfully diverse group of people who read early drafts of this book and offered suggestions. These include Adil Ispah
ani, Leona Powell, Neil Lawrence, David Papineau, Michael Muthukrishna, Kathy Weeks, Andy Kidd, Priyanka Rai Jaiswal and Dilys Syed.
I would also like to thank my superb editor Nick Davies, and agent Jonny Geller. I have had terrific support from my colleagues at The Times, which is a wonderful publication to work for. I am particularly grateful to Tim Hallissey, my editor for more than fifteen years.
The intellectual inspirations for the book are, as you’d expect, diverse, but I would like to acknowledge two thinkers, in particular. The work of Joseph Henrich, Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, has influenced the book in multiple ways, as has that of Scott Page, Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I would like to thank both for reading drafts and taking the time to discuss the central issues.
One of the most wonderful things about writing a book of this kind is coming into contact with a huge variety of books, research papers and case studies. I have tried to reference all of these in the endnotes for anyone wishing to look at specific topics in more depth, but these are some of the books that have been particularly influential: The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich, The Difference and The Diversity Bonus by Scott E. Page, Constructing Cassandra by Milo Jones and Philippe Silberzahn, The End of Average by Todd Rose, Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, The Secrets of Station X by Michael Smith, Regional Advantage by AnnaLee Saxenian, Echo Chamber by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Friend and Foe by Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, The Blunders of Our Governments by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, Der Spiegel, Inside 9/11, Infotopia by Cass R. Sunstein, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, What Works by Iris Bohnet, Give and Take by Adam Grant, Principles by Ray Dalio, The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama, The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley, Wiser by Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie, The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Imagine by Jonah Lehrer, Creative Conspiracy by Leigh Thompson, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony by Kevin N. Laland, Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Social Physics by Alex Pentland, Scale by Geoffrey West, Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella, The Geography of Thought by Richard E. Nisbett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel C. Dennett and The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper.