‘Innovate or die’ is a technology truism; if you can’t think like an attacker – and let’s face it they’re a varied bunch – you have little hope of defeating them.

If you have a diverse workforce you are more capable of accelerating a business, developing new products or spotting and mitigating key risks. Both Investment houses and large corporations realise this and it’s one of HR’s hottest topics as boards realise the need for diversity to remain competitive.

Diversity is the cradle of both innovation and resilience – it helps organisations avoid group-think: the tendency for people with the same experiences, backgrounds or mental framing to ask similar questions and generate similar answers. Group-think can easily lead to poor business, stagnation or worse. NASA cites group-think as a contributing factor to the Challenger space shuttle disaster – and agrees that diversity is a key part of the solution.

Diversity starts at board level and ideally is present across all key operational and delivery teams. A truly diverse board includes different genders, ethnicities, neurotypes, sexualities and social backgrounds – and so produces different experiential thought processes. They ask a range of varied and different questions and reach a variety of conclusions. In the long term, these diverse opinions lead to a stronger portfolio, increased resilience and more profit.  

Multitude of minds
Diversity of all types adds different ways of thinking, but perhaps none so much as neurodiversity – with its focus on increasing the numbers and support for neurodivergent/neuroatypical people in an organisation.