The thinking advantage

Diversity is not a policy. It is not a target. It is not a box to tick in an annual report or a slide to include in a board presentation to demonstrate awareness of the right issues.

Diversity is a thinking advantage. And in a book about time, it is one of the most powerful time saving tools available to a leader.

A team that thinks in only one way will always miss what that way of thinking cannot see. The blind spots are not visible to the people inside them. They are only visible from outside. The leader who builds a team from people who all share the same background, the same function, the same location, the same seniority level, the same way of approaching problems, has built a team that is efficient at confirming what it already believes and slow at discovering what it does not yet know.

That is an expensive way to operate. Especially when time is the resource that cannot be recovered.

Key Takeaway: Diversity is a thinking advantage. The team that thinks in only one way will always miss what that way of thinking cannot see. The cost is paid in time.

A team that thinks in only one way is a team that can only see in one direction. The blind spots are not visible from inside them.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 3: The Present · Philosophy 8: Diversity · Section: The thinking advantage.

MarvinPro | November 2025

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What diversity actually means

Diversity is not one thing. It is every dimension along which people differ, and every dimension along which different people bring different thinking.

It is the difference in background, the person who grew up in one context and the person who grew up in another, who see the same situation and recognise entirely different things in it.

It is the difference in function, the operations leader and the finance leader and the customer experience leader who look at the same problem and each see the part of it their experience has trained them to see.

It is the difference in location, the team member in one market and the team member in another, who understand the same customer need differently because the customer they know is different.

It is the difference in seniority, the person at the beginning of their career who has not yet learned what is supposed to be impossible, and the person at the end of their career who has seen what happens when the impossible is attempted and occasionally achieved.

It is the difference in discipline, the person who thinks in processes and the person who thinks in relationships and the person who thinks in numbers and the person who thinks in stories.

Any of these differences, applied to the same problem, produces a different angle. More angles produce a more complete picture. A more complete picture produces better decisions, faster. And faster better decisions save time.

Key Takeaway: Diversity is every dimension along which people differ. Any of these differences, applied to the same problem, produces a different angle. More angles produce better decisions faster.

The most complete picture of any problem is assembled from the most different views of it.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 3: The Present · Philosophy 8: Diversity · Section: What diversity actually means.

MarvinPro | November 2025

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The time saving

The connection between diversity and time is direct and underappreciated.

A homogeneous team, one that shares the same background, function, experience or perspective, is fast at reaching agreement. The agreement is easy because the starting points are similar. The assumptions are shared. The blind spots overlap. Everyone nods at the same moments because everyone is looking at the same thing in the same way.

That agreement is fast. And it is often wrong in ways that take a long time to discover.

The diverse team takes longer to reach agreement. The starting points are different. The assumptions have to be made explicit because they are not shared. The blind spots of one person are in the field of vision of another. The conversation is harder. The agreement, when it comes, has been tested from more angles.

That agreement is slower. And it is more likely to be right in ways that save significant time later.

The cost of a fast wrong decision is always higher than the cost of a slower right one. The team that reaches the right answer in two weeks saves more time than the team that reaches the wrong answer in one week and spends three months correcting it.

Key Takeaway: The diverse team takes longer to agree. That agreement is more likely to be right. The cost of a fast wrong decision is always higher than the cost of a slower right one.

Agreement that comes quickly from people who think alike is not consensus. It is the absence of challenge.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 3: The Present · Philosophy 8: Diversity · Section: The time saving.

MarvinPro | November 2025

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The blind spot problem

Every leader has blind spots. Every team has blind spots. The question is not whether they exist. It is whether the team is structured to find them before they become expensive.

A blind spot is not a failure of intelligence. It is the natural consequence of experience. The more experience a person has in a specific domain, the more automatic their thinking in that domain becomes. They stop questioning assumptions that once seemed worth questioning because those assumptions have been confirmed enough times to feel like facts.

The person who has never worked in that domain questions those assumptions immediately. Not because they are more intelligent. Because the assumption is not automatic for them. They see it as a choice rather than a given. And the question they ask, the one that seems obvious to them and strange to the expert, is sometimes the most important question in the room.

Diversity of experience does not slow down the expert. It gives the expert access to questions they have stopped asking. And those questions are often where the most valuable thinking happens.

Key Takeaway: Blind spots are not failures of intelligence. They are the natural consequence of experience. Diversity gives the expert access to questions they have stopped asking.

The most valuable question in the room is often the one asked by the person who does not yet know what is supposed to be obvious.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 3: The Present · Philosophy 8: Diversity · Section: The blind spot problem.

MarvinPro | November 2025

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Building for diversity

Diversity does not happen by default. It has to be built deliberately, in the decisions made about who is in the room, who is asked for input, who is included in the conversation before the decision is made rather than informed of it after.

The leader who always consults the same people will always get the same thinking. Not because the people are wrong. Because the same people, asked the same questions in the same context, will draw on the same experience to produce the same answers.

Building for diversity means widening the consultation before the decision. It means asking for input from the function that will be affected but was not involved in designing the solution. It means including the market that operates differently from the others, rather than designing for the majority and treating the exception as a problem to solve later. It means listening to the person at the front of the operation, the one closest to the customer, before finalising a decision made at the back of it.

It also means being comfortable with the slower conversation that diversity produces. The leader who builds a diverse team and then becomes impatient with the time it takes to align has not understood what diversity is for. The friction is the feature. The different perspectives are the point.

Key Takeaway: Diversity does not happen by default. It requires deliberate decisions about who is in the room before the decision is made. The friction it produces is not a problem. It is the mechanism.

The leader who always consults the same people will always get the same answer. That is not consensus. That is an echo.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 3: The Present · Philosophy 8: Diversity · Section: Building for diversity.

MarvinPro | November 2025

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A real example

In a service operation running across multiple European markets, a process was designed centrally and then deployed to each market. The design team was drawn from the markets that represented the largest volume. The smaller markets were informed of the design after it was complete.

In two of the smaller markets the process broke immediately on deployment. Not because the markets were difficult or the teams were resistant. Because the customer behaviour in those markets was different in ways that the design team had not considered, because nobody from those markets had been in the room when the design decisions were made.

The fix required weeks of rework. The process had to be adapted, tested and redeployed. The operational pressure during the period of the broken process was significant.

The cost of including representatives from every market in the original design conversation would have been one additional meeting and a longer design phase. The cost of not including them was weeks of rework across two markets and the operational impact that followed.

The lesson was applied to subsequent design processes. Every market was represented in the design phase, not the deployment phase. The design conversations took longer. The deployments worked.

The market that was not in the room at the design stage will always be in the room at the problem stage.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 3: The Present · Philosophy 8: Diversity · A real example.

MarvinPro | November 2025

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Chapter Outcome

Build for diversity across every dimension that matters to the problem you are solving. Background, function, location, seniority, discipline, experience. Any difference in perspective is a potential blind spot removed, a faster wrong decision avoided, a better right decision reached.

Be comfortable with the slower conversation that diversity produces. The friction is the mechanism. The disagreement is the test. The agreement that survives the test is the one worth acting on.

And include the people who will be affected by the decision in the conversation before the decision is made. Not after. Before.

Diversity does not slow decisions down. It slows the wrong decisions down. The right ones move faster because they have already been tested.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 3: The Present · Philosophy 8: Diversity · Chapter Outcome.

MarvinPro | November 2025

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