Trish's Blog

When I tell people what I do, there is a particular response I get often enough that I can almost see it coming. A knowing nod, and then: “Ah, so it is diversity of thought.”

I understand why. The phrase has become more common in workplace conversations, and what I do touches it. But the nod usually means the person has filed my work under something they already understand, and I think the filing misses the most important part.

Diversity of thought is where it begins. It is not where it ends.

Here is the assumption hiding inside that knowing nod. That if you assemble people who think differently, good outcomes follow automatically. Get the right mix in the room and innovation happens. It is a comforting idea, and it is not true. I have seen plenty of organizations with genuinely diverse thinkers who still produce the same safe, predictable ideas year after year. The difference was in the room. It just never made it into the conversation.

Why? Because having different thinkers and using different thinking are two separate things, and the distance between them is where most of the value is won or lost. People can be sitting around a table holding wildly different perspectives and still converge on the blandest possible option because no one invited enough, to say the thing that does not fit. The diversity is present. It is simply not in use.

This is the part my work is about. Not getting different people into the room, which is a start that many organizations have already made. It is knowing what to do with them once they are there. How to make those differences work together instead of cancelling each other out. How to take an awkward question, the kind that slows a meeting down, and treat it as a contribution rather than an irritation. How to use tension productively instead of rushing to smooth it away.

That last point matters more than it sounds. Most teams treat disagreement as friction to be minimised. Harmony feels like health, so the moment a difference appears, the unspoken pressure is to resolve it quickly and move on. But the difference was the asset. The whole reason you gathered varied thinkers was so they would see what each other missed, and that only happens if the seeing is allowed to surface and be argued about. A team that cannot tolerate productive disagreement has diversity of thought on paper and groupthink in practice.

So the real skill is not curation. It is conversation. It is building the conditions in which an unconventional idea can be spoken without the speaker paying a social price for it. Where slowing down to question an assumption is read as care rather than obstruction. Where the quiet person with the unusual angle is drawn out rather than talked over. None of that happens by accident, and none of it happens just because you hired for variety.

This is why I am wary of treating diversity of thought as a destination. Reaching it is not the finish line. It is the starting line. Once you have different thinkers, the work begins: the harder, more human work of making the difference useful. That work is ongoing. It lives in how meetings are run, how questions are received, how failure is treated, how much room there is to be wrong out loud. It is built and maintained in a thousand small interactions, not declared in a policy.

There is a practical edge to all this, which is that the organizations who do the second part well pull ahead of the ones who stop at the first. Anyone can hire for variety now. It has become a widely shared ambition. Far fewer know how to convert that variety into better decisions, sharper problem-solving, and ideas that would not have appeared in a more uniform group. That conversion is the rare and valuable thing, and it cannot be bought or declared. It has to be practised.

So the next time someone nods and says “Ah, diversity of thought,” I will agree, and then I will add the part the nod leaves out. Yes, and that is the beginning. The beginning of learning what to do with all that difference once it is finally in the room. Different people in the room is a good start. Knowing how to use them is the whole game.