The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies

Scott E. Page

Overview: The Difference uses modeling approaches based on formal logic to rigorously describe the types of issues and conditions for which “diversity trumps homogeneity and ability” in collective problem solving and prediction, and when diversity is less relevant to outcomes.

In Part I, Page describes four frameworks for how people see the world differently, including perspectives, interpretations, heuristics, and predictive models (8). Part II presents model problems using the frameworks of Part I to describe how and when diversity produces collective benefits for problem solving and prediction. Part III discusses the difference between fundamental preferences and instrumental preferences, and their impacts on the potential benefits of diversity (11-12). The final part addresses questions about the empirical validity of Page’s analysis supporting the book’s three core claims, which are 1. Diverse perspectives and tools enable collections of people to find more and better solutions and contribute to overall productivity, 2. Diverse predictive models enable crowds of people to predict values accurately, and 3. Diverse fundamental preferences frustrate the process of making choices (13).

• In chapter 1, “Diverse Perspectives,” Page describes what is meant by perspectives, or “the way we encode things” (23), and discusses what makes certain perspectives more useful than others for problem solving. When have you experienced a personal breakthrough of your understanding of either a problem or solution due to another’s perspective? Are there historical examples of someone coming from completely outside of a certain field creating a breakthrough that the experts in that field were blind to?
• In Chapter 2 Page introduces “Heuristics,” the “thinking tools used to find solutions to problems,” which he formally defines as “a rule applied to an existing solution represented in a perspective that generates a new (and hopefully better) solution or a new set of possible solutions.” (52, 55). There are numerous heuristics historically or currently encoded in Air Force doctrine or popular informal aphorisms (e.g., Tenets of Airpower, “Speed wins!” “Keep it Simple, Stupid!” “Get inside the enemy’s OODA loop”), are there historical situations when a popular heuristic has veiled the larger problem or the application of a single heuristic made a problem worse?
• Chapter 3, “Interpretations” articulates how we simplify and model the world to make sense of it, and how those models provide perspectives that influence our interpretations of how the world works and what is happening in it. Does Air Force culture and organization preserve certain perspectives, and how/when has this been both helpful and unhelpful?
• “Predictive Models” explains how people use predictive models to make sense of what is happening and act purposefully in social environments. As a result we usually seek the simplest and least cognitively taxing models that we can so long as they remain useful to the tasks at hand. When using models to make predictions and debate possible future outcomes, how do we ensure we “Keep it Simple, Stupid” and prevent “Keep it Simple=Stupid”?
• In Chapter 5, “Measuring Sticks and Toolboxes”, Page talks about information and context that is either transmitted or lost based on the way we capture perspectives, build models, and make predictions. He describes two alternative interpretations we can use to do this, “measuring sticks and “toolboxes.” What “measuring sticks” and “toolboxes” does the Air Force use to make predictive evaluations and how effective are they?
• Using an abstract, logical approach, “Diversity and Problem Solving” makes the case that when problem solving is described by the interaction of components presented in the previous chapters, the models show that “diversity may be as important as ability in some contexts, and how it can be more important in others.” Page summarizes his findings with the aphorism, “the more tools in our kits, the fewer places we get stuck” (145). Can you name any personal experiences or historical examples where the addition of additional members with new tools helped a group get unstuck?
• The next two chapters (7 & 8) “Models of information aggregation” and “Diversity and Prediction” discuss when crowds are “wise,” when they fail to create better insights or predictions than experts, and why we study them to understand how information aggregates (180-182). What kinds of Air Force problems might be suitable to be addressed with a crowdsourcing type of approach, and how should we pursue them? What cultural and organizational impediments prevent us from doing effective collaborative problem solving in the Air Force (e.g. rank consciousness, risk aversion, etc.)
• Chapters 9 “Diverse Preferences,” 10 “Preference Aggregation,” and 11 “Interacting Toolboxes,” consider the difference between fundamental preferences (about outcomes) and instrumental preferences (about how one achieves the same outcomes). Page argues that on the whole, diversity in preferences often leads to greater diversity in tools that help us to avoid “no winner” solutions and devise new frames and solutions that avoid mediocre net outcomes. When would a more hierarchical decision structure be superior to a collective aggregated effort, and when is the collective approach better?
• Chapters 12 “The Causes of Cognitive Diversity” and 13 “The Empirical Evidence” compare the structure and the cases in Pages models to studies of the real world and evaluate what multiple studies have showed us about how preferences are really formed, and how diversity influences social interaction in practice. How should the insights about training and experience (with education inferred in the training section) inform how we develop our Airmen and manage their careers? (302-305)
• Chapter 14 “A Fertile Logic” discusses Page’s ideas about how to “go on the offensive” and use the insights from both the models and the real world studies to create positive social outcomes, emphasizing “the superadditivity of diverse tools” (340). Page writes that “Outsiders must remain outsiders, otherwise they will cease to think differently” (343). What are the practical implications of that statement for Air Force and Joint multidomain strategy, planning, and command and control?