A team where everyone thinks alike is a toolbox of hammers: ideal, as long as the problem is a nail.
For three days, your team has been stuck on the same problem, and the same ideas keep coming back. Not for lack of intelligence, but because everyone on the team is intelligent in the same way. This module teaches you to recognize ways of thinking that differ from yours—slower, more visual, quieter—and to make room for them, whether or not you manage people.
~20 min at your own paceKey skill: Cognitive Diversity and NeurodiversityAvailable in FR + ENNo prerequisites
What you’ll take away
- an awareness of what a team loses when all its members are alike
- meeting practices that give a voice to slower, written, or visual ways of thinking
- the habit of turning to whoever thinks least like you when you are stuck
Who it’s for
Managers and recruiters who build teams, and team members who want every way of thinking to be heard.
Learning objectives
- Understand why a cognitively identical team, however brilliant, gets stuck on problems that need a different angle.
- See neurodiversity as a source of strengths (pattern recognition, memory for detail, rigor) rather than as a list of deficits.
- Apply the three practices that foster cognitive diversity: hire for cognitive complementarity, adapt meetings, and make the environment more predictable.
- Get into the habit of consulting the person who thinks least like you when a problem is hard to solve.
How does this module work?
The steps of the Adaptive module.
- Self-assessmentOn nine dimensions, to gauge current habits and guide the practice.
- Expert videoA ~10 min video with three pauses for reflection.
- Practice scenariosThe first two scenarios chosen from the self-assessment, then sixteen more, optional. Every answer gets feedback: what it leads to, and one way to improve.
- Dated commitmentOne action to try, written by the learner or chosen from the suggestions.
- Memo to downloadKey takeaways, questions, commitment, personal notes, and checklists.
Duration: ~20 min. Excluding bonus practice scenarios and optional in-depth content.
