‘Diversity means lots of things,” says Amir Goldberg, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “These days, it evokes the idea of race or gender, but it’s also about how people think.”

Beyond their demographic differences, people working in a group will likely think differently about a collaborative task. That cognitive diversity can be helpful—or not. “In an organization, there’s tension between people who have incongruent ways of thinking about a specific problem to solve,” Goldberg says.

It’s widely thought that brainstorming to create a better app or product requires a range of ideas and perspectives, while getting down to the business of execution is best handled with greater alignment around how to proceed. “The assumption,” Goldberg explains, “is that intellectual diversity is good for creating novelty and creative problem-solving, but not necessarily good for efficient coordination.”

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