The Two Traits of the Best Problem-Solving Teams

The establishment and maintenance of psychological safety with a cognitively diverse team can be achieved by setting up a psychologically safe environment to encourage cognitive diversity and focus various minds on effective strategy execution, report the Ashridge Business School's Alison Reynolds and the London Business School's David Lewis in the Harvard Business Review. "We need to be more curious, inquiring, experimental, and nurturing," they write. "We need to stop being hierarchical, directive, controlling, and conforming. It is not just the presence of the positive behaviors in the Generative quadrant that count, it is the corresponding absence of the negative behaviors." Reynolds and Lewis note hierarchical behavior is named one of the top five dominant behaviors 40 percent of the time in the non-generative quadrants, but cited only 15 percent of the time as a top behavior in the Generative quadrant. "This is not because the organizations in the Generative quadrant have a flatter structure — hierarchy is a fact of organizational life — but because hierarchy does not define their interactions," they say. "We see controlling cited 33 percent of the time as a top behavior in the non-generative quadrants compared with only 10 percent in the generative quadrant. We see directive cited 24 percent of the time as top behavior in the non-generative quadrants compared to only 5 percent in the generative."