The future needs a big kiss
Today, most teams are rather homogenous. ‘Great minds think alike' and supposedly “great” minds often also look alike.
This approach works fairly well for routine jobs, for problems that have a largely predetermined process.
With increased digitization comes more automation of routine work. What is left for humans are the more complex problems, the problems whose solutions are not well defined. Here, homogeneous teams are no longer good enough. When creativity is needed, a team of similar minds, even when individually impressive, performs poorly.
Soon, complex problems will dominate the workday rather than routine tasks. Complex activities are more challenging. In these settings, workers must form teams with complementing skills and interact continuously to create and execute a course of action. At the end of the decade, the typical knowledge worker will be engaged in projects for about 40% of the time (up from today’s share of roughly 10%). Rather than hoping for the kiss of the muse for inspiration and creativity, cognitively diverse teams - by design - are smarter when solving complex problems. An optimal mix of mind, experiences, gender, ethnicities, age, workstyle, and, very importantly, pluralism, a tolerance for non-conformist views, and divergent thinking will increase so-called cognitive diversity.
As a direct consequence, recruitment will focus on soft skills rather than hard skills. For both hiring and team assembly, hard skills will no longer be the primary selection criterion (also confirmed by the assessment of top skills for the future of the World Economic Forum). Soft skills and, in particular, those that an organization or team is currently lacking will be actively searched for and added. Teams with the right blend of talent, personality, and motivation are built for their purpose. As a consequence, impressive credentials alone will no longer be sufficient to get the job. The result will be diversity in the ultimate sense of the word.