Scott Page

Scott Page, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, studies how differences in people’s skills and perspectives affect collective problem-solving. His computer-simulated experiments show that a group combining strong and less effective problem-solvers can outperform a group made up only of high performers: intelligence matters, but it does not by itself supply the range of approaches a group needs. The larger argument surrounding his work is that diversity becomes useful when distinct, often local knowledge can be brought together rather than left isolated.

Experiments in Cognitive Diversity

Page tested groups of ten or twenty simulated agents, each endowed with a different set of skills, on a relatively sophisticated problem. Some agents were individually very good at solving it, while others were less effective. Yet groups that included both kinds of agents almost always did better than groups composed entirely of the strongest performers. Selecting a group randomly and letting it work could match or exceed the results of spending time identifying the best agents and assigning them to the task alone.

The result is not that ability is irrelevant or that ignorance improves a group. None of the agents was ignorant, and successful groups included high-performing members. Rather, Page’s experiments suggest that group-level performance depends on what members contribute in combination. A group of smart people may resemble itself too closely in what its members can do; adding people with different skills can expand what the group knows as a whole.

Why Difference Helps Groups Learn

Page’s findings make diversity valuable in its own right: it adds perspectives that might otherwise be absent. Intelligence alone cannot guarantee this variety. If the set of skills regarded as best is relatively small, people selected for those skills may bring overlapping strengths, leaving the group with less knowledge than it could have had.

This argument connects to a wider account of organizational learning. Homogeneous groups may become efficient at exploiting what they already do well while becoming less able to investigate alternatives. New members can contribute even when they are, on average, less experienced or knowledgeable than those they replace, because what they know is less likely to duplicate what the established group already knows. Diversity, in this account, is not a decorative feature of a team but a way to keep new information entering its work.

Local Knowledge and Collective Decisions

The broader discussion of Page’s work places cognitive diversity alongside decentralization. Knowledge tied to a particular place, job, or experience can be valuable precisely because it is difficult to summarize and pass upward through a hierarchy. Decisions made close to a problem may benefit from the knowledge of people directly engaged with it, and Page’s findings help explain why drawing on different kinds of knowledge can improve a group’s capacity to solve problems.

Decentralization nevertheless has a weakness: information discovered in one part of a system may never reach the others. A group can preserve independent judgment and specialized local knowledge but still fail if it has no means to combine them. The challenge is therefore to make individually acquired knowledge collectively useful without erasing the local perspectives that produced it. This distinction also clarifies the intelligence community’s pre-September 11 problem in the book’s account: specialization and dispersed expertise were not themselves the failure; the missing element was a way to aggregate information and judgments across agencies.

Significance for Organizations

Page’s experiments challenge the assumption that assembling only the most individually capable people will necessarily produce the best team. In a small group, a few influential or similarly trained members can narrow the range of approaches brought to bear. Selecting for a mixture of skills can counter that limitation, provided members’ contributions can enter the group’s reasoning.

The practical implication is not decentralization without coordination, nor diversity without competent participants. Effective collective problem-solving depends on preserving differences while creating channels through which they can shape a shared decision. Page’s work gives this organizational argument an experimental illustration: the group’s advantage lies not simply in adding more intelligence, but in bringing nonredundant capacities together.