It’s a situation I often see when working with leadership teams inside well-intentioned organisations. They’ve recruited skilled professionals who are collaborative and well-aligned. But when it comes to solving complex problems or adapting to change, the organisation gets stuck. The energy loops. The solutions converge too quickly. Divergent views quietly disappear.
Despite all their talent, they fall into what I call a “cognitive convergence trap.” And it’s much more common than we think.
Why does this happen?
It’s easy to chalk it up to poor culture or unconscious bias. But beneath the surface, something deeper is at play: systems dynamics.
Human systems, like biological systems, are designed to preserve internal equilibrium (homeostasis). Once a culture, team, or leadership group establishes a dominant pattern of thinking, anything that disrupts it tends to be:
- Ignored (“That’s not relevant right now.”)
- Dismissed (“That’s too complicated.”)
- Rejected (“That doesn’t align with our values.”)
- Or overpowered by consensus (“Let’s not get distracted.”)
In complex environments, this bias toward balance becomes dangerous.
Stability in thought is not the same as resilience in action.
“Stability in thought” means a team or organisation tends to think the same way, reaching quick consensus, avoiding dissent, and relying on familiar solutions. Whilst this can feel efficient, it often creates fragility. “Resilience in action,” by contrast, requires the ability to hold diverse perspectives, navigate complexity, and adapt under pressure. In uncertain environments, sameness of thinking undermines adaptability, whereas cognitive diversity strengthens it.
The hidden cost of low cognitive diversity:
- Risky decisions made in echo chambers
- Missed innovation because dissent looks like disruption
- Slowed adaptability because divergent sense-making is never surfaced
- Valuable people, especially those with deep, contextual, or systemic ways of thinking, gradually disengage or leave
And all of this happens in plain sight.
How do we fix it?
Not with another values poster or a one-off bias workshop.
We fix it by intentionally rewiring how we sense, think, and decide as systems. That includes:
- Making the invisible visible, through cognitive audits and team sense-making
- Designing meetings, processes, and hiring flows that surface difference, not suppress it
- Teaching leaders how to hear what they’re not hearing
- Inviting friction in psychologically safe ways
- Mapping thinking roles across the system, not just job functions
Where to start? A simple self-audit.
I’ve created a free, experience and research-informed online quiz to help leaders and teams uncover whether they’re truly making the most of diverse ways of thinking or quietly filtering them out. Don’t worry the results are kept strictly between you and me.
It takes 5–7 minutes and gives you a practical sense of:
- Where your team invites or ignores divergence
- How decisions are framed
- Whether your culture allows complexity, or collapses it too soon
🧭 Take the Cognitive Inclusion Audit here → Your Cognitive Inclusion Self-Audit
Let’s stop mistaking alignment for effectiveness. Resilience starts when we honour complexity, including in how we think.
#CognitiveDiversity #SystemicLeadership #OrganisationalChange #Inclusion #SenseMaking #TeamDynamics #Yinsight #Transformation #Complexity #PsychologicalSafety
Through Yinsight, I support companies, their managers and teams in their development with a view to achieving tangible performance that respects people. Creating strategy, working on collective values, aligning teams, managing complexity and interpersonal dynamics, and providing individual and collective support for transformation are at the heart of my work.