Eric Schmidt, former chairman of Alphabet, said, “diversity is key to innovation”, and, “with a blend of different points of view, you’re much more likely to get the kind of innovation that pushes things forward.”

Teams and, in particular, diverse teams are smarter when it comes to 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 and lead to superior outcomes — or, very much in the Aristotelian spirit, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Cognitive diversity has been defined as differences in perspective or information processing styles. Interestingly, it is not predicted by factors such as gender, ethnicity, or age. Research suggests that there is substantial cognitive diversity, even in populations with relatively little ethnographic diversity.

Thought diversity is necessary for the workplace to generate creativity and innovation. In addition to cognitive diversity, the most successful teams are also psychologically safe. Google conducted extensive quantitative research on team effectiveness and found that what mattered was less about who is on the team and more about how the team worked together. In order of importance: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact. While algorithms that capture hard and soft factors can contribute to assembling a team with those characteristics, there will always be a pivotal role to be played by the humans involved and by the humans facilitating teamwork. Ad-hoc groups in crowd work have been shown to have higher performance when they are formed with balanced personality types, which suggests that demographics or personality types could be algorithmically optimized in team formation.