Diversity Is The Key To Recruit The Perfect Ideasicleˣ Team
You could invite any four people to the Ideasicleˣ platform and you will have a productive idea session. There’s something about the virtual nature and the fact it allows creativity to happen naturally makes the platform that powerful. But the fact you can, in fact, be choosy with who you invite to your idea job makes it doubly powerful. What we’ve found is that the more diverse the team, the more territories will be explored.
Makes sense if you think about it. If everyone on the team is too similar, the ideas that are generated will be nauseatingly narrow. But if everyone on the team is wildly different, they will bring these differences to each session, ensuring the team thinks about the problem from four different perspectives.
Here are a few things to consider when maximizing diversity when recruiting a team, realizing it’s not a perfect science.
#1: Diverse demographics
One obvious and admittedly superficial way to amplify your idea session is to consider diverse demographics. If you had a team of four 40 year old white guys you’ll get ideas from a very thin slice of the population with a potentially overly-consistent perspective on the problem you’re trying to solve. But if you play with the many dimensions of demographic diversity—race, gender, age, geography, etc.—what comes out of your session will likely be that much more exponential. Differences in perspective are good for ideas.
#2: Diverse ways of thinking
There’s another kind of diversity that is even more powerful when crafting the perfect team, and that is diversity in how the people think. Because let’s face it, there are different kinds of creativity. You may have your favorite freelancers that you bring in, but only when the challenge is right for them. The visual thinker, the woman who’s so good at turning a phrase, the guy who loves psychology and tying insights to human truths. All creative people, but all deploying their personal creativity in different ways. Try to recruit, to the degree you can, a team of diverse thinkers and have them work together. That psychological truth might inspire a visual idea that becomes a great turn of phrase. Differences in ways of thinking are good for ideas.
#3: Diverse disciplines
Another way I’ve found you can create clear delineation between team members is recruiting from different disciplines. For example, if I need promotional ideas, I might recruit two promotional experts to anchor the team in the reality of promotions, but then also a writer and maybe a social media person. I would not recruit four promotional experts as the approach to the problem risks being one-dimensional. I’d much rather mix it up so each team member is thinking through the problem from a different base of knowledge, a different expertise, a different discipline. Differences in professional disciplines are good for ideas.
So, in summary, the goal in recruiting a great team on the Ideasicleˣ platform is diversity. Whether that’s diversity in demographics, ways of thinking, or professional disciplines. Or even combinations therein. Because the more different the perspectives of your individual team members, the more exponential the ideas will be.
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Will Burns is the founder and CEO of Ideasicleˣ.
Follow him on Twitter @willoburns.