Why Strategic Renaissance Starts with Diverse Minds
Most organisations approach diversity as a fairness issue, focused on equity and representation. But there’s an equally compelling reason to prioritise diverse perspectives in strategic conversations: it’s a competitive advantage that directly impacts performance.
When homogeneous teams tackle complex challenges, they bring similar mental models, shared blind spots, and predictable thinking patterns. The result is strategies that feel familiar, safe, and ultimately insufficient for the realities they’re meant to address.
Strategic breakthroughs happen when diverse minds face complexity together, and smart organisations are learning to harness this dynamic deliberately.
The Medici Effect: When Ideas Collide and Multiply
Frans Johansson’s concept of the Medici Effect, named after the Renaissance banking family who brought artists, scientists, and philosophers into creative collision, reveals something profound about innovation.¹ The Medicis funded creators from a wide range of disciplines, and when sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, financiers, painters, and architects converged upon Florence, they found each other, learned from one another, and broke down barriers between disciplines and cultures. From this cross-pollination emerged the Renaissance, a burst of creativity and knowledge that reshaped Europe after centuries of medieval tradition.
When you connect two separate fields, you set off an exponential increase of unique concept combinations, an explosion of ideas. Johansson calls this the Intersection and illustrates this with an example from music: rock music alone offers roughly 2,400 possible variations, and classical music another 2,400. But here’s the crucial insight – when these genres intersect, they don’t simply add together to create 4,800 possibilities. Instead, they explode into over 6 million potential combinations.² This demonstrates how every new intersection dramatically expands your option set in ways that can’t be achieved by staying in the homogeneous lane.
The core concept is not about the exact, verifiable number of variations for each genre, but rather that by combining the two distinct fields (rock and classical music), the number of possible variations explodes.
This is why the Intersection represents the best chance to innovate because of the explosion of unique concept combinations, offering a great numerical advantage when looking for fresh ideas. You’re not just getting more of the same thinking, you’re accessing entirely new territories of possibility.
Johansson expands this concept with what he calls “intersectional innovation” which differs fundamentally from “directional innovation” that improves existing approaches along predictable paths.³ The major difference between a directional idea and an intersectional one is that we know where we are going with the former, while intersectional ideas emerge from combining disparate disciplines in unexpected ways. This intersectional innovation creates the most groundbreaking ideas that come from the convergence of different disciplines or cultures.
In my facilitation work, I’ve witnessed this repeatedly. I once observed a marketing director’s customer insights combine with an engineer’s systems thinking and a CFO’s commercial logic during a strategy session. But the real breakthrough came because we also had perspectives from team members with different cultural backgrounds who thought differently and understood market dynamics the others had missed entirely. The strategic shift they landed on was something a homogenous team would not have reached, and it reflected a deeper understanding of both their customer base and their capability beyond orthodox thinking.
This isn’t just role diversity, though that matters. It’s cognitive diversity, cultural diversity, and experiential diversity working together to see what homogeneous thinking cannot.
Diversity Pays
McKinsey’s research shows that organisations with greater diversity on boards, executive ranks and general staff population are more likely to outperform their less diverse peers.⁴ Research from Northwestern Kellogg claims diversity is less about proliferation of ideas and more about decision-making, showing that diverse groups “outperformed more homogeneous groups not because of an influx of new ideas, but because diversity triggered more careful information processing that is absent in homogeneous groups.”⁵
So, apart from the intuitive appeal that Johansson’s concept engenders, there is real evidence that diversity is more than just a values matter – it’s genuinely value-creating.
Aligning with Your Two Critical Audiences
Strategy ultimately serves two primary audiences: your customers and your people, because organisations fight it out for the best clients and the best staff. I have long held a strong view that an organisation’s employee population, particularly the executive and board ranks, should reflect the face of your market (or in the case of for-purpose entities, your community). This isn’t just about representation, it’s about strategic insight.
Teams that genuinely understand their customer base because they share diverse backgrounds and experiences create more relevant strategies. They spot opportunities that homogeneous teams miss, anticipate challenges that uniform thinking overlooks, and develop solutions that resonate across different segments of their market.
When your strategic conversations include perspectives that mirror your community, you’re not just being inclusive, you’re being strategically relevant.
Creating Conditions for Collective Genius
The challenge isn’t just getting diverse people in the room, it’s creating environments where different thinking styles can collide productively. This requires moving beyond polite consultation to genuine intellectual engagement.
When disagreement is handled well, it doesn’t derail strategy, it strengthens it. It reveals hidden assumptions, challenges comfortable thinking, and creates the creative tension where breakthrough insights emerge.
But this demands intentional facilitation. Diverse perspectives need psychological safety to contribute authentically, equal speaking opportunities to be heard, and new frameworks that value different types of intelligence rather than defaulting to old models and whoever speaks most confidently.
Five Ways to Harness Diverse Strategic Thinking
Assuming you are recruiting for diversity into your board, executive team and employee ranks, there a several things you can do to unlock that new stock of diversified minds:
1. Design for Productive Collision Create cross-functional project teams that deliberately combine different disciplines, backgrounds, and thinking styles. Combining homogenous groups tend to lead to less innovation than finding ways to combine widely divergent groups, individuals or thinking styles.⁶
2. Establish Psychological Safety for Divergence Explicitly encourage cross-functional critique and constructive challenge. Make it clear that the goal is strengthening ideas, not winning arguments. Create ground rules that protect space for different perspectives to emerge and hold space for divergence.
3. Slow Down the Strategic Pace “Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”⁷ ― Rainer Maria Rilke
Like Rilke urging his correspondent in Letters to a Young Poet, we must resist the urge to rush to answers and solutions. Cultivate the capacity to hold questions for longer. You also must be willing to ‘waste time’ on things you are curious about that are not directly relevant to your work.⁸ Strategic thinking requires time for ideas to intersect and emerge in unexpected ways, and different ways of thinking need time to blend and mature.
4. Value Diverse Perspectives Over Homogeneity Johansson radically suggests hiring people who make you uncomfortable, even those who you dislike!⁹ The Northwestern Kellogg Research makes the observation “The mere presence of diversity in a group creates awkwardness, and the need to diffuse this tension leads to better group problem solving“.⁵ The point is to go against your cognitive bias for homogeneity, familiarity and predictability. Ride out the emotional discomfort that comes from the perception of conflict in diverse groups. And in your strategic conversations, actively solicit input from those who take oppositional views, often without sophisticated strategic vocabularies, recognising that innovative thinking often comes from unexpected sources.
5. Embrace Strategic Failure as Learning Create environments where teams can test intersectional ideas without fear of career consequences. You have untapped creative potential throughout your organisation, if you create the space for exploration. Bold experimentation is the pathway to breakthrough thinking. The most prolific creators are often very unique personalities and also the ones who have the most significant innovative impact (think Picasso, Einstein and Edison).¹⁰ Innovation requires experimentation, and experimentation requires accepting dead-ends and failure as part of the process.
The Strategic Advantage of Engineered Diversity
Organisations in advertently walk themselves into the homogeneity trap: They treat diversity as an add-on, and they hire for cultural fit from their existing referral networks. This stifles the very foundation of the Medici effect and keeps you stuck in convention – like your own type of Middle Ages of endlessly repeating convention. What I suggest is the opposite: treat diversity as the goal and hire for cultural fluidity from outside your known networks. Then, constructively manage the creative tension.
This is the real competitive advantage: a team that can harness diverse thinking to see possibilities that uniform perspectives cannot imagine. The strategic edge belongs to organisations that can think collectively across difference – where that difference actually reflects the face of the very markets you seek to serve.
Your strategic renaissance won’t likely come from comfortably homogenous teams that all culturally “fit” and produce orthodox thinking with monotonous regularity. It will emerge when genuinely diverse minds in your organisation intersect in new ways, push you well out of your comfort zone, and when their perspectives, skills and experiences are given time, safety and a voice, to tackle your biggest questions together.
Footnotes
¹ Frans Johansson, The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). Author’s note: While the Medici family of Florence undoubtedly contributed to the Renaissance, it’s worth noting they operated in a rather different moral and political context than today’s business leaders.
² Ibid., Johansson calculates that rock music has approximately 2,400 variations (4 basic instruments × 12 structures × 50 vocals) and classical music similarly has 2,400 variations (30 instruments × 40 structures × 2 vocals), but when these genres intersect, they create over 6 million possible combinations.
³ Johansson distinguishes between “directional innovation” (predictable improvements along established paths) and “intersectional innovation” (breakthroughs from combining disparate fields).
⁴ McKinsey & Company, “Diversity matters even more: The case for holistic impact,” December 2023. http://mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/diversity-matters-even-more-the-case-for-holistic-impact. Author’s note: There remains some doubt about the causality between success and diversity: are successful companies more able to promote diversity or does diversity create more successful companies?
⁵ Northwestern Kellogg Insight, “Better Decisions Through Diversity,” September 2022, https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/better_decisions_through_diversity
⁶ Frans Johansson, The Medici Effect, p. 147.
⁷ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, translated by M. D. Herter Norton, revised edition, 1993.
⁸ Frans Johansson, The Medici Effect, p. 76.
⁹ Ibid., p. 82.
¹⁰ Ibid., referencing historical examples including Picasso (20,000 artworks), Einstein (240+ papers), and Edison (1,039 patents).
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