Opinion: Stop Hiring People Who Think Like You

The entrepreneurial advantage may be hiding in the room next door, writes Sarah Tucker

There is a peculiar habit in business. When something works, we hire more people who think like the people who made it work, then wonder why the next big idea looks suspiciously like the last one.

Edward de Bono was challenging this habit decades ago.

Long before innovation became an industry with its own vocabulary, he was asking what happens when people approach problems through the same familiar routes. His distinction between vertical and lateral thinking was not an invitation to abandon logic. It was a warning about becoming so accustomed to one way of thinking that other possibilities become difficult to see.

For entrepreneurs, that distinction is becoming rather useful.

Blue Earth Summit, taking place in London from October 14 to 16, has built its proposition around putting people together who would not normally have much reason to meet. Its investment forum in New York during Climate Week in September brought founders, investors, family offices and businesses working across areas including AI, energy, food and materials into the same conversation.

The interesting part is not the networking.

It is what happens when someone from outside your industry starts asking questions about your problem.

The entrepreneurial world has never had more information, or more ways of hearing exactly the information it already agrees with. Algorithms recommend what we already like. Investors know the sectors they know. Founders study companies that have already succeeded. LinkedIn has become an impressive machine for confirming that people who think like us are also thinking like us.

Even innovation has acquired a uniform.

There is the pitch deck, the accelerator, the podcast, the panel, the venture fund and, eventually, the tote bag.

The danger is not too few ideas.

It is too many arriving from the same direction.

This is where the polymath becomes interesting.

Business has traditionally preferred specialists because specialists are easy to place. Finance knows where finance belongs. Technology knows where technology belongs. The person interested in several fields is harder to file, which may be precisely why they can be useful.

Knowing several subjects does not make someone automatically brilliant. It does, however, change the connections they can make.

A designer may see why customers are abandoning a product that the data says they should love. An anthropologist may understand a behaviour that marketing has reduced to a demographic. A scientist may recognise an opportunity an investor has dismissed because it does not fit an established category.

The useful person in the room may be the person who does not quite belong there.

Climate change makes the point particularly clearly. It is treated as an environmental problem, yet its consequences run through insurance, infrastructure, energy, agriculture, real estate, finance and consumer behaviour. A flood has little interest in which department has been assigned responsibility for it.

AI is doing something similar. What began as a technology story is rapidly becoming a question about energy infrastructure, employment, education, skills and investment.

The technology may be clever.

The business problem is considerably larger.

This is where de Bono’s thinking remains useful. His point was not simply to “think differently”, a phrase now so thoroughly absorbed into corporate language that it should probably come with a warning.

His more interesting proposition was to change the route into the problem.

That matters because entrepreneurs are supposed to do precisely that. They notice something other people have overlooked, or see something familiar differently. Yet once a company succeeds, the habits that produced the success can harden into rules that make the next departure harder.

Success can make a company less curious.

Hiring can do the same.

“Culture fit” sounds sensible until it becomes a polite way of hiring people who already agree with you. A strong company needs shared standards and trust. It does not need everyone to have reached the same conclusions by the same route.

There is a difference between cohesion and conformity.

Blue Earth is interesting because it is deliberately engineering the collision. Its London Summit brings together entrepreneurs, investors, scientists, explorers and creators, while its New York forum has taken the proposition into the American investment world.

There is no guarantee that putting different people together produces a breakthrough. Conferences have been disproving that theory quite successfully for years.

But the potential value is simple: a connection that would not otherwise have happened.

For entrepreneurs, that may be more useful than another session on how to innovate.

The next business idea may come from someone who has no business reason to have thought of it.

That is precisely why you might want them in the room.