The Cognitive Diversity Solicitation Obligation
Groups naturally converge toward shared perspectives, particularly under pressure or when time is limited. The cognitive diversity solicitation obligation holds that professionals facilitating group decisions have a responsibility to actively solicit perspectives that differ from the emerging consensus, particularly from those who may be reluctant to volunteer divergent views without explicit invitation.
Solicitation is necessary because passive openness is insufficient. Announcing that diverse views are welcome does not produce them, because the social cost of volunteering a dissenting perspective remains high even when the group explicitly invites dissent. Active solicitation—asking specific individuals for their perspectives, creating structured processes for surfacing disagreement—overcomes the inertia that passive openness cannot.
Meeting this obligation requires deliberate process design. For those developing effective professional development strategies, cognitive diversity solicitation distinguishes those who access the full range of available insight from those who hear only what consensus permits. Our solicitation framework provides process-design approaches.
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