Picture yourself in a room with 12 like-minded CEOs...
What would you ask them? How could they help you resolve that problem that keeps you awake?
This is one of the foundations of my peer coaching group. I can put you in that room, and each one of those hand-picked CEOs or MDs want you and your business to succeed. And, as a result, they will use their different perspective, experience and knowledge to help you achieve greater clarity on the underlying cause of your business challenge or opportunity, and provide a range of pragmatic options that will help you chart a successful path forward.
Members of my group are exposed to a greater diversity of experience and opinion than most business leaders and it is this that helps my members to make better decisions for themselves, their companies and their employees.
But why does diversity help when making decisions?To appreciate the strength of diversity in decision making consider the psychological concept of 'The Wisdom of Crowd', based on an observation made by Francis Galton in 1907. Galton noticed that the average of all the entries in a ‘guess the weight of the ox’ competition at a country fair was more accurate than most of the individual guesses -including those of cattle experts. What Galton observed was the wisdom of crowds - average judgement converges on the right answer.
More recent research has strongly supported this concept and is beginning to refine the idea by looking at the detrimental effect of a lack of independence in the crowd (which can produce a herding effect away from the right answer), and the positive effect of adding contrarian thinkers into the crowd (those whose ideas are as different as possible from the crowd can improve the crowd's judgement)(Davis-Stober, et al, 2014).
My peer coaching group creates and channels diversity and contrarian thinking by hand-selecting members who are from across a wide range of manufacturing and service industries. The very diversity built in to the DNA of the group avoids any and all conflicts of interest and customer-supplier relationships which might colour judgements.But it also promotes the very diversity and contrarian thinking that is at the heart of the wisdom of the crowd and leads to better decisions with less risk for our members.Isn't it about time you joined?