Diversity Isn’t Just Nice. It’s Essential

In your book, “A Team of Teams,” and in your experience, you were bringing together all these siloed Special Forces, right? Rangers, SEALs, Green Berets, all that. One of the things I believe is that diversity of thought is a catalyst for genius and the secret sauce for building a high-performance team. I mean what do you think about that in terms of what you've seen? And maybe an example of that?

The process to create a great Delta Force operator or a great SEAL or great Ranger produces people who become more and more similar and the longer they're in the organization, the more similar they become. Now, that gives you a certain predictability. If you go on an objective, if you have a problem you know what they'll do, they can trust each other, but it's precious little diversity, and it's frightening little diversity. What we found is when we got into a complex war... For a very tactical task, that's fine. You're gonna land on the beachhead, just take the enemy, okay. You don't have to be very diverse to do that. But if you're going against a complex enemy, like we ended up against Al-Qaeda in Iraq, this homogeneous culture sees the problem a certain way, assesses the problem a certain way and has a reflexive way to respond, because that's what they are.

You know, for a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. What we found was that was very, very dysfunctional for us. When we opened the aperture and we started bringing people from other parts of government - Department of State, they have a radically different culture, they view life on a different timeline. The Central Intelligence Agency - they want to gather intelligence and they want to build sources for the long haul. The State Department wants to create conditions. The military wants to hammer the nail and go home. I think we've got to understand diversity is not a nice thing to do. It's not something to do because you want to be fair. It's not something you do that, you know, makes people feel good. I mean, it's all of those things, it's morally right. But it's practically essential if you're going to solve a complex problem.