13 April 2015 was a typical day in modern British politics. An Oxford University graduate in philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE), Ed Miliband, launched the Labour party’s general election manifesto. It was examined by the BBC’s political editor, Oxford PPE graduate Nick Robinson, by the BBC’s economics editor, Oxford PPE graduate Robert Peston, and by the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Oxford PPE graduate Paul Johnson. It was criticised by the prime minister, Oxford PPE graduate David Cameron. It was defended by the Labour shadow chancellor, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Balls.”

And so, it goes on, pointing out the insane number of holders of this particular Oxford degree that are at the top of our politics, media, and business world. If you think things have changed since 2015, both the final two candidates, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, for the ongoing Conservative Party leadership contest, are both PPE BAs.

It’s not like the UK’s the only example of a homogenised elite who tend to have very similar educations, even down to just one or two degrees or institutions. Japan’s top rank is full of graduates from its Imperial Universities of Tokyo and Kyoto, France had only very recently closed its École Nationale d’Administration, US business is dominated by graduates of a select handful of prestigious Business Schools—the list goes on.

Are we being selective about the diversity we want to increase?
Is this a problem? Some UK voters might be a little confused as to how the country has managed to get into quite the state it’s in if all its leaders have such ostensibly brilliant educational pedigrees—but that’s a topic for another time.

But it is certainly a problem for anyone in the HR function truly committed to making positive change on inclusion and diversity. The CIPD—our industry’s professional body in the UK—stresses, after all, that, “Promoting and supporting diversity in the workplace is an important aspect of good people management” as it’s about “valuing everyone in the organisation as an individual”.

But as it also adds, to reap the benefits of a diverse workforce, it’s vital to have an inclusive environment where everyone feels able to participate and achieve their potential.

The problem is that a little bit too often—perhaps reflecting its increasingly heated social debate around race and gender—inclusion and diversity is framed in US terms, as being about hiring, and supporting talent from under-represented minorities.

But to achieve what the CIPD wants, and indeed achieve better business outcomes, inclusion and diversity must fight back against things like the hegemony of PPE and the kind of groupthink it unconsciously encourages.

Which is why a key target of any HR Director’s inclusion and diversity strategy must be to foster not just educational, racial, sexual or age diversity, but what maybe actually the most important form of diversity of all:

Cognitive diversity.
Diversity = more than skin and chronology

Why does this matter? Because business—and I would also say, our wider social conversation and politics—is crying out for greater diversity of thinking. I’ve seen companies fall behind in their market because they kept producing the same kind of product or service, as they had no-one in their decision-making cycle who could offer the voice of the consumers they were neglecting or hadn’t even heard about yet. I have also seen companies get drained of smart people who got frustrated that their perspective wasn’t the same as the internal equivalent of the PPE mindset, and so went places more open to challenging the status quo. I know of at least one major global brand that, because of a lack of openness to new thinking, missed a major business opportunity that resulted in a downturn that soon led to multiple redundancies.

Clearly, for many brands, diversity of thinking is both critical but even more challenging to achieve than social diversity hiring and talent acquisition. After all, you can have a highly mixed team of genders and races… but if they all grew up in the same type of area, went to the same type of school, had very similar career pathways (like CFO to CEO?) and are surrounded by the same type of people, then in practice, they will all think the same, or at least very similarly.

The challenge is that diversity of thinking is harder to see than race, gender and age. Cognitive diversity means non-standard ways of interacting, expressing oneself; the huge potential contribution to business of neurodiversity is only now being recognised, for example, most interestingly in the fast-growing machine learning market.

If you’re not yet convinced moving to cognitive – and not just social diversity – is important, there’s a wealth of data out there that firmly establishes a link between inclusion and better business performance, like McKinsey’s observation that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25 percent more likely to have above-average profitability than others, or Cloverpop’s recent analysis that showed more inclusive decision making leads to better business decisions 87% of the time, business teams arrive at decisions twice as fast with half the meetings, and overall decision outcomes might improve by up to 60%.

Convinced? Here, then, are my three tips for breaking the cycle of only one kind of voice getting heard at leadership level in your company:

Widen the door
Too many companies only recruit from certain universities, e.g., Oxbridge/Russell Group. They may also rely a bit too much on a narrow set of psychometric or aptitude/personality tests. Being this narrow will only ever get you employees that fit a certain mould and limit your chances of cognitive diversity. Removing, or at least expanding, such over-used ways of recruiting and then promoting people is a huge first step to cognitive inclusion and diversity.

Make it very clear you always want to hear the opposing view
To get new, unexpected, and potentially game-changing perspectives on your market, you need to build (and sustain) a culture truly open to divergent opinions. This sounds very grand but can be achieved by very simple techniques. One I always recommend is that your people should be encouraged to create connections in different functions in the company. Quite often, we just tend to work in small teams or in a department, and so can be blind to what happens outside our immediate sphere of influence or set of work connections. I once worked for a very successful corporation that randomly matched us all with somebody from a different part of company to have a regular quick coffee and a chat. This led to loads of new ideas and concerns getting aired that I just don’t think would have surfaced otherwise.

Use the tech
To do things like open up decisioning, we need to become less static and more open in the workplace. Obviously, this is more challenging in a hybrid working environment—but here, modern collaboration and communication tech is improving all the time at solving these problems, so use all the HR and workplace tools you can to promote inclusion and ways for people to better network and feel they can air their opinions.

Increasingly, CHROs know that this isn’t just Teams or Zooms video. A lot of people just don’t like cameras or feeling they are on display; they prefer, and often add huge value, by online comments or emails post-meeting. Support this all you can: set up a virtual coffee for somebody working in Procurement to speak to a colleague in Sales or in Finance to find out what their perspective is. I keep finding in the kind of high-level change management projects I lead that connecting with people in different parts of the organisation enables more effective problem-solving.

Cook up a new way to arrive at decisions
Finally, to achieve true cognitive diversity, take a long hard look at how meetings are run, and consensus achieved. Having a structure and process for decision making that really sets out to capture different views and war-game alternatives is critical. This is important from the diversity perspective because it makes sure that all your people are included; for example, introverted people or team members that they don’t like to intervene might have the best answers, but won’t propose them in a meeting. (A useful technique here is anonymous e-voting on all decisions until a true majority agree, for instance.)

My challenge to you is that if you are serious about inclusion and diversity, never forget the diversity that might be the most useful of all:

The one inside our heads.