Most teams don’t fail because they lack capability. They fail because certain voices dominate, others hold back, and important challenges never quite make it into the discussion.

You see it in small ways:

Everyone in the room might be competent but the process still produces blind spots. That is not a hiring problem. It is a team dynamic.

Recent research — including work commissioned by the Diversity Project and authored by Professor Alex Edmans — helps explain why. Teams that bring together different perspectives can make better decisions, particularly in complex or uncertain environments. But they can also be harder to run. They take longer to align, and they introduce friction into discussions that might otherwise feel straightforward.

In other words, better inputs don’t automatically lead to better outcomes. They need managing.

This is where many organisations get stuck. There is broad agreement that a range of perspectives is valuable. But far less clarity on what to do once those perspectives are in the room.

Without deliberate answers to those questions, teams tend to default to familiarity. The most confident voices set the direction, others adapt, and the final decision reflects a narrower range of thinking than was available. None of this is new, but it is often underestimated. In practice, the difference between a team that uses its diversity well and one that does not comes down to fairly ordinary management choices: how agendas are structured, how contributions are invited, how disagreement is handled, and whether people feel it is worth speaking up.

These are not abstract principles. They show up in specific moments — a trustee board agreeing how challenge should work before a decision is made, an adviser raising a difficult point, an employer adjusting one process rather than launching a broad initiative, or a provider designing around real member behaviour. Individually, these changes are small, but collectively they determine whether different perspectives improve outcomes or get filtered out. That is why conversations often fall short: there is no shortage of agreement, but far less focus on trade-offs, friction, and what needs to change in day-to-day behaviour — and that is the gap we are trying to address.

On May 7th, a group of cross-industry organisations are bringing together trustees, advisers, employers and providers to focus on what this looks like in practice. The aim is not to revisit the theory, but to work through the realities: what gets in the way, what has worked, and what people can realistically do differently.

A core part of the session will be a structured workshop and speed mentoring format. Participants will work in small groups to define what good practice looks like in different settings — from meetings and governance to recruitment and product design — and to share examples of both progress and failure. Most sessions will run under Chatham House rules to allow for more open discussion, and will focus on producing a small number of practical takeaways that can be applied immediately.

Because the question is not whether different perspectives are valuable. It is whether teams are set up to use them.

📍 7 May | Hybrid (London + virtual)
 🎟️ Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/joint-pensions-diversity-inclusion-event-tickets-1984768988473
 🌸 Organised by: Diversity in Pensions, Pensions Equity Group, O:Pen, NextGen Pensions, the Association of Professional Pension Trustees, the DEI Pensions Group and Investors for Purpose, and generously hosted by Burges Salmon LLP.