This article, “How Cognitive Diversity Affects Your Work” from the ABA Law Practice Today is one of the best things I have read in quite some time about how lawyers and clients interact. The author, Anne Collier, explores a hypothetical legal team’s relationship with its client, where the CEO and general counsel have different cognitive styles and the lawyers on the legal team have different cognitive styles as well — not to mention the huge differences among the CEO and one of the lawyers on the team. These differences emerge from different approaches to the “paradox of structure” in solving problems: “The paradox of structure is the seemingly incongruous fact that structure both enables and limits one’s ability to solve a problem.” A group of professionals can all be operating at a very high level but still have different preferences for structure and innovation. Their differing preferences can lead to clashes in cognitive style. 

The article focuses on some (fascinating) metrics for problem-solving styles and never uses the word “listening.” Yet listening is part of the “bridging” and “coping” strategies it recommends for handling clashes of cognitive styles. My favorite line in the article, other than the one about the paradox of structure, is this example of a nonverbal bridging strategy: “Oscar agrees to give Madison ‘the look’ in meetings when she needs to be more concrete.”

Have you investigated your own cognitive style, or gotten informal or formal feedback on it? How do you use listening skills — including nonverbal signals — to perceive and anticipate problems stemming from cognitive diversity?