Bloomberg View) — Scott E. Page trained as a game theorist, and in game theory, diversity is usually an obstacle to overcome. That is, the more diverse the preferences of the participants in a game, the harder it is to come to a mutually acceptable solution.

Early in his career, though, while teaching economics at the California Institute of Technology, Page decided to try looking at diversity in a different way. As he recounted in his 2007 book "The Difference":

One winter in 1995, to have a little fun I constructed a computer model of diverse problem solvers confronting a difficult problem. Put aside for now what counts for fun at CalTech; "fun" at CalTech rarely makes sense to the outside world. In my model, I represented diversity as differences in the ways problem solvers encoded the problem and searched for solutions. I referred to these ways of solving problems as tools. In working through the implications of my model, I stumbled upon a counter-intuitive finding: diverse groups of problem solvers — groups of people with diverse tools — consistently outperformed groups of the best and the brightest.