Virtual quizzing with friends has become a popular Saturday night ritual in lockdown. Last weekend, our weekly quiz included a riddle round with a crowd-pleasing opener: “What occurs once every minute, twice every moment, and never in a thousand years?” This put me into a state of wild speculation – is it a meteor? A comet? Some form of light year….? Totally flummoxed, I turned to my wife who calmly said, “I’m sure the answer is the letter “M”. It’s pretty simple”.

Which brings me to the point. I consider myself to be relatively switched on, as is my wife, but our brains work in completely different ways, despite both being lawyers. My wife found the riddles easy and straightforward, whereas I found them mind-bogglingly difficult.

To me, it was a “real-life” example of the importance of people who think, analyse and interpret problems in different ways to any team, organisation or decision-making group, such as a trustee board. It would have been detrimental to the decision-making process of any group if all individuals thought like me.

But this example also shows the potential difficulty in assessing cognitive diversity and finding a trustee board that is cognitively diverse. On age, socio-economic and demographic lines, the quiz participants were all similar. We were gender diverse, but that wasn’t the factor in determining success.

It would be reasonable for a selection panel to appoint only one of us to a trustee board based on the typical diversity parameters of age, gender and demography. In doing so, the trustee board would be “diverse” in the truest sense, but there would be no guarantee that the board was cognitively diverse or was able to successfully eradicate “group think”.

The Pensions Regulator (TPR) has rightly put significant emphasis on the importance of diversity on trustee boards and in the decision-making process, which follows excellent work from industry bodies, such as the PLSA in this area.

Indeed, the number of applicants for TPR’s working group on diversity in response to its consultation on the future of trusteeship shows how seriously the industry is taking up the challenge. But in my view, there is more that can be done to improve diversity.

Whilst an increasing number of trustee boards have undertaken an external assessment of the governance of their scheme and the composition of their board, these schemes are in the minority and often the reviews focus on the collective skill set and knowledge of the individual trustees only. Typically, there is no assessment of how the individual trustees solve problems or the way in which they approach and analyse issues.

This approach reflects TPR’s fit and proper assessment during the master trust authorisation process where trustees were required to show that they complement each other’s skill sets and collectively had the full range of relevant competencies, experience and knowledge, but there was no analysis of how the board worked together and whether there were any gaps in the trustees’ “soft skills” or problem solving capability.

From what I have seen, the new trustee accreditation offered by industry groups such as the PMI looks robust, challenging and thorough, but by and large, the accreditation service applies to professional trustees only and is binary – either the individual has the characteristics to pass or not.

The accreditation cannot evaluate how a professional trustee will be able to work with fellow board members; how their skills as chair will complement or hinder the individual personalities on the board; or how their skills and competencies will support or complement the other board members.

Unless and until trustee nominees are subjected to psychometric tests to ascertain their cognitive composition, and trustees are selected on criteria resulting from review and analysis of the board as a whole, there is no guarantee that trustee boards can achieve the level of cognitive diversity that TPR, industry and the underlying beneficiaries are striving for.

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