Matthew Syed on why diverse thinking could be a General Counsel’s secret weapon

Key Lessons

This was an opportunity for GCs to take time away from their day-to-day work and discuss different ways of thinking with their peers in an informal environment. These are the key lessons that we took away from an engaging, thought-provoking talk and what they could mean for a GC or in-house lawyer.

The power of cognitive diversity

With GCs increasingly under pressure to deliver more with fewer resources, they can fall into a pattern of decisions being made by the same, narrow pool of people. This can result in a limited perspective which misses key risks and considerations.

GCs can help overcome these limitations by involving functional specialists from other areas of the business in key projects at an early stage. The higher the stakes of a specific project, the more important this diversity of thought becomes.

The dangers of groupthink

Failing to address a lack of cognitive diversity can result in groupthink, whereby team members simply move towards even greater conformity. This behaviour intuitively feels low-risk, but can actually increase the risk of important considerations being overlooked.

Teams should actively seek out dissenting voices from within their organisation and beyond. This may include other functions of the business, customers or even external stakeholders. The stronger those challenges are, the more they will help to improve the service you provide.

The importance of psychological safety

For diversity of thought to reach its true potential, people need to feel safe. This will allow them to express their ideas in the first place and to implement them without fear of the consequences of failure.

A perfectionist mindset, driven by fear of failure will discourage innovation and learning and limit the success of any team. Failure can teach valuable lessons in leadership and fear can be one of the biggest blockers to team success.

The power of outsiders

Some skills and expertise are so important that they need to be brought into the team on a continual basis by recruiting and developing the right people. As legal teams grow and the demands of their roles expand, certain non-legal skills become ever more valuable.

For example, project management, change management and the use of technology such as artificial intelligence can all help in-house legal teams to deliver a better service to their internal stakeholders. This will often mean looking outside of the legal profession to find the right people, which in turn can bring new ideas and fresh perspectives to the team.

The limitations of experience

When it comes to making significant decisions, many people rightly feel more confident as they accumulate experience in their role. However, that experience can have its downsides too, such as reinforcing old paradigms.

A healthy way to counter this can be seeking input and critical thinking from those with less direct experience to bring different perspectives to the decision. You won’t lose control of the final decision, but the act of having to explain your thought process to someone less experienced can help you clarify and sense-check your own thinking.

The limitations of AI

While technology can transform how legal teams operate, we are reminded that AI has its boundaries. It can process and analyse vast amounts of data, but it cannot generate hypotheses, apply contextual reasoning or test scenarios in the way humans can.

For GCs, this means that imagination, curiosity, and critical thinking remain essential, especially when making complex legal or strategic decisions. AI should be seen as a powerful tool to support judgment, not replace it.

Practical strategies

So how can GCs start to embed more positive behaviours and remove some of the biases and vulnerabilities created by the way they currently think? A legal team won’t change overnight and shouldn’t try to.

However, they can make small changes consistently over time, such as:

• Thinking about diversity of opinion as a commercial imperative, rather than a tick-box exercise based on perceived political correctness.
• Asking better, open-ended questions of their team members and their internal and external stakeholders, to understand their unique perspectives.
• Listening more actively to the answers to those questions and engage in an ongoing dialogue to track those perspectives over time.
• Exploring new technologies and processes with an open mind to find ways that they could be put to use for the good of the department.
• Encouraging innovation, risk-taking and openness from all members of the team and wider stakeholders.

This kind of diverse, enlightened thinking will only become more important as the roles of GCs and in-house legal teams continue to evolve. We’re very grateful to Matthew for his inspiring talk which allowed our guests to think more creatively about the benefits they can bring to their organisations.

More about the Expanding Horizons series

This series of roundtable events has been carefully designed to hit the challenges faced by GCs head on and provide useful, practical insights. Matthew’s talk was a great start to our series and we look forward to sharing more actionable learnings from the upcoming events in February and April 2026.

About Matthew Syed

Matthew was once England’s number 1 table tennis player and represented Great Britain at the Olympics in Barcelona (1992) and Sydney (2000) before winning team gold at the 2002 Commonwealth Games.

He is now a keynote speaker, author, journalist, podcaster and consultant. He works with global organisations to encourage high performance, growth mindset and cultural change. Matthew’s talk was based on his book ‘Rebel Ideas’ – one of four he has written.