The waiting room at the Queens courthouse is enormous, sunlit, and oddly peaceful. Hundreds of people sit in rows of connected plastic chairs doing the things people do when they have no choice but to wait: read, scroll, sleep upright, or stare at the ceiling with the thousand-yard look of someone reconsidering their relationship with civic participation.
Nobody chose to be there. That is, somehow, the whole point.
I served as Juror #5 in a New York City trial a few years ago, and I was back in Queens recently for a second round — questioned, then dismissed before reaching the jury box. Both times, I kept thinking about the same thing: not the case, not the procedure, but the jury as a team. Twelve strangers. A few days. A decision of consequence. No warm-up, no shared history, no exit until the task is complete.
The borough of Queens is one of the most demographically diverse counties in the United States, with 160 languages spoken and nearly half of its 2.3 million residents born in another country. And the diversity I mean goes beyond the categories that show up on questionnaires. People who carry different frameworks for engaging in conflict. Different intuitions about authority. Different relationships to legal systems and concepts of justice. The kind of diversity that is harder to name and matters more inside a deliberation room than almost anything else.
Which made me wonder: does that level of extreme diversity make a jury harder to norm, or easier? The answer surprised me. And it has implications well beyond the courthouse.
Why You'd Expect Harder
When people share a cultural background, they share interpretive shortcuts: the same tells, the same baseline for what nervous looks like versus guilty, the same implicit idea for how disagreement gets expressed. Strip that away and every signal gets harder to read. Every assumption has to be questioned. The room is harder to navigate before anyone has said anything important.
The selection process doesn't help. “Voir dire,” the attorney questioning process that selects the jury, is an exercise in rapid judgment under pressure. Attorneys have a brief window, a list of questions, and real incentive to make elimination decisions fast. Someone seems too eager, gets cut. Too skeptical, gets cut. Shifts in their chair, someone writes it down. Voir dire is an exercise in what psychologist Nalini Ambady calledthin-slicing: the human tendency to make rapid confident judgments from very thin slices of behavior. We’re sometimes accurate, but the problem is that our confidence vastly exceeds our accuracy. We have almost no ability to tell the difference between the reads that are right and the ones that aren't.
Research on unstructured interviews shows how freestyling these conversations can actively hurt prediction accuracy, introducing irrelevant impressions that override better information you already had. Voir dire is an unstructured interview with high stakes. The attorneys might be experts in their field, but they’re still mostly pattern-matching on noise.
A Queens jury, this hyper-diverse, randomly assembled group of strangers, seems like exactly the wrong room for a high-stakes, time-compressed team task.
What the System Figured Out
Here’s where the jury system does something quietly brilliant.
The summons assumes almost any adult can do the job. Being dismissed in voir dire means you might be wrong for this case but perfectly right for the next. This is closer in spirit to Greyston Bakery'sopen hiring model than to anything most organizations do. Greyston, the Yonkers bakery famous for the brownies in Ben & Jerry's ice cream, puts your name on a list and offers you a job when your turn comes. No interview, no audition. Most organizations find that idea radical. Jury duty has been running a version of it for centuries.
Then, once the room is assembled, the system invests everything in the launch.
In our case, the foreperson was automatically Juror #1: no vote, no debate, no deliberation about the deliberation. The most arbitrary leadership selection mechanism imaginable.
In our case the room was split, and a juror who had been nearly silent for four days turned out to have the clearest read on a key piece of evidence. Once they said it, the disagreement reorganized entirely. That's the hidden profile problem solved by process design rather than by hoping the right person speaks up.
In 1965, Bruce Tuckman describedthe lifecycle of small groups as four stages: forming, storming, norming, performing. Most organizations take a quarter to move through them. We had an afternoon. No offsite. No ropes course.
Why It's Actually Easier
Katherine Phillips found thatdiverse groups feel less certain than homogenous ones, which makes them work harder. They verify more carefully, question assumptions they would otherwise coast past. The friction is the mechanism. When you try to eliminate it too quickly, through forced familiarity and premature norming, you suppress the thing that makes diverse teams actually better.
But there's a second effect specific to extreme diversity, and it's the one the conventional wisdom misses entirely.
In most organizations, even diverse ones, there is an implicit center of gravity: a dominant culture whose norms become the ambient default, and everyone else navigates toward or against it. That navigation takes energy. It crowds out the productive friction that should be happening instead.
When no single cultural default applies, nobody can coast on assumed shorthand. Everyone has to build from scratch. The group gets pushed toward explicit norms and shared process from the start, because the other modes simply aren't available. That forced explicitness — the thing that initially seems like a liability — turns out to be the mechanism.
There's a concept in social psychology called superordinate identity: when groups with different backgrounds are given a shared goal and a common role, the role overrides the subgroup identities that would otherwise create friction. In a jury, that role is unusually clear and structurally enforced. Everyone is a juror. The oath, the instructions, the arrangement of the room, the unanimity requirement, all of it reinforces a single shared identity before the deliberation begins.
Research on racially diverse juries bears this out: they deliberate longer than homogenous ones and, in doing so, make fewer factual errors and cite more evidence. The friction produces rigor.
A Queens jury doesn't norm despite its diversity. It norms through it.
The Design Philosophy
Most workplaces demand teamwork without designing the conditions for it. They assemble groups, hand them a task, and trust that chemistry and goodwill will do the structural work that clear process and explicit norms would do far more reliably. This works sometimes, in the same way that hoping the project lands on time sometimes works.
The jury system is imperfect and not a model to copy wholesale. But, it's intentional in ways that most team environments are not, and the intentionality is specific. Assume broad inclusion, then filter for fit. Invest everything in the launch. Name the decision rule before the conversation starts. Run a private vote before anyone commits publicly. Ask explicitly what only one person in the room knows. Strip status from the deliberation. Hold psychological safety and accountability simultaneously, whichAmy Edmondson's research identifies as the rarest and most valuable combination in team design.
None of this requires a courthouse.
The goal isn't a room full of the “right” people. It's a room with the right process, and enough trust that the people in it, whoever they are, can do the work. That's the design philosophy hiding in plain sight inside one of the most seemingly mundane civic obligations in American life.
No summons required.
Tim Cynova is a People + Culture leader and host of the Work Shouldn't Suck podcast. He has spent twenty years helping mission-driven organizations build better teams.
