Wicked problems need an inter-disciplinary approach
Bringing people together from different disciplines is an effective way to solve wicked systemic problems.
problem solving
As companies grow and evolve it's natural for business owners and leaders to group and categorise people into disciplines, or roles, or functions in the workplaces.
You are that role, I am this. You do that, I do this. You work in that function. I work in this one.
Departments form, job families grow and different disciplines work side by side to deliver value. Functions tend to be financially separated and governed, some as costs, some as value generators, all needing to be "accounted" for across the business. Before you know it, you have people segregated and siloed into very specific categories and disciplines.
Domain specific approaches to work form, along with terminology, knowledge and language, as people go about the job of doing their job. It all sounds so terribly simple and straightforward.
Yet, it causes inevitable problems.
Firstly, almost all customer value-work crosses these different functional or department boundaries and requires many different “disciplines” to contribute to it, hand it over, communicate about it, measure it and pass it along until value is delivered to the customer. Very few roles in business contribute individually to customer value. We are typically part of a wider team who must work together.
Secondly, as companies grow, red-tape and well-intentioned gatekeeping creeps in, gaps in process form, gaps between roles form and problems start to be passed around between disciplines and functions. This creates a prolific rise in systemic problems; problems that are ingrained in the very system of work itself; problems that are no longer easy to solve without a cross-discipline group of people to solve them.
It’s not uncommon for these gnarly problems to morph and change becoming deeper and harder to untangle. Getting simple work activities done becomes really hard, clarity becomes fuzzy and alignment is out of the window. To address these problems people often tackle the easier, shiny symptoms rather than the root cause - often creating a myriad of new shiny symptoms and problems as a side effect.
Before long, work becomes so complex that it’s pretty tough to even understand how anyone gets anything done.
It’s common for some of these systemic problems to be identified and partially understood. Then well-intentioned leaders and managers break the problem up and assign parts of it to the relevant disciplines or functions to solve in isolation. The tech parts of the problem goes to tech, the product problem to product and the ops problem to the ops team, and so on.
But, this often causes further issues as each discipline will bring their own discipline specific expertise to their part of the problem, when a better solution is usually to form an interdisciplinary team to look at the problem holistically - and come together to create new knowledge, new approaches and novel solutions to the whole.
Let’s jump in.
Wicked Problems
Systemic problems are wicked problems.
Wicked problems, first made popular by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in 1973 [1], are problems that are hard to solve because they are interconnected, complex and systemic in nature. They aren’t simple to understand with simple trade-offs, simple solutions or simple answers.
Our business worlds are full of Wicked Problems; problems that grow and become richer and harder to solve the longer they are left unresolved.
Even seemingly small problems can be wicked in nature as they transcend functions, departments and levels of an organisation.
Yet, these problems are also major opportunities (which surprises me why leaders tend to avoid tackling them thoroughly).
On the flip side of wicked systemic problems are outlandishly wicked opportunities to make the business better, release business agility, create a better place to work and ultimately keep the business alive by enhancing people’s ability to deliver value, which is needed for the company to remain competitive and profitable.
Wicked problems are not solved by individuals or single teams looking for potential solutions, as the problems are complex, interconnected across the organisation and hard to solve with a single approach.
The most effective way I’ve found of solving systemic wicked problems, and learning how to make the business better (or avoid these sorts of problems in the future), is the interdisciplinary approach to problem solving and creativity.
The reason an interdisciplinary approach often works is because of the lenses, skills and attitudes that different people, from different roles, with different motivations, bring to creatively solving problems.
Putting people in boxes
In business we tend to package people up into boxes and then box up their knowledge, approach and views of work too. You are that role, I am this. You do this work, I do that. You work that way, I work this way.
The biggest problems many companies face are usually not in the remit, or gift, of a single discipline, or role, or person, to solve. They exist in the gaps between roles, departments and functions; between disciplines.
Yet, we persist in trying to solve problems by using packaging. We break some problems up and give a problem to tech, or marketing, or sales, or this person here.
When we do this, we lose out on the breadth of knowledge and approaches that comes from different disciplines; the very breadth of knowledge and approaches that we need to solve these wicked problems.
Not only do we lose this breadth of knowledge and skills, but we also don’t take advantage of the different motivations, creativity, methods, connections and critical thinking that different people have as part of their role or skill set.
We lose our ability to mash together ideas and approaches, to adapt, to explore, to bring analysis AND creativity, or use tech, data and other insights. We also don’t capitalise on different ways of communicating about the problem and solutions.
We lose a lot when we don’t adopt an interdisciplinary approach to solving big, wicked and gnarly systemic issues in a business. I’d also argue that this interdisciplinary approach is warranted for smaller issues and everyday work too….. I’ll save that for another post.
Solve problems, generate knowledge and create new ways of working
Solving problems also generates new knowledge. And knowledge is power.
Knowledge of: how to solve similar problems, about the problem, how it happened, how to ideate, how to look at problems differently and of course, knowledge about how to solve the problem.
This knowledge can be shared and therefore live on in the organisation through the myriad of people and disciplines brought together to solve the problems. Not only do people grow but all of the knowledge gained becomes part of the company.
It’s fair to say that when we bring different people together to solve problems, they learn more about each other’s world too. They learn how to look at a problem differently and pick up new skills, methods and approaches from each other. This new knowledge creates a competitive advantage and is a way of developing varied skills in individuals.
Let’s first explore some terminology.
Disciplines
Some companies do indeed use the word discipline to describe job families or roles or domain experience. Some companies use the term job role, or job description, or function, or department, or ability etc. They kind of all mean the same thing; individual expertise in a specific domain.
Let’s use the word discipline to keep it simple - it's also an academic term that describes skills, experience and domain.
Single Discipline
A single discipline is an individual's job role or a single “job family” in a company. This could be a sales person, or software engineer, or product manager, or data analyst, or financial controller. It is a single person with domain experience and skills relevant to their role.
Problem solving with a single discipline may be the right thing to do, for problems that are domain or discipline related.
However, when tackling wicked problems a single disciplinary approach will likely create a very narrow solution, and in my experience, a high probability the problem won’t actually be solved.
Let’s take a problem that is common in large enterprise companies; an inability to deliver quickly to maintain competitive advantage against smaller, more agile companies.
This is a varied, systemic and business wide problem.
The causes are unlikely to be just to do with the delivery model or pipeline of delivery to customers. There are likely many causes such as the finance model and governance, the lack of clarity about business requirements, the complexity involved in getting decisions made, the red-tape and process that make doing anything hard, the politics, the governance boards, the behaviours and culture and of course, the confusion that often happens as teams are overloaded with too much work to do.
If we were to assign this problem to a single discipline to solve, we would give them an impossible task. Not only that, but that single discipline (say Tech) would approach this problem with their own lens, domain experience and skills. The solution would likely be one-dimensional, if they could even solve it in the first place.
Multidisciplinary
Multidisciplinary is where two or more separate disciplines come together to collaborate on problem solving.
Each brings their own expertise and contributes this at the relevant time, and place, as it is needed. If part of the problem needs input from a Product discipline, then someone will come with that expertise, offer it and step back to their own work after a problem is potentially solved.
This approach is what many companies do with wicked problems.
They separate out the problems into suitable buckets of disciplines or functions, and assign the problems to the relevant people. Tech gets the tech part of the problem, Design gets design problems, Product gets product problems, Finance gets finance problems.
There will likely be some collaboration, project management and alignment but it is usually siloed in approach. Each discipline approaches their part of the problem and applies their own expertise and lens, in solving that part of the systemic problem. Any new knowledge created tends to stay within their own discipline.
I’ve yet to see this approach work, as a holistic and systemic problem requires a holistic and systemic solution, but it is the most common approach.
There is a huge amount of coordination involved in this. Steering groups, project offices and governance boards are often set up to deal with the inevitable conflict, politics and lack of joined up solutions.
What typically happens is various parts of the system are optimised as these discipline specific problems are partially solved, usually at the expense of the overall system. Discipline related solutions don’t join up, or rework is required as each part of the system solves their specific part in their own way, whilst not really solving the overall holistic problem.
The systemic issue still exists but it’s now changed shape, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.
In some instances I’ve seen entire problem solving programs being run to solve systemic wicked issues across the organisation, split into smaller discipline teams, with no clear end goal or end state being known. A kind of “let’s hope it all comes together in the end” approach. It never does.
Each discipline brings their expertise, contributes to the solution of the problem, hopefully solves it and then goes back to their discipline, often taking any knowledge and learnings with them.
This approach is about bringing different disciplines together to solve the problem, but it’s siloed, requires a huge amount of coordination and the solutions are usually disjointed. Disciplines work alongside each other, but solutions (and learning) are still siloed.
Interdisciplinary
This is where the magic happens.
People from different disciplines work together on the entire problem (at a systemic level) to produce the solution collectively.
Each discipline brings their own expertise, approach and knowledge and it is brought together to create solutions that are not only creative and considered, but also generate new approaches and new knowledge.
Instead of each discipline attempting to solve the systemic problem that is relevant only to their own discipline, or with their own specific discipline expertise, they are all working together to tackle the system wide problem, generating new approaches and knowledge as they go.
It is no longer about a single discipline specific approach, method or expertise, but instead, it is about the most appropriate one from across all disciplines, or, as is usually the case, it a mash up of different approaches and expertise to create something unique and novel.
These new understandings, novel solutions and new knowledge didn’t exist before in any single discipline. It is created at the intersection of the disciplines involved, and doesn’t belong in any one single discipline.
The solutions created tend to be novel and specific to the problem at hand. The solution is contextual, it works and it generates an immense amount of new knowledge too.
This is where people bring their own discipline specific methods, approaches and insights to a particular problem, mash everything together, learn from each other, adopt the approach that will solve the problem, and jointly come up with a solution that brings the best of the best from across different disciplines.
It is about bringing expertise together to solve the problem in an interdisciplinary way - thereby creating new solutions, understanding and knowledge that itself is an interdisciplinary combination of ideas, methods and approaches.
Imagine people from many different disciplines coming together to look at how to improve the delivery problem highlighted earlier.
Sales, marketing, advertising, legal, tech and designers all working together on the entire problem domain, bringing their knowledge, insights and experience together as one, tackling each part of the problem collectively, rather than using a single discipline approach.
An interdisciplinary approach takes elements from each discipline to create a new understanding or insight or solution.
Personal Multi and Inter Disciplinary learning
I’ve often said that I don’t read many management books, nor any domain specific books such as tech or agile. I read widely from different domains and industries such as marketing, sales, communication theory, engineering, biology and more.
This is an multidisciplinary approach to learning that takes in ideas, methods, approaches and insights from a broad set of disciplines to create novel, unique and creative ways of looking at my day job.
The outcome is my interdisciplinary approach to work and problem solving built from a multidisciplinary approach to learning.
When you bring together people from different disciplines you get new ways to look at problems, new patterns to use to solve problems and creative ways to move forward. People learn from each other and share methods and approaches - helping everyone develop new, innovative and optimised ways of working.
Not just for problems
The Interdisciplinary approach isn't just for problem solving. It is also the approach effective managers construct within their teams to bridge the gaps between departments and disciplines, designed to enhance the companies ability to deliver value to customers.
Although our organisations (and their skills, experience and knowledge) are organised into clearly defined functions and disciplines, the true opportunities for competitive advantage fall between these discrete human-made categories.
Problems, collaboration, cooperation and new ways of working are all within these gaps - opportunities that cannot be opened up or taken advantage of by a single discipline alone.
This is one of the great strengths of interdisciplinary approaches; bringing people together with a breadth of knowledge across more than one discipline can provide the glue, the insights, the experience and the knowledge to address challenges, solve problems and enhance a company's ability to deliver value more effectively.
Interdisciplinary problem solving (and working) is essential in an increasingly complex business world. We need to work together and bring the strengths of all to tackle wicked problems, unlock opportunity and make the business better.
Next time you find yourself approaching a problem with a single discipline of people, consider whether that’s the right approach. Or should you be capitalising on different perspectives, skills, expertise, creativity, approaches and motivations from other disciplines? I know the latter is the better choice.
The hard part is convincing the leaders of these different disciplines to let it happen, to put their politics aside and to take on the monumentally tough, yet rewarding, challenge of solving some of these wicked systemic problems once and for all.