Breadth Brings Bigger Breakthroughs
Gyms taught me about organisational design.
Handing me a jar, my wife asked: “Can you open this?”
I soon gave up. “Let’s smash it.”
“Give me that!” retorted my wife, as she opened the jar in one motion. “What’ve you been doing at the gym? Because it’s certainly not involved your arms.”
“Actually, I use every machine there!” I shot back.
“You do know the machines just strengthen individual muscles, and not the combination of muscles you need to actually do anything useful - right? Use the free weights.”
Something in my head clicked.
Organisations are often divided into functions: sales, finance, technology. We then run and optimise them individually - each has their own objectives, budget, plan.
But no one of these teams in isolation can give customers what they need. Dividing the organisation in this way creates interdependencies, and prevents teams from seeing the whole picture.
Suggests Ackoff:
“Dividing knowledge into separate disciplines originated with Aristotle. Whatever its merits in the past, this division of human experience has long since been recognised as harmful to innovative insight.
In business, people trained in specialised fields have been combined into ‘interdisciplinary teams’ to mitigate the harmful influence that compartmentalised thought has on creativity and progress.
A story illustrates the deadening effect of thinking in terms of narrowly-defined fields. A physics student was asked: ‘Suppose you were in a tall building and had a barometer. How would you find the building’s height?’
The instructor was looking for the answer he’d prepared students to give: use the barometric pressure at the bottom and the top of the building to calculate the height.
The student instead answered, ‘Drop the barometer from the top of the building and measure how long it takes to hit the ground [another piece of 'physics']. Or attach string, lower the barometer to the ground, and measure the length of the string ['carpentry']. The answer was declared wrong.
This is the intellectual straitjacket that schooling seeks to impose. In corporations, the equivalents of disciplines are functions, product classes, or market-defined units. There are no such things as production or marketing problems, but there are problems that are erroneously treated as though they were.”
The takeaway? Interdisciplinary teams are not an advantage, but lacking them is a disadvantage. Stronger answers come from wider understanding.
Note: This article was inspired by Ackoff’s Turning Learning Right Side Up. Quotes adapted for brevity.