Few weeks ago I participated in a conference about innovation and diversity. It was a very interesting conference about how to creation the best conditions for radical innovation.
The conference covered - had a presentation - about the easiness, or the opposite, when leading multidisciplinary teams.
The conference concluded that it sometimes – at the most – is very difficult leading multidisciplined teams because of lack of communication and common understanding of goals and vision.
I’ve experienced that my self and as I see it its more about a radical shift in leadership attitude going from that a leader interprets himself as the overall leader/manager to facilitating/framing the process/conversation. The future leadership of innovation is more about HR and understanding where people is coming from, why they say what the say – the reason behind – and how the interact with other people with other skills and backgrounds.
Or what? Is innovation more about strict deadlines, focused teams, and projectplan revisions. What tools do you use when facilitation group processes?
Sasha Verhage has some very interesting leaningpoints when dealing with digital interaction design.
The processes used caused - “…The benefits of this tool include increased participation, increased understanding of the value of each discipline, and consequently increased buy-in from the team.”
Any experience from anyone using these specifik tools?
One comment so far
Leading multidisciplinary teams is one of facilitation because the key ingredient is participation and leveraging different viewpoints, not following.
The methodology I use and am studying for ensuring productivity from multi-disciplinary teams is getting them to work together in facilitated workshops. The workshops consist of immersion in content that helps them see their world in a new way, engaging them in tangible teardowns of analogous products and services, brainstorming of solutions to specific challenges, and building prototype representations of potential solutions. Each of these activities are followed by some form of idea categorization and discussion from the various viewpoints.
It gets the team to make progress and align around potential opportunities…