The future isn't multidisciplinary (part 1)

This is Part 1 of my reflections on multidisciplinary teams, which examines the conflict between the design of multidisciplinary teams and their non-transformative impact. Part 2 will look at how transdisciplinary teams can be built for transformation without being exactly copied.

For more than a decade, small, empowered, multidisciplinary teams have sat near the centre of digital government’s theory of change. They’ve driven reform by putting different capabilities around the same work, close enough to understand what citizens are actually trying to do, trusted enough to follow the evidence, and clever enough to build and change things as they learned. At their best they’ve given government something it had struggled to build for years.

Relationships between disciplines, from Wright Morton, Eigenbrode and Martin (2015), redrawn in their paper from Tress et al. (2004).

Then government did what government does with anything that works. It made it legible. Roles became professions, professions grew capability frameworks and career paths, teams took on recognisable shapes, and those shapes became easy to recruit, grade, fund, report and hold to account. All the necessary, governmenty things that gave digital capability a permanence in Whitehall it would never have had otherwise.

But legibility has a cost. Because whilst we have become very good at assembling teams capable of running services, improving them and making them better over time, we have become much worse at preserving the judgement, trust, permission and relationships that made those teams transformational in the first place.

This matters now. Because if we’re talking seriously about rewiring the state, rebuilding government around outcomes, missions or whole services, that work will not stay where we put it. It will cross professional boundaries, organisational boundaries and the lines between delivery and policy itself. This type of transformation needs teams with permission to follow problems, agency to act on what they learn, and enough flexibility to change shape as their understanding changes. And these are exactly the conditions the machinery of government is least well set up to provide.

So, are multidisciplinary teams still the right foundation for the kind of transformation we now say we want? Or have the structures we built to break the silos quietly become silos of their own?

Expanding how we think about working together

In the quest for legibility at scale within government, multidisciplinary working has become something of a shorthand for an entire philosophy of empowered working. Partly, that is a legacy of what the original GDS teams made look so easy. Relational, integrated, flexible, trusted, able to cross a boundary when the work asks for it. All qualities that became bound up with what good multidisciplinary working in government was supposed to look like. But it also tells us something about how government scales what works. We put enormous effort into the parts we can describe, formalise and reproduce, building line management, funding routes, career paths and professional boundaries around the separate forms of expertise that make up a team.

The consequence, however, is that the version of multidisciplinarity government has become best at reproducing is also the most legible one. It is the definition of multidisciplinary that has scaled most faithfully – specialists working alongside one another while retaining their own disciplinary approaches and perspectives ² – rather than all the characteristics we came to associate with those original teams. Which is a considerably smaller promise than the one we’ve been making.

This difference is more than semantic, and becomes uncomfortably obvious when you see it drawn. This typology of relationships between disciplines comes from a study on how large, multi-institutional research programmes organise themselves around complex problems ³. And there, multidisciplinary – the word government has loaded with a much broader philosophy of empowered working – is almost brutally simple. Separate disciplinary columns, each with its own goal, sitting under a shared thematic umbrella.

Put that beside the shape of a mature government service team and the resemblance is hard to miss. Teams of researchers that research. Designers that design. Analysts that analyse. Policy that sits somewhere else. Everyone doing their own job well, more often than not still bloody brilliantly. But I think this is the trap we’ve fallen into. Government has learned to organise the work around the professions we’ve assembled, rather than organise those professions around the outcome. And when the work has to travel between those territories, every handover creates another opportunity for tacit knowledge, learning and perspective to get lost along the way. Familiar, right?

Where these diagrams become even more useful is in giving us a vocabulary we’ve perhaps been missing. Participatory brings people from beyond the disciplines into the work and creates knowledge exchange, while the disciplinary knowledge itself remains largely separate. Interdisciplinary goes further, integrating knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. And then transdisciplinary crosses boundaries between disciplines and sectors, forms goals in common and produces knowledge together rather than passing it between established professional territories. It looks much closer to the kind of movement rewiring the state seems to demand, and we have never really had a word for it in government.

So while multidisciplinary teams can contain excellent researchers, designers, technologists, analysts and product people, multidisciplinarity itself only tells us that those forms of expertise are present. It does not tell us whether knowledge is integrated, whether authority can move, whether the team can cross organisational or policy boundaries, or whether its shape can change when the problem changes.

All of which points at an obvious answer. If multidisciplinary is too small, perhaps what government needs is transdisciplinary teams. If only it were that simple.

When the work moves

One of the clearest things I’ve learned from working on service and policy problems across government is that the work rarely stays in the place, profession or part of the system where it first appears. A citizen cannot complete something, so the obvious place to start is the service. But the service works the way it does because of an operational rule. The rule exists because a particular piece of evidence is required. That evidence requirement encodes a judgement about risk, and that judgement was made somewhere else entirely against a policy intent nobody in the room wrote. Again and again, somewhere along that chain, the thing that first presented itself as a service problem stops being one.

Put simply, the work moves. Horizontally across different kinds of expertise, from design into operations, evidence, analysis and policy, which is the movement much of the literature on cross-disciplinary working helps us understand.

But it also moves vertically, through layers of institutional authority. From an interaction to a process, from a process to a rule, from a rule to the judgement or policy that put it there in the first place. And this is the tricky part for multidisciplinary teams. They can contain every relevant profession and still have no route through those layers. Nobody is missing from the team, but the authority to follow the problem sits somewhere else.

This is where transdisciplinary working starts to act as a genuinely useful lens. It gives us a way of thinking about expertise organised around the problem rather than handed between professional territories, crossing disciplinary and sectoral boundaries where the work demands it.

How three large research programmes were structured at conception in 2011, and how they had actually organised themselves by 2014. Wright Morton, Eigenbrode and Martin (2015).

What this ends up looking like in practice is much closer to the kind of working those original GDS teams made familiar. Messy, relational, crossing boundaries and organised around an outcome rather than a fixed set of professional territories. Different combinations of people form around different parts of the problem, some lasting, some temporary, some crossing disciplines and others staying firmly within them. The architecture gets denser as the work develops because understanding a problem creates new questions, and those questions demand different combinations of expertise and relationships.

What that illustrates, really, is that the team you planned for does not always end up being the team the work needs. As the work evolves and the conditions around it change, the useful mix of skills, relationships and authority changes with it. And if the work itself cannot be fully specified upfront, neither can the architecture required to do it. That puts our business as usual governance in an awkward position, because much of the machinery we use to organise, fund and assure work assumes its shape can be known at the start. The evidence has to be able to change the structure as the work develops.

This is what the authors of these diagrams call architectures of adaptive integration. The structures and processes, formal and informal, through which different groups work together on a shared problem over time. And the point of the phrase is the movement in it. Relationships form and dissolve, different expertise becomes important at different moments, and the architecture keeps adapting to what the work is teaching.