Professions as platforms, not silos

This is part 2 of my reflections on multidisciplinary teams. Part 1 asks "Have multidisciplinary teams become the new silos?" This piece answers that question by looking at practices to avoid institutionalising transdisciplinary teams.

Building depth that travels

The obvious answer would be to go and build transdisciplinary teams across government. But the reality of transformation work is messier than that. Disciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary work happens at the same time, often inside the same programme, because different questions demand different relationships between expertise. Some of it needs deep specialist craft. Some of it needs several professions working alongside one another. Some of it needs people to cross those boundaries entirely.

This is part of what we’re learning through CustomerFirst. Through our NewCo partnership with DVLA we started with a deliberately loose structure, organising workstreams around some of the biggest opportunities for transformation. But the muscle memory of professions has a funny way of kicking back in. Over time, we found those workstreams drifting towards technology, data, governance and organisation design silos. We have been trying to push back against that by reorganising around the future service processes and outcomes we are trying to create, using a shared view of that future service to hold the work together while different combinations of people form around it as the work changes. What we keep coming back to is that our aim shouldn’t be to preserve the org chart we happen to have today. It should be to keep asking what team we need for the work ahead.

That way of working hasn’t required anyone to abandon their craft. People step into unfamiliar areas when the work needs it, share knowledge and ownership across disciplines, and contribute beyond the usual edge of their role. The emerging learning is that the boundaries around that craft can be permeable enough for people to contribute past them, while still knowing where their expertise ends and when somebody with deeper knowledge needs to come in. We’re still figuring out where that works and where it doesn’t, and likely making plenty of mistakes along the way. Most of this movement has happened because individuals have made it happen, which is effort rather than architecture. We’re learning that if the same people keep bridging the gaps, those bridges have to become part of the model.

And that gets closer to the proposition underneath all of this. People need to keep their professional depth while the architecture around that depth becomes more fluid. The two depend on each other. You need enough mastery to understand what your field contributes, where its limits are, what you can safely carry across a boundary and whose knowledge needs to enter next. This is what Helga Nowotny argues in her 2003 paper Democratising expertise and socially robust knowledge; that expertise increasingly involves building links between what experts know and what other people need to know and do, and that feels remarkably close to the capability we are trying to create through CustomerFirst.

Which is why the professions still matter, as platforms rather than silos*.* Strong places to develop craft, methods, standards and professional community, but places people can launch from as the work demands different combinations of knowledge. Somewhere solid to stand, without deciding in advance where the work is allowed to go. The profession supplies the depth. The work determines how that depth combines with everything else around it.

The real danger is what government does next with all of this, which is try to institutionalise it. Making something legible at scale usually means making enough of it repeatable, and transformation, infamously, isn’t, despite what the McKinseys of the world tell you. Make fluid working easier to manage from a distance and the temptation will be to give it firmer edges, define the roles and write more of the instructions down. We have done versions of this before, creating structures intended to preserve a different way of working that eventually make that way of working harder.

Transdisciplinarity is a practice, not an institution

The alternative is structures that enable the practice without fixing it in place. Which leaves a fairly practical question. If the answer is not another prescribed team shape, how would you know whether the conditions for this kind of working actually exist?

The characteristics of adaptive integration offer a useful lens. Not a framework to implement, or a checklist every multidisciplinary team should suddenly pass, but a way of looking at complex work when it starts to strain against the structure around it. When the problem keeps crossing boundaries, when the expertise you need changes as you learn, or when the team can see where the work needs to go but does not have a route to get there, these are useful questions to ask.

These are probably most useful as questions asked during the work and revisited as it changes, not as criteria settled before it starts. A team might look perfectly healthy against them at one point and find six weeks later that the problem has moved, a new form of expertise has become important or an organisational boundary has become the thing stopping progress. The point is to notice those changes and be able to respond to them.

Is this what we meant by empowered teams?

Adaptive integration points us somewhere government does not usually look. People inside complex work need enough awareness of the architecture forming around them to see where knowledge sits, where it is getting stuck, which relationships are emerging and where new ones are needed. Call it sideways legibility. Making the structure visible to the people trying to move through it, rather than only to the people trying to manage it from above.

And that gets us back to empowered. Enough freedom to follow the work when it moves, bring different expertise around it and change the shape of the team as understanding changes. This is why the future isn’t multidisciplinary, at least not in the way we’ve come to use the word. The same professions may still be there, and multidisciplinary working will still be useful. What cannot stay fixed is the architecture between them. When professional boundaries determine where the work can go, the structures we built to break the silos start behaving rather a lot like silos themselves.

I recognise there are plenty of questions left hanging. What this means for the politics of professionalisation, when digital specialists spent years fighting for the standing that professions gave them. And how people get good at moving horizontally across disciplines and vertically through institutions without sliding into generalism, which is close to what I was circling in my analysis of the Public Design Gap and my practice notes on testing and learning.

Those feel like places to keep exploring rather than answer now. So instead, here is a provocation. If the future team contains exactly the same professions as today’s, and what needs to change is the architecture between them, who in government is responsible for creating the conditions that let that architecture move?