About Multidisciplinary Teams and Complex Problems

Usually the challenges we are facing in daily life, are multidisciplinary. Still very often we are trying to solve these challenges by looking at the problem from only one perspective. One-eyed approach won’t work pretty well.

For example, let’s say there is a woman who feels herself sick. She is exhausted, stressed, she has pain in her stomach, and she can’t even sleep at nights. Maybe she has demanding job, young children and she is struggling in the middle of midlife crisis. Finally, she goes to the nearest medical center. In the medical center she has to meet a bunch of different specialists one at the time, each of them looking at the problem from only one point of view. One medical is specialized in internal diseases, another knows about family therapy and the third one has deep understanding about psychiatric and mental health. Wandering between the specialists doesn’t look so efficient way to fix the problem.

What if that woman could be diagnosed and treated from all perspectives at once by a multidisciplinary medical team? Could that be more effective, at least from the patient experience point of view?

Multidisciplinary challenges are solved most effectively by multidisciplinary teams.

As an opposite example, let’s say there is a service operations unit in some big industrial company which is planning to renew their customer service portal. The main drivers for the project are to improve both customer experience and internal process efficiency.

The business development officers of the company have learned their lessons from the past. They know that the traditional, one-eyed and technology driven approach won’t work. So, they will assign a multidisciplinary task force to solve the challenge. The assigned team is a combination of expertise from different disciplines: service operations business, marketing, enterprise IT architecture and service design.

The goal for the team is to build a common understanding on the current state of business processes (the way the company serves their customers), customer experience (how it shows to the customer), business performance metrics (how does it fulfill the company business objectivities) and the IT architecture landscape (how the portal solution is aligned with the company overall IT architecture). Based on the understanding of the current state, the team will build a vision of the future state of the service and its development roadmap from different points of view (e.g. business processes, IT architecture, digital service, skills development…).

Successful outcome is not the service itself, but the customer perceived value of it.

Would you believe that the multidisciplinary approach will most probably provide more successful outcome than one-eyed approach? A successful outcome is not the digital service itself, but it’s the customer perceived value of it. And that customer value can be measured and understood best by analyzing how the service will change the customers’ behavior.