By Your Powers Combined: the potential of multi-disciplinary teamwork
Multi-disciplinary approaches have been shown time and time again to produce the best solutions for difficult problems, in a variety of instances.
We’re encouraging Explorers to test this out for minerals exploration!
In medicine, multi-disciplinary teams have been shown to improve outcomes for patients with chronic or complex health challenges.
In reality television, the challenges are always won quickest when the Beauties and the Geeks combine their knowledge — and the Survivors don’t stab each other in the back.
In nature, egrets and cattle team up; the birds get a free ride and meals of tasty insects, the cattle get picked clean of fleas and ticks and have an early warning system for approaching predators.
This is relevant!
See, the Explorer Challenge combines two disciplines each with advanced technical knowledge; data science, and geoscience. This is the kind of project where multi-disciplinary teams have a clear opportunity to excel; the breadth and depth of knowledge doesn’t sit neatly in any domain, and it would take some kind of wizard to know everything that’s going to be relevant.
Though we have poked the geoscience bear somewhat with that Sheldon Cooper meme, amongst other allusions, we 100% rate the importance of geoscience for the challenge. Having sound geological assumptions will be crucial for model development.
Likewise, we think geologists will benefit from the skills of data scientists: yes, we know you use modelling software and can handle the maths, but if geologists could solve this problem alone, we wouldn’t need to hold this challenge at all.
There are more benefits though. Not only do musti-disciplinary teams give you a much greater breadth of technical knowledge, and a multitude of ways that said knowledge can be combined, but they also offer different perspectives and thinking and working styles.
Whilst different thinking and working styles also exist within single domains, there tend to be dominant styles of thinking and ways approaching problems found in every field. It can be argued that this is a natural, justified state — that different personalities just suit different careers better; but also, it’s a state that’s compounded by both conscious and unconscious bias, hiring and promoting similar kinds of people as past staff and leaders.
Regardless of the cause though, combining fields helps gather a diversity in views, which can generate previously untested ideas.
Our resident geologist-turned-data-scientist described the two dominant thinking styles as “splitting” and “mashing”, while speaking at the Perth Machine Learning Group meetup.
“Speaking as someone who has sat on both sides of the fence… when it comes down to it, data scientists and geologists think in fundamentally different ways,” he said.
“Machine learning is really good at doing splitting — categorising things, pulling out trends… Geologists are really good at taking information and mashing it back together… the reason why mashing is important is that it’s not always clear from the data alone what it is we’re actually looking for.”
“We think that the winning teams are going to be the ones that take a combination of approach.”
So, how can you form a team?
If you’re ready to try this multi-disciplinary thing, but need to make some new connections to do so, head on over to the #explorer channel on Slack (once you create an account on our platform, you can join our Slack workspace).
You can post a detailed description of yourself and your ideal teammates, worthy of eHarmony, or just stick up a simple “seeking geos, apply within.”
Slack has private chat functionality, so you can take conversations off the public channel once you find some potential collaborators.
Any tips for teamwork?
We’d love to hear any tips for working successfully in multi-disciplinary technical teams! Comment below or shoot us an email if you’d like to share!
