Recently, I started working with a new group of people. Actually, it’s a school group project, which are unique relative to the real world. Due to brevity and intensity, school projects provide opportunities to reflect on how, when, and if, a group makes the shift into becoming a team. What do I know about the group? None of us know one another, and we are diverse! Gender, culture, race, ethnicity, age, experience, knowledge—you name it, and we probably have it. Also, we come from a variety of disciplines, such as tourism and systems engineering. Interdisciplinary teams face unique challenges to leverage their knowledge diversity, but if all goes well, they can turn in to high performing teams, taking on a variety of problems.
But how does our group make that happen? How do we transition from a highly diverse group into a well-performing team? Oh, and did I mention that the course is online, and most of us have never met? If you’re familiar with Tuckman’s stages of group formation, forming, storming, norming, performing, we tried to skip to performing. Fortunately, we realized we needed to build some foundations, such as relationships and co-developed mental models before moving forward. Having done that, we are at an interesting crossroads in how to best leverage our interdisciplinary diversity.
I don’t think we will be successful, and here’s why.
Earlier, I mentioned we come from multiple disciplines and are extremely diverse. What I didn’t mention is that everyone on the team is also a professional educator, teacher, or trainer. We have a powerhouse of expertise with teaching. The problem—the one our group came together to solve—involves creating a training series. Research has shown that teams need to have some, but not too much, overlap in expertise in order to leverage multiple disciplines. Too little overlap and the team can’t communicate. Too much overlap and the team struggles to be innovative. One researcher describes teams as having two types of problems: Problem A and problem B. Problem A is the task at hand. Problem B is all of the challenges associated with group work, also known as coordination costs. In our case, Problem A is the training series, and Problem B involves managing our diversity, including negotiating our personal approaches to teaching. I predict we have too much overlap in expertise with regard to the problem/solution at hand, and our major challenge will be overcoming Problem B.
It will be interesting to see what happens. My prediction could be wrong. One possibility might be that we have sufficient diversity within the education domain to take an interdisciplinary approach. After all, we have representation from multiple perspectives: international, agricultural, engineering, higher ed, and secondary. Melding these together would be an interesting Problem A. Still, I think our biggest challenge will be Problem B—the interpersonal aspects of teamwork. I also predict that our early investment in team formation and fostering relationships will work to our favor!