Ever worked in a multidisciplinary team? Everything worked out well, people got along and you achieved amazing results together? Or maybe there were some challenges along the way?
Service Design Network Finland organised an event at Futurice on 14th of March about the power of multidisciplinary teams. In a service design spirit, there was both talking and doing.
We had several insights from both in-house and agency service design on the topic. Eeva Raita from Futurice was talking about embracing difference in creative team work. People are attracted to similarity. If you’re a designer , you like to hang out with other designers. IT people spend time with other IT people. The problem is that too much cohesion is bad for creativity. Desire for harmony makes people inhibit their pursue of new ideas and strategies. We all live in bubbles and there’s nothing wrong with that. But to be able to work creatively in a multidisciplinary team you need to step out of the bubble. How to do that?
There was a mini-brainstorming workshop on working with multidisciplinary teams. Each team was brainstorming on challenges they had faced and possible solutions. Almost all teams came up with some kind of game ideas. One idea for example was that the team would play escape room game together. Many of the ideas were so called “happy poops”.
Here are the results from my teams brainstorming session:
I think that game idea works well because it helps to break the ice in the team when you have some some fun before getting your hands dirty on real work.
Tuija Ojanen from Palmu shared a good point that you need customers voice to work together. Plan, participate and iterate with end-customer. Don’t forget to include the business controller of end-customer in steering group. For the steering group (who have the money but no time) give small individual comments from customers, not result summaries.
Service Innovation & Design 
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