Thinking in boxes

The day was June 19^th. I was at the NWO (Dutch Research Council) Teknowlogy festival at the Fabrique in Utrecht and attended a session called Systems Thinking: Integrating insights from Technical and Social Sciences. The session was illustrative of the, important, greater awareness that both technological development and insights from social sciences and humanities are needed to deal with the major challenges of our time. However, I saw something happening here that lies at the heart of why this often fails: stereotypes.

I heard, for example, things like[1] “Technicians love nitty gritty details” and “Technicians are not that good with people”. But I also heard things like “Social scientists oversee societal needs” or “Psychologists can bring about market acceptation of technology”. Strikingly, nine out of 10 times the social or humanities academics in this kind of statement are psychologists. We often include an ‘integrator’ – or closer to home, a  ‘Gluon researcher’ – in research projects to bridge social and technical academics, or between science and society. This is a sensible and valuable thing to do, but it is only a temporary fix.

The intention to collaborate more and better–  multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary – which is needed to solve the wicked problems, only seems to promote thinking in boxes. This seems counterproductive to say the least!

The intention to collaborate more and better – which is needed to solve wicked problems – only seems to promote thinking in boxes

Stereotyping can sometimes be useful, and it can help in ensuring that a team has the right expertise. But it does not take account of the fact that, above all, we are humans. The difference between individual technical academics or between individual social and humanities academics are often bigger than between the two ‘species’. It is thus important, apart from the expertise and stereotype, to get to know each other better. In the corporate sector, this is often done through a range of personality tests like the Meijers-Briggs test and colour models (covered nicely in a recent episode of Lubach, a television chat show that covers all sorts of subjects). While the validity of these models is often scrutinised, I did use them for inspiration. I asked myself what dimensions could be relevant to describe ‘academic types’ if we want to drop the tiresome use of ‘Technical and ‘Non-Technical. You could think of the following axes:

• Concept driven – Implementation driven
• Systems thinker – Detail thinker
• Specialist – Generalist (linked to fields of expertise)
• Creative – Rigorous

Combined, these main axes could lead to various types such as:

• The visionary: Creative concept driven systems thinker (specialist or generalist)
• The bridge builder: Creative generalist and systems thinker (can be both concept driven and detail driven)
• The gardener: Implementation driven systems thinker, specialist and rigorous (focused on consolidation, validation and robustness).
• The handyman: Implementation driven, detail thinker and specialist.

I am not suggesting that academic teams and consortia get bogged down in endless questionnaires and analyses. But where ‘the academic’ used to be seen as one uniform archetype, we now have a more diverse academic setting. Luckily. Attempting to get to know each other and, apart from each other’s expertise, also understanding each other’s ‘academic type’ before a project starts seems useful in promoting the quality of collaboration between the technical disciplines and the social and humanities disciplines.

Given that I put myself in the ‘visionary’ category, I am now looking for a ‘handyman’ with expertise in behavioural psychology to move this forward!

[1] Not direct quotes, but illustrative for what was said.