Читать книгу Voices of Design Leadership - Ken Sanders - Страница 20

Collaboration across disciplines is composed of two things. First, empathy. It’s important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective – to stand in somebody else’s shoes. Second, they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people’s disciplines, to the point that they may actually start to practice them. T-shaped people have both depth and breadth.

– Tim Brown²

“T-shaped” describes a leader with deep expertise in one or more disciplines who also is well-versed at integrating cross-disciplinary teams. The vertical stroke of the letter T represents expertise, while the horizontal stroke represents integration. A T-shaped professional is a vertical expert and a horizontal integrator.

Early in their careers, design professionals typically develop expertise in one or more specialty areas. These might include conceptual design, digital technology, marketing, project management, construction documents, specifications, or others. Later, they may focus on different project types or market sectors: education, sports, retail, hospitality, residential, etcetera. Over time, they are recognized as experts and market leaders. Integrators, on the other hand, see a broader playing field and work to combine expertise in ways that unlock innovation and value.

Two of the world’s most impactful T-shaped leaders are Dr. Jennifer Doudna³ of the University of California at Berkeley and her French collaborator Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier, who jointly won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The two leaders and their research teams collaborated to develop CRISPR, the gene-editing technology that saw its first significant commercial application in testing and diagnosis of COVID-19. Like many scientific innovations, CRISPR is largely the result of discipline integration: bringing together expertise from chemistry, biology, physics, and manufacturing-at-scale to confront an unprecedented global pandemic.

Each of the design leaders profiled in this book can also be considered T-shaped. Barbara Bouza, President of Walt Disney Imagineering (Chapter 5), leads an integrated design-build organization with over 100 different disciplines. Billie Faircloth, leader of the transdisciplinary research team at KieranTimberlake (Chapter 10), is a research expert and integrator. Nader Tehrani, the founder of NADAAA and Dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union (Chapter 15), thoughtfully integrates the acts of design and making within his professional practice and academic curricula.

In multi-discipline design firms, T-shaped professionals are essential. Even within single-discipline firms, most teams need to integrate the expertise provided by external consultants. In either case, T-shaped professionals play critical roles in sponsoring design innovation.