Breaking Siloed Thinking

• Employers are signaling that higher education must develop dynamic, resilient thinkers who can address problems spanning many disciplines, domains, and contexts.
• The greatest barrier to transformative interdisciplinary programs is not funding or time, but the willingness to move beyond how things have always been done.
• Collaboration begins with deans who look beyond their own schools, seeking like-minded leaders to change not just structures but mindsets.

Transcript

Sean Carr: [00:12] Employers today are sending a loud and clear message to higher education, not just business, but higher education in general, that change needs to happen. Part of the signal they’re sending is that we need to develop more dynamic, resilient, and interdisciplinary thinkers to solve the problems we face—problems of the world that span many disciplines, domains, and contexts.

[00:36] It’s upon us as educators to find ways to find connections with other parts of our universities and to do the best we can to serve our most important constituencies: our students who are looking for those kinds of novel, unique, and innovative new programs that are interdisciplinary, and industry, which is looking to us to provide the leaders that they need to solve those very problems.

[01:00] Interdisciplinary approaches in education, business, engineering, and other fields can be—when done right, with thought and deliberate intent—truly transformational for students. Because many times students come to a program, maybe a business program, where they have certain expectations about what their experience is going to be like.

[Higher education] needs to develop more dynamic, resilient, and interdisciplinary thinkers to solve the problems we face.

[01:21] And so, immersing our students into these interdisciplinary contexts, inside classrooms, outside classrooms, inside the country or outside the country, working with companies that tend to value that kind of collaboration and cooperation, can be a game-changer for a student and their career.

[01:40] The greatest constraint toward developing and delivering powerful, potentially transformative interdisciplinary experiences for our students at the intersection of fields like engineering, business, and design. Sure, everything takes a certain amount of resources, time, energy, treasure.

[02:00] But the thing it most requires in terms of a resource is political will or simply the will to do it. That’s because doing things that way isn’t how things have always been done. Yes, you have to break silos, but then you have to break the thinking that puts people in silos.

[02:21] This is where deans who have an open-minded view about how and when to collaborate across different schools and academic units in the university go a long way. Often, finding deans who can find other deans of a like-minded nature, where they truly see that one plus one is equal to three or more, by collaborating.

Yes, you have to break silos, but then you have to break the thinking that puts people in silos.

[02:46] That sets the tone. And then, well, incentives do work. Providing the right set of incentives across these different disciplines, whether that’s within the business school and elsewhere, such that everyone feels they’re gaining value from the experience.

[03:03] What is harder to resolve, at least initially, are the cultural constraints: differences in how engineers and businesspeople, just to use one example, think, speak, and value. Finding the right set of bridges around these cultural dimensions is probably among the most important things that academic leaders can do today to help facilitate more interdisciplinary collaboration in the future.

[03:31] We’re in a very fertile time right now, when that kind of experimentation is happening. The interesting part of this story is the nature of collaboration. Interdisciplinary collaboration is happening in a multitude of ways. In the next some years, we’ll be figuring out exactly what the right models are as we head into the future.