The "T Shaped" Approach
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Much has been made of T-Shaped thinking in the last several years. One of the biggest promoters of this concept is Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, who has defended this approach as a method to build interdisciplinary work teams for creative processes.
It’s really an update of an old concept around which the humanities were originally formed. It basically says that to be an effective collaborator you must first have a deep knowledge and skill in a particular discipline. Then you need context, vocabulary, ability to understand and interpret fact patterns across other disciplines in order to contribute.
Why is this so important? Ken Robinson, author of The Element, among other books, has pointed out that less than 27% of college graduates remain in the field in which they majored in college. What this means is that people are continually making career changes based on career paths partly defined by today's universities.
Howard Gardner, one of the founders of Harvard’s Project Zero and the source of the concept of EQ, or Emotional Intelligence, has recently published a book called the Five Minds for the Future. These include:
The Disciplinary Mind: the mastery of major schools of thought, including science, mathematics, and history, and of at least one professional craft.
The Synthesizing Mind: the ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others.
The Creating Mind: the capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions, and phenomenal.
The Respectful Mind: awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings and human groups.
The Ethical Mind: fulfillment of one’s responsibilities as a worker and as a citizen.
Nevertheless, the T-Shaped concept has come under some criticism for being too naive, too generalist too pretentious and most importantly, unable to match ideas with execution. Much of this has come from the experience in the business management world, in particular in the “design-management” arena, which is generalist by nature.
To counteract this, one must return to the original concept of the “T” and remember that it is not only the “cross” of the “T” that is important, but the “stem” as well. In fact, the “T” does not exist without the stem, and without it one runs the proverbial risk of being “a mile wide and an inch deep.”
A true interdisciplinary team is made up of T-Shaped specialists, not generalists. In order to be an effective collaborator you must first be an accomplished specialist. Only then can you meaningfully grasp the depth and complexity of your collaborators’ contributions, and support, challenge and ultimately complement them.
The challenge today for higher education is how to broaden the horizons of graduates while providing them with meaningful intellectual or technical skills that can make them effective contributors as they emerge into the post-college world. In old model one entered as a freshman and took “survey” classes, the classic “101’s” across a range of disciplines before selecting a major. Perhaps the new model is one which includes a return to the “101’s” late in the curriculum, but with a new perspective, say “version 101.1.”
This is not easy to do in a world in which many graduates of four year programs are barely able to complete the coursework for their majors in five years, and this does not take into account the majority of students who must work their way through school either through work/study programs or part-time jobs. Yet it remains critical that higher education adapt to what Daniel Pink calls the “conceptual economy” and continue to dot the “i’s” and cross the “t’s” if it is not to be overtaken by the disruptive forces of rising costs, online degrees, MOOC’s and other competing forces in the new collaborative world in which we live.