Disruption in Consulting via Transdisciplinarity
featured blog
Disruption in Consulting via Transdisciplinarity
—
By Aparupa Chakravarti, Director, Botho Emerging Markets Group
April 18, 2021
In my first article in this series, I introduced the concept of transdisciplinarity as a potential way for consultants to find a better balance between the convenience of linearity and the necessity of plurality.
What is transdisciplinarity? The concept has been around for a few decades, emerging in France in the 1970s and originally attributed to the Swiss philosopher and psychologist, Jean Piaget. Though, from my understanding, it was theoretical physicist, Basarab Nicolescu, who really ran with the idea, authoring the Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, which even contains a Charter that was adopted at the First World Congress of Transdisciplinarity, held in 1994. Yes, there’s a Charter.
I read Nicolescu’s methodological explanation of transdisciplinarity and - let’s just say it’s evident he’s a theoretical physicist. So, distilling it into its simplest possible form, I understand transdisciplinarity to be a synthesis of existing disciplines to create something new - transcendental, if you will.
A transdisciplinary approach is not meant to solve any old humdrum problem. In the context of our work as consultants, if a client wants me to help them fix a distribution bottleneck in their supply chain, I probably won’t need to go all transdisciplinary on them.
Wicked Problems Need Transdisciplinary Solutions
This is because a transdisciplinary approach is meant to solve “wicked” problems - wicked in the sense of massive, complex, tangible, evolving. Kind of like a - global pandemic? Or a client that doesn’t want to look at a single distribution bottleneck, but wants to entirely rethink their supply chain and how it fits into the broader ecosystem.
As the supply chain example illustrates, wicked problems do not have to be unprecedented or esoteric. At Botho, we encounter wicked problems on a regular basis. A client wants us to help them develop Africa’s first-ever university ranking system. Another is trying to think of how to address mindset issues underlying intra-African trade. Yet a third wants to figure out how to reconfigure the global film value chain - while bringing millions of Africans online. It’s no global pandemic, but these are wicked problems, indeed.
At its core, transdisciplinarity eschews silos, divisions, and boundaries. As an approach and a philosophy, it is both deeply pragmatic - geared towards tackling real, significant problems - and deeply ethical - championing diversity, tolerance and open-mindedness. And as consultants, who are tasked every day with helping others solve problems, which ultimately affect people’s lives and livelihoods, we need both pragmatism and ethics in equal measure.
So, with all of that in mind, I am here to answer two central questions.
1. Is there Room for Transdisciplinarity in Consulting?
Yes, but with a few caveats:
You need a certain type of problem. A transdisciplinary orientation is not appropriate for every problem. If a company or organization comes to you with a single, well-defined issue they need rectified, chances are you’re better off with your existing methodologies. At Botho, we are often approached by clients whose problems are anything but singular or well-defined. We usually have to offer guidance on problem sets that are ambiguous, experimental, and systemic in scope. These are the kinds of challenges that are likelier to lend themselves to a transdisciplinary approach.
You need a certain type of client. Even if your problem is ostensibly “wicked” and primed for transdisciplinarity, your client may well not be. If a client is very top-down, does not offer you an opportunity to co-define both the problem and the solution with them, is not willing or able to provide you with room for experimentation, chances are, this client isn’t down for a transdisciplinary ride. Fundamentally, for a disruptive methodology with no counterfactual, you need a client who can take a bit of a leap of faith with you. In our case, we have clients we have worked with for long enough that they trust us to solve differently for them - or, at the very least, allow us to bully them a little into giving it a shot, because they know we can deliver. That’s the kind of client you can shake things up with and achieve the systemic change they’re aiming for.
You need to be a certain type of consultant. I say this not with the intent to be exclusionary, but because it relates back to point (a). At Botho we work across borders, sectors, and industries. We try to be deliberate about making connections not only within individual problem sets, but across them too, looking across clients, projects, and initiatives to see if there are opportunities to bring them together to realize collective goals. Yes, we work with clients to fix specific issues, but much of our energies are expended on what, to us, are “wicked” problems.
2. How Can Consultants Try to Move Towards a Transdisciplinary Approach?
This is what we’re testing at Botho in our quest to unlock a paradigm shift in how consultants consult:
Try to create pockets for experimentation in your overall project where you can have some room for co-creation with your client. Start small, keep it tightly contained, you may not be able to budget for it at first, but if you’re able to do a few iterations and create some proof of concept, over time you should be able to persuade clients to make these pockets an integral part of your engagement and a central component of your strategy consulting practice. This is how we introduced design thinking into our methodology at Botho - what began as essentially pro bono test cases with minimal risk to the client is now core to our methodological offering. Today, clients pay us to both integrate design thinking into a larger project or run standalone design sprints for them.
Introduce a person or people who are seemingly unrelated to the topic and see how they affect the dynamic in your brainstorming and strategy development sessions. In typical design processes, the role of experts is clear and essential. Experts are usually people with extensive experience or profound knowledge of the spaces and subjects you’re trying to interrogate. If we want to move from multidisciplinary to transdisciplinary, maybe one way to do so is to bring in experts who can provide a radically different perspective, because they are not entrenched in the domain in which your problem sits. How could an artist, or an anthropologist, or a historian, or a philosopher disrupt the linearity of your design process? And how could you channel that disruption towards a really holistic, fresh, and potentially transformative solution?
Always have one or more cross-cutting lenses. What are the issues, industries, or perspectives that are frequently recurrent in your work? How can you make sure at least one of these cross-cutting lenses - whether technology, or SMEs, or gender, or climate, etc. - is represented in your design process to make sure that there’s always one person in the room (aside from you, the facilitator) who can see and make connections across individual silos and functions?
Transdisciplinarity is a complex, nuanced idea that has been tackled, discussed and utilised in myriad ways by an array of people over decades. But at its core, I believe it is fundamentally about learning how to curate, manage, and direct conversations with disparate people, which, for us consultants, could go a long way towards progressively making room for multiplicity, misalignment and discord in our otherwise linear-prone industry. Because if the idea is to have us all agree and fall in line from start to finish, then the status quo will remain just that - unchanged.
By Aparupa Chakravarti, Director, Botho Emerging Markets Group