Leadership and Work in Practice

Wicked problems need interdisciplinary thinking

Organisations grow by dividing work. Roles appear. Functions harden. Disciplines specialise. What begins as clarity slowly becomes fragmentation — and the most important work no longer fits inside any single box.

Breaking Down Silos: Why Interdisciplinary Work Solves Wicked Problems

Wicked problems need interdisciplinary thinking

Organisations grow by dividing work.

Roles appear. Functions harden. Disciplines specialise. What begins as clarity slowly becomes fragmentation — and before long, people are boxed into job families, departments, and budgets that were never designed to communicate with each other.

The map takes over from the territory.

Customer value crosses boundaries. Delivery crosses boundaries. Meaningful problems almost always cross boundaries. And yet organisations continue to assign systemic problems to functions, as if something that lives between disciplines could be solved inside one.

Technology optimises technology. Product optimises product. Legal optimises risk. Each discipline succeeds on its own terms — while the organisation struggles as a whole.

Editor's note — where this sits

This essay sits in the Physics layer of the Idea to Value system — examining what happens when systemic problems obstruct the flow between idea and value, and why single-discipline responses tend to make them worse. The Engine layer runs beneath it: interdisciplinary work creates the conditions in which new knowledge emerges — at the intersection of disciplines, not within any one of them.

The Idea to Value system — five layers

The map Direction & orientation Where we're going and where we are

The physics How ideas move to value Diagnostic system for seeing how ideas flow to value This article

The wiring Communication & meaning How clarity moves between people

The engine Creativity & climate The conditions that let good work happen Also here

The flywheel Learning & practice How capability compounds through sustained practice

Explore the full Idea to Value system →

Wicked problems

In 1973, urban planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber introduced the term wicked problem to describe a particular category of challenge: interconnected, evolving, and resistant to simple solutions. Problems where solving one aspect creates new problems elsewhere. Problems that cannot be fully understood until a solution is attempted. Problems that have no definitive answer — only better or worse responses.

Business is full of them.

The inability to deliver quickly in a competitive market. The breakdown in coordination between sales and delivery. The product that works technically but fails commercially. The team that performs individually and underperforms collectively. These are not problems with clean edges. They cross functions, disciplines, levels, and time horizons.

And that is precisely why they resist the way most organisations try to solve them.

Three approaches — and why two of them struggle

When organisations encounter a wicked problem, they tend to reach for one of three approaches. Understanding the difference between them explains why most problem-solving efforts produce incomplete results.

Quick reference — three approaches

The physics

Single, multi, and interdisciplinary — at a glance

The approach chosen determines not just the solution, but whether new knowledge is created at all.

Single discipline

One domain, one lens. Knowledge stays inside the discipline. The problem is defined by what the discipline can see.

→ Narrow solution

Multidisciplinary

Multiple disciplines contribute from within their silos. Work is coordinated but knowledge stays separated.

→ Disjointed solution

Interdisciplinary

Disciplines work on the whole problem together. New knowledge is created at the intersection — it belonged to neither discipline before.

→ Novel solution + new knowledge

Single discipline assigns the problem to whoever owns the most relevant function. Tech gets the technical problem. Finance gets the cost problem. The problem is defined by the discipline rather than by its actual shape — which means the solution will be one-dimensional at best, and will likely create new problems elsewhere.

Multidisciplinary brings different disciplines to the table but keeps them working in parallel rather than together. Tech solves the tech part. Design solves the design part. Each discipline contributes from within its own expertise and then steps back. Coordination becomes the primary challenge — steering groups form, project offices appear, governance boards multiply. The solutions are often disjointed because each part of the system was optimised independently. The wicked problem changes shape. It rarely disappears.

Interdisciplinary is where something different becomes possible. People from different disciplines work on the whole problem together — not on their fragment of it. They bring their own expertise, methods, and lenses, and combine them at the intersection rather than applying them in isolation. The solutions that emerge did not exist in any single discipline before. They are created at the boundary — novel, contextual, and genuinely new.

This is where knowledge is generated, not just applied.

What happens at the intersection

When disciplines genuinely meet, several things shift.

Assumptions that each discipline held as givens get surfaced and questioned. A finance lens applied to a delivery problem reveals cost structures that no delivery team would have named. A design lens applied to an operational challenge reveals friction that no operational manager would have seen. The problem looks different depending on where you are standing — and only when multiple standpoints combine does the full shape become visible.

Language changes. This is significant. When disciplines work in isolation, they develop terminology that is precise within their domain and opaque outside it. When they work together, they are forced to translate — and translation often reveals that two disciplines have been solving for different versions of the same problem, or that what appeared to be a disagreement was actually a misunderstanding about terms.

New knowledge appears. This is the often-overlooked dividend of interdisciplinary work. The solution is not just better — it teaches the organisation something about itself that it could not have learned any other way. That knowledge compounds, if it is shared.

The gaps are where leverage lives

The most significant advances in any organisation rarely come from within a single function. They come from the intersections — between technology and design, between operations and finance, between people and process.

This is not accidental. The gaps between disciplines are where the wicked problems live, and where the greatest opportunities for improvement also sit. Problems that no single team can solve. Improvements that no single team would think to make.

Interdisciplinary work is not a workshop format or a collaboration ritual. It is a way of thinking — one that asks people to work on the whole problem rather than contributing fragments from within their silos.

It is slower than assigning work to functions. It is messier. It is often political, because it requires people whose authority derives from disciplinary expertise to subordinate that expertise to a collective endeavour.

But it is where understanding deepens. And it is where real change begins.

Making it happen

The practical challenge is political as much as organisational.

Disciplines protect their territory. Leaders of functions have authority, budget, and identity tied to their discipline. Asking them to dissolve that boundary — even temporarily, even for a specific problem — requires both a clear mandate from above and a genuine belief that the outcome will be better than what any single function could produce.

The starting point is diagnosis. Not every problem requires an interdisciplinary response. Problems that are genuinely domain-specific — a bug in the codebase, a legal compliance question — belong with the relevant discipline. The question to ask is: does this problem cross boundaries? Does solving it in one place create or expose problems somewhere else? If yes, the response needs to cross boundaries too.

When it does, the composition of the group matters more than its size. A small team of people from genuinely different disciplines, with permission to work on the whole problem, will consistently outperform a large multidisciplinary group working in parallel on separate fragments.

The next time a problem feels immovable, ask where it lives.

If it crosses boundaries — and most meaningful problems do — the solution will need to cross boundaries as well.

Cultivated Studio

The argument is here. The working tools are in Studio.

Studio is the ongoing, behind-the-scenes layer of Cultivated — field notes, extended essays, frameworks, and over four hours of Idea to Value deep-dive video. It doesn't extend every article with a matching framework. It extends the thinking across the whole system, for practitioners who want to go further than the public library. If this essay opened something, Studio is where the wider architecture lives.

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