About a month ago, it was announced that Megha Rajagopalan, Alison Killing and Christo Buschek of BuzzFeed News won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
Per the Buzzfeed article, their investigation was the “most extensive investigation of China’s internment camp system ever done using publicly available satellite images, coupled with dozens of interviews with former detainees”
What’s interesting to me is that the collaborators were all from very different disciplinary backgrounds. Megha Rajagopalan is a tech reporter for Buzzfeed, Alison Killing is trained as an architect, and Christo Buschek is a programmer and digital security trainer.
The collaboration enabled the team to glean insights from publicly available data that would not have been apparent from within their individual disciplines. And it wasn’t just that three people from disparate disciplines collaborated on a project. Each of the team members approached their work through multidisciplinary lenses.
I would argue that the skill that made their collaboration successful was their ability to think across boundaries; to use their functional disciplines as tools to apply to a challenge that was bigger than any of their respective disciplines.
The global challenges we are facing today – the Grand Challenges such as climate change, economic inequality, etc. – do not exist neatly within a collection of single disciplines, and they cannot be addressed from within the traditional hierarchical, siloed systems that dominate our current work structures.
We need to address boundary spanning challenges with teams of boundary spanning people.
I’ve seen organizations try to address this issue by creating multidisciplinary teams composed of single focused experts from a variety of disciplines. Teams of diverse, yet single focused, experts are far less likely to be successful in addressing Grand Challenges than teams comprised of people who naturally work in boundary spanning ways. Boundary spanners may be less ‘expert’ than their functional counterparts, but they are far more talented in doing the type of work for which Rajagopalan, Killing and Buschek have aptly been recognized.
In an interview with Alison Killing she pointed out that “…many journalists don’t know what spatial analysis could add to an investigation and the networks aren’t there to allow these two groups of people to start working together – they often just don’t know each other.”
She’s right. So many people of different disciplines just don’t know each other. They are also not encouraged or rewarded to seek each other out. This Pulitzer Prize is one small step. How do we encourage momentum in the right direction?