UNDERSTAND YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES - Personality and Experience
Our experience: each of us within our project would agree that personality and previous experience has been crucial to our success. We have all got along and each been dedicated to making the project a success. Therefore, conflict has been dealt with quickly and issues discussed openly and resolved as a team. This has sat closely to our appreciation of the different experiences we each bring to the project. Many of us have had previous career paths – one in manufacturing, others in recruitment and marketing, whilst another continues to run a private architecture practice. We all have hobbies and interests, some similar, some more unusual than others. Knowing these things enables us to value each other beyond our disciplines, drawing on different strengths and experiences when we need them. Thus, making us a rounded and cohesive.
Why?
Once again this section seems quite self-explanatory, but experiences and personalities are fundamental to how a project runs, how people get along and, thus, how interdisciplinarity is shaped.
Personality
Any researcher who has been in a long-term project working with others, whether from their own discipline or another, will have tales to tell about particular personalities in that project. Such stories might be about conflict, egos, or in the case of many successful interdisciplinary projects, how the personalities of those involved ensured everyone got along, the project continued and had a successful interdisciplinary outcome.
Mike Fortun (2005: 170 – see further reading) talks about’ friendship’, ‘muddling through’, ‘laughter, dedication, forbearance born of sustained proximity and mutual critique….’ And whilst these may seem like strange aims at the start of a research project, they are crucial to ensuring a project’s success, particularly an interdisciplinary one. This is why getting to know each other, and spending time out from the project (see Time out in Get to know your colleagues) are activities that need to be made part of the project.
Experience
Part of this getting to know each other is appreciating the varying experience around the table. Often in interdisciplinary projects experience is only ever thought of in disciplinary terms – what does that discipline do and what experience will that person therefore have. However, as our experience, discussed above, highlights, colleagues often have a wealth of ‘other’ non-disciplinary experience which they bring. Maybe from previous work experience, career paths, hobbies, interests, background. All of which, not only shapes their personality and how they get on in the project, but may prove useful to the research path the project takes and potentially it’s interdisciplinarity.
Exercise
One exercise to get to know colleague’s experience, past background and non-academic elements of their personality, may be to hold an informal ‘get to know your colleagues’ type quiz. All parties would need to be willing to do this, but it involves one member of the team (ideally the facilitator) asking each colleague for two random facts about themselves (for example musical abilities, previous jobs, hobbies etc) which they must then keep secret. These facts would then form the quiz which could be given out at a dedicated reflective session or more relaxed project meet up (such as a time out type event), for everyone to complete. It does not need to be long but something to get people talking and to give them potentially new common ground with which to bond over.