Page 147 - The Design Thinking Playbook

EXPERT TIP

Recruiting an interdisciplinary
team with T profiles

Lilly still plays with the idea of founding a consultancy firm for design thinking. She would need to recruit If you want to take the time and experience potential team members
her future colleagues against a T-shaped profile in order to cope with the professional challenges and be in actual practice, you can hold something like a design thinking
able to work as a team, on which all have the same social skills. It is probably easier to find people with boot camp. It can serve several purposes: For one, it is a quick
specialist skills for the individual process steps—corresponding to an I profile—than those who have both and easy way for candidates to experience design thinking and its
forms of knowledge. individual steps in practice and judge for themselves if they want to
collaborate in this way. Second, those who assemble the team quickly
A good sign for the ability to collaborate, from the horizontal bar, is when people during the interview talk get an idea of the specialist and social skills of future team members.
not only about themselves but also emphasize what they have learned from others and how valuable the
collaboration was for the common project. Interdisciplinary teams have many advantages, which, among other
things, lead to a better-quality result within a shorter time. At the
Quite specifically, it can help to have the potential candidates create their own T profile. The way some- same time, the complexity of the collaboration increases with this
body fills out the profile yields a lot of information on his way of thinking and expressing himself. At the approach compared to an individual way of working, without iterative
same time, it shows how somebody interprets the requirements for collaboration and presents himself in agreements. The complexity can be reduced using a few simple rules,
this respect. on which the entire team should agree from the outset if the collab-
oration is to be successful. Some of them already comply with the
principles of design thinking anyway, but it has proven to be of value
for the team to reflect on them consciously again.

Creative Analytical

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EXPERT EXPERT

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