The Vine

Dev Patnaik makes an excellent case here for the virtues of hybrid thinking, a discipline he describes as “the conscious blending of different fields of thought to discover and develop opportunities that were previously unseen by the status quo.”

He cites the widely celebrated transformation of Procter & Gamble from a 200-year-old consumer products manufacturer to a world-class design innovator. Much of the credit is attributed to Claudia Kotchka, P&G’s VP for design strategy, and her success is heralded as the power of design thinking applied to traditional business models.

Except Claudia’s background is accounting, not design. In fact, Patnaik asserts, the key to her success is that she isn’t a designer. Instead, she immersed herself in the world of design and blended in her previous experience in accounting, marketing and other fields.

It strikes me that Dev is speaking to the very reality of our industry today. With staffs now stripped to the core, it’s unlikely that anyone in your company is doing just one job (or two, or four). Everyone on your team is multidisciplinary—and that’s to your great advantage. Hybridity is precisely what you need, Dev suggests, because the challenges you’re facing are too great for any single skillset to solve.

Taking it a step further, he writes:

“Hybrid thinking is much more than gathering together a multidisciplinary team. Hybrid thinking is about multidisciplinary people … folks who can connect the dots between what’s culturally desirable, technically feasible, and viable from a business point of view.”

Granted, this housing collapse and the dismantling of our organizations has been painful. But the recipe for growth and reinvention and discovery of new opportunities—previously unseen by the status quo—calls for precisely the conditions we have today.

We already have the hybrid people. Now let’s engage them in hybrid thinking.