Learning to Tango: Sustainable development and the multidisciplinary dream

It is widely accepted that the creation of a sustainable future will require considerable collaboration between a range of academic and professional disciplines. This need is usually expressed in calls for the formation of multidisciplinary teams that are designed to explore the issues and develop our understanding of the problem space. However, there would appear to be few attempts to understand how such teams operate and how they should be managed. This paper explores collective music making as a useful metaphor for understanding the role of specialist skills, of generalist, management and support skills and the way they could be harnessed so that each is able to provide the right contribution at the right time ensuring that all contributions intertwine to create a powerful song. In unpacking the multidisciplinary bag, the paper draws on the author’s experience and observations in both collective music making and the development of regulatory structures and technologies for sustainable housing. It provides a reflective reassessment of the nature of multidisciplinary working and how, with a much deeper understanding of the difficulties involved, multidisciplinary approaches can be enabled so as to deliver the solutions required for a more sustainable world.

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