Professional Knowledge, Complexity and Interdisciplinary Teams

In this paper, I examine some of the issues involved in “crossing boundaries” in the sense of thinking across different professional disciplines, such as law, medicine, engineering, education, social work, and so on. More specifically, I begin by describing several surprising observations I made while working as an occupational researcher and interviewer. I then interpret these observations through the lens of complexity science, arguing that each major professional area can be seen as a complex, learning system—one that embodies a rich and dynamic web of knowledge that cannot be easily reduced or translated into other professional areas’ ways of knowing. Finally, I argue that this incommensurability between different disciplines or professions has important implications for interdisciplinary teams. Most controversially, it challenges the notion that such teams should aim for consensus.