Building value with cross-discipline frameworks

For the last two decades, businesses have relied on a familiar growth equation; digital marketing to drive demand, global supply chains to deliver it, and a world of fragmented niches to exploit. 

 

Today, the core challenges businesses face (finding customers, driving loyalty, launching new products) haven’t changed, but the environment around them has.

 

Social media use is in decline, and LLMs are disrupting Google’s predictable returns. Trade wars and once-open markets turning inward are disrupting global supply chains. AI is driving competitive consolidation, and changing how consumers discover, compare and buy.

 

The old growth equation is starting to become unstuck, we’re entering a period of extended global disorder, and we’re unlikely to ‘optimise’ our way out of the problem.

 

But many organisations are still applying yesterday’s frameworks to today’s environment - reorganising teams, reallocating spend - when what we need are brand new frameworks.

 

 

Enter cross-pollination thinking

Cross-pollination thinking is the deliberate practice of widening perspective before narrowing in on a solution. It means looking beyond your industry or your function to uncover new ways to reframe challenges in ways that conventional business logic can’t.

 

It is a structured approach to solving emerging problems by borrowing rigour from disciplines that have tried and tested approaches for dealing with uncertainty and complexity, and unlocking change and transformation.

 

 

The boardroom doesn’t have a monopoly on growth

Thousands of years of human progress across hundreds of disciplines offer masses of sources to choose from, from sports performance to civil engineering, Freudian psychology to intelligence analysis. Each offers robust and novel ways to deliver changes in performance or fortune, and few are ever applied in a corporate setting.

 

Team Sky’s early noughties success and Dave Brailsford’s “marginal gains theory” was one example of when a framework from an unexpected sphere of expertise has been applied effectively to business. But it needn’t end there.

 

Businesses can apply the principles of coaching to proposition building; the framework of Freudian psychology to team culture change; red-teaming techniques from military intelligence to stress-test strategy.

 

The point is simply; colliding business problems with new frameworks can unlock radical new perspectives and answers.

 

 

An on-going practice, not a one-off effort

Expansive thinking is not something most organisations are set up for; they are biased towards familiar and known ways of working and types of solution, commercially, structurally and psychologically, tending to think within the confines of their expertise, and focused on improving existing ideas, even if those ideas no longer deliver value.

 

It cannot rely on serendipity; the chance conversation, the inspirational away day, the occasional external speaker. And it is not a skill that appears on demand. It has to be built deliberately. And built consistently, like a muscle. 

• It is about frameworks not just ideas: the value lies in adopting the underlying model rather than superficial inspiration.
• It requires giving time to thinking, not just execution. Many organisations incentivise delivery and efficiency, but rarely time to reframe the question.
• It requires building a new mindset not just a new model; namely, curiosity. 

 

From optimisation to expansion 

The environment businesses operate in has changed in significant and structural ways, and when that happens incremental improvement is rarely enough. New conditions require new frames of reference.

 

Cross-disciplinary thinking provides those frames. By looking beyond traditional corporate models and looking to established disciplines that have long dealt with complexity and uncertainty, organisations can approach familiar challenges differently.

 

This practice requires deliberate effort and cultural support. The businesses that embed cross-disciplinary thinking into how they operate will be better equipped to grow, whatever uncertainty they face. 

 

---

 

Lorna Burt is co-founder of East Winds

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and MicroStockHub