Episode #73 Designing your teams to flow with Professor Lisa Scharoun and Head of School Design at QUT. - a podcast by Professor Selena Bartlett, Neuroscientist and Group Leader Neuroscience and Neuroplasticity, Translational Research Institute, QUT
from 2021-11-09T10:00
Imagine exiting a train station and rounding the corner in an urban part of London for the first time, on your own without knowing a single person to start studying in a Design School, after growing up in a small town. This is exactly the unlikely path taken by Lisa Scharoun, now Professor and Head of the School of Design. This never occurred to her growing up as one of 5 children in the middle of rural U.S.A. As Steve Jobs famously quoted you can only join the dots looking backwards.
What comes to your mind when you hear the word design? At first it invokes, fashion, architecture, and iPhones. For example, it was the discovery of the design of DNA, the double helix, that it consists of two strands that wind around each other like a twisted ladder that led to the scientific and genomics revolution. The simple design came in 1953 by putting together pieces of a puzzle discovered by hundreds of scientists, starting with Friedrich Miescher in 1869. Watson and Crick with the help of Rosalind Franklin, and others, used cardboard cut-outs on a table of the individual chemical components of the four bases (AC TG) and other nucleotide subunits that make-up the chemical structure of DNA. Watson and Crick shifted molecules around on their desktops. It took a team working together to discover the double helix built by nature’s simple design. Together they solved one of the most complex scientific problems, being the way, in which all living forms are connected to each other (see Pray et al., 2008, Nature Education 1(1):100).
What could be more complex than designing our teams that flow. At the end of the day, the life of our team members, arises from a complex array of small daily decisions. From how we choose to get up in the morning, exercise, and the food we eat. In Lisa’s case it was exchanging letters with a family friend in Germany that meant she lived, studied, and worked in USA, UK, China, Singapore, and Australia and become an International expertise in Design. Her team used co-design and her mantra of ‘change by design’ to create a set of promotional posters for the Olympic Village that highlighted the history and significant contributions that Australian Paralympic athletes have contributed to sport. This set of posters, created for the London 2012 games, has subsequently been showcased at the US Embassy in Canberra as well as at every subsequent Paralympic Games.
As we enter the post-pandemic covid era, the dominant issue we face our teams face is how to live sustainably within an economic model that demands consumption and growth. The puzzle pieces to this complex problem are in need of a design solution. As David Attenborough said we know the solution to climate change is to re-wild the Earth. What could be more important than leaders that create teams with a global perspective that live by the mantra of change by finding a simple design. Just as scientists discovered the double helix, the new challenge facing our leaders and teams is finding the design that sustains life in a complex world. Please join Lisa and I as discuss how to design teams that flow.
Citation: Pray, L. (2008) Discovery of DNA structure and function: Watson and Crick. Nature Education 1(1):100
https://www.qut.edu.au/about/our-people/academic-profiles/lisa.scharoun
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