Working at the Intersections

Rakhi Rajani, Chief Digital Officer, Genomics England, gave the industry keynote at the 2021 Response-ability Summit in May. In her talk, Rakhi explores the myriad ways in which we can approach challenges differently in order to arrive at better solutions, which involves working at the intersections.

Response-ability Summit 2021 ticket-holders and sponsors can also watch the recordings of the #RAS21 talks here.

Watch Rakhi’s talk, Working at the intersections, or busting out of boxes, or read our brief summary below.

Working at the intersections

Rakhi has worked at the intersections for most of her career. When deciding what to study at university Rakhi chose “psychology and computing” so she could “go deep into some areas ” but also “take a step back and look at things from a different perspective”. For Rakhi the intersections are about “moving away from a very specific thing” and “looking at what sits in between”.

From her experience working in Silicon Valley at the start of her career right through to today, she explains that “most problems are solved at the intersection where disciplines get out of the way, and where you can really start to think about problems more holistically”.

Being comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity

Rakhi has worked “in a world of new things forever”, which she finds “truly fulfilling and a privilege” because “it’s about sitting with ambiguity and uncertainty, and those are two things that I’m very comfortable with”. Innovation is often “the connection between human behaviour, industry shifts, invention, and science”. It’s “that bit in the middle” where “really interesting stuff happens” and “where we should be looking if we’re going to create change”.

‘Boxes’ work at the level of tactical innovation

Rakhi acknowledges that ‘boxes’ work “if you look at the different levels of innovation, from tactical to strategic”. She says that those boxes often work “because you’re looking at incremental innovation and individual brainpower meeting the needs of stuff and creating generative value.” At the other end of that scale she explains, “we’re really trying to create exponential change. That comes from collective brainpower because you are changing behaviours and shifting things, shifting patterns and norms.”

Wicked problems require us to think differently

Given the wicked problems we are facing, Rakhi says “that in and of itself is a reason why we need to think differently about the problems we’re trying to solve for”. It suggests that we must “think more about what those intersections are without the certainty of names” and labels and the “boxes that we want to put people and things into”.

Diversity of mindsets

Rakhi suggests that “a diversity of mindsets is needed to shift the what and how we do next”. Too much emphasis is placed “on known disciplines versus the perspectives that can change our approach” with the result that “we start asking the wrong questions where we could ask more generative questions, more open questions, more holistic questions” such as “how do we bring the art and science of problem-solving together to solve for climate change?”.

Challenge dominant perceptions and create alternative solutions

Approaches like speculative design “help us challenge dominant perceptions and create alternative solutions”. She says, “the stories that we can create and the changes that we can make on the world come from being at those intersectional points.”

How do we encourage symbiosis

The questions we should be asking, suggests Rakhi, are, “how do we leverage emerging technology and infuse it with a human touch” and “how do we create a world where robots and humans actually work together”. The most interesting questions for her are, “how do we build collaborative intelligence that combines empathy and uncertainty with automation” and how do we “break down those human-machine boundaries and create shared experiences”.

Distributed cognition

Thinking about intelligence, Rakhi explains that “cognition is not siloed”, it is “distributed in the environment” and “coalesces to create diversity of thinking and brain power, which means that you get different perspectives”.

Building a healthcare team

Rakhi says they’re building a team at Genomics England “that includes designers, and social scientists, natural scientists, all the folks that have been there for a very long time”. She says “we’re augmenting those skill sets with other things so that we can ask questions”, both difficult and different questions, because “healthcare is very emotive”. And you can ask these types of questions “if you ask them at the intersections versus asking them from a very disciplinary point of view.”

Creating invitations to interact

Barriers to interact across disciplines are, for example, the lack of a common language and being uncomfortable with opinions different to your own (because humans dislike conflict). The question for us all, Rakhi suggests, is, “how do I create the invitation to interact that’s going to enable those conversations” between disciplines, between a designer and a scientist?

Moving towards a systems-thinking rather than role-based approach

Rakhi suggests that “to make working at the intersections much more possible than it is right now” we need to move “towards a systems-thinking approach rather than a role-based one”. She explains how she builds teams: “I’m not just looking for a great engineer or a great product manager. I’m looking for great storytellers, for the magicians, for the naysayers, the fighters, the dreamers, the reflectors. The people who make decisions very quickly and the people who agonise over them. Because those ways of thinking, those brains, and those ways of tackling problems, for me at least, are how we get to a better solution”.

How to encourage intelligence at the intersections

Rakhi leaves us with five key points to encourage intelligence at the intersections and drive innovation:

• Leave disciplinary baggage at the door. Job titles convey people’s specialism but that does not limit their impact.
• Remove functional bias and value the people who disagree but who nevertheless listen to other perspectives.
• Make space. Curb pace for exploration; we’re so intent on fixing things, faster, and faster, and faster.
• Allow diverse teams to define their own rituals and language. Enable them to get to a place where boundaries and hierarchies break down quickly.
• Enable ‘circular causality’ by setting challenges on problems that make the outputs of one action or decision the input to another. It encourages thoughtfulness at the intersections.