You’ve got a complex problem to solve or process to improve and you need a cross-disciplinary, cross-functional team to do it. How do you decide who should be on that team?

Bill Buxton, Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research, suggests that you look for I-shaped people. In a July 13, 2009, article in BusinessWeek, Buxton argues for the value of the I-shaped person: “They have their feet firmly planted in the mud of the practical world, and yet stretch far enough to stick their head in the clouds when they need to. Furthermore, they simultaneously span all of the space in between.”

Such people excel at abstract thinking and at using physical material and tools. They’re grounded in reality but able to rise above the specifics of a problem to think of it in a more abstract and general way.

Buxton offers guidelines for building a cross-disciplinary team:

• Don’t put someone else like you on the team. You need people who fill the gaps of your skill set.
• Test for and choose team members with both a breadth of literacy and deep competence. Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO, calls these “T-shaped people”: They have “basic literacy in a relatively broad domain of relevant knowledge” (the horizontal bar of the T) “along with real depth or competence in a much narrower domain” (the vertical line of the T).
• Identify the core competencies you need for the team and then write the “go-to” team member for each competency. Address any gaps.
• Test and select for I-shapedness.
• Choose people who don’t need predictability and stability to be effective.
• Choose people with strong interpersonal skills. Brilliant candidates who lack social skills will weaken the team.

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