Multi-Disciplinary Team Impact in High Performance Sport

Maximizing Multi-Disciplinary Team Impact in High-Performance Sport: Exploring Problem Solving, Decision-Making, Expertise, & Team Performance.

Ryan King¹

^1.Blended Intellligence

Multi-disciplinary Team; Practitioners; Problem Solving; Expertise; Knowledge; Wicked Problems; Tame Problems; Complexity; Solutions

Overview

In recent years, there has been a significant shift in the requirements of the workforce to meet the changing needs of industry and society. The emergence of the knowledge era has created new frontiers that are much more complex, inter-connected, and inter-disciplinary in nature, requiring individuals, teams, and organizations to work together to identify and solve our most difficult questions and thorny problems. This is especially true in the field of high-performance sports where Multi-Disciplinary Teams (MDT) are tasked with supporting athletes in achieving their performance goals. However, it is essential to determine if practitioners in MDTs are trained to be ‘skilled doers’ or ‘knowledge workers’ who engage in deep cognitive work to produce novel, creative solutions to complex problems. In this paper, we explore the expertise of a Multi-Disciplinary Performance Support Team engaged in performance problem-solving and delivery of services, examining the different problem types, and discussing how practitioners can differentiate between them. Additionally, we will review problem-solving classifications in industry and explore how they can be applied in the context of MDTs to help practitioners expand their vocabulary and approach to problem-solving.