One of the things that makes our business different from other sectors is the complexity of its workforce. To discover, develop and deliver a new drug to market requires an extraordinary range of expertise and competencies.

From medical to commercial, from legal to manufacturing, from basic science to regulatory, the variety of skilled professionals needed to make a typical pharmaceutical company work is enormous. Other sectors employ a range of expertise but I struggle to think of any that approaches pharma’s professional diversity. Combining that variety of knowhow makes innovation possible but it is difficult. And evolutionary thinking helps you to understand and resolve the challenges of cross-functional working.

In 1950, Akira Kurosawa made an influential movie, Rashomon, about four different witnesses to a murder, including the victim’s ghost. Each had very different recollections of the event. The movie’s title gave the name to the Rashomon Effect, that phenomenon when different perspectives lead to different, but equally valid, views of the same thing. Almost any activity that involves more than one person can give rise to the Rashomon effect. We see it in the courtroom, in personal relationships, in medical diagnoses and, most relevant to us, in cross-functional teams such as brand teams. If you have ever struggled to understand, or be understood by, a colleague from a different discipline you will be familiar with the Rashomon Effect. And if you are familiar with the Rashomon Effect, you will want to understand it better and overcome its negative impact on your team’s effectiveness and efficiency. So let’s talk about that.

The ubiquitousness of the Rashomon Effect indicates its roots in human evolution. In other words, we evolved to differ. My favourite work on this is Karl G. Heider’s classic 1988 article, The Rashomon Effect: When Ethnographers Disagree. While it’s framed in anthropology, Heider touches on how differing perspectives may stem from evolved cognitive and cultural filters – suggesting that the Rashomon Effect is not just a nuisance, but a predictable outcome of how humans evolved to process reality. I also love Maria Popova’s take on this, which explores how memory formation and distortion are shaped by evolutionary pressures – leading to fragmented recollections that fuel the Rashomon Effect. Together, this work tells us that we differ because we evolved not to see the whole picture but only those parts of the picture that are important from where we sit. This cognitive glitch is especially relevant in pharma companies because our training, objectives and subculture means we sit in functional silos, looking at the world from our own particular position. No wonder we so often disagree.

How does this evolutionary understanding help us make cross-functional work less cross and more functional? It tells us that before we can get colleagues to agree, we need to get them to see the world in the same way. To do that, we need ‘thinking tools’, a phrase coined by the late Dan Dennett to describe methods for making sense of the world. And, brand teams, there is good and bad news about that. The good news is that there are many thinking tools for helping a team to develop a shared, realistic view of the market environment: Contextual segmentation, SWOT alignment and emergent property analysis to name but three. The bad news is that such tools are, in our industry, horribly misunderstood and frequently misused. And badly used tools are worse than useless. Worse still, those tools are often restricted to the marketing silo and eschewed by medical, marketing access and other brand team functions.

And the practical implication from this? There are three. First, tensions in cross-functional teams are inherent because we evolved to see things differently from our colleagues. Second, the tensions caused by different perspectives can be reduced by shared use of appropriate thinking tools. Third, if you want those tools to work, you need to use them correctly, rigorously and carefully. Using them badly, casually and amateurishly, which I see all the time in pharma brand teams, won’t work and will waste your time.

So, if you consider the tools that you learned from college, books and courses, like contextual segmentation, SWOT alignment and emergent properties analysis, are only market analysis techniques, then you’ve missed the point. They are tools for reducing the Rashomon Effect.

And no industry needs that more than the life sciences, a complex area that it is correspondingly often full of conflict.