Ramón Bataller Alberola: The advantages of working collaboratively in biomedicine

Anyone who has read my blog probably has noticed that I love collaborative work. I enjoy putting people to work together, networking, achieving agreements, preventing and dealing with conflicts, etc.

My field, biomedicine, is highly complex and is evolving very rapidly. Our way of working in the past, with unconnected worlds between researchers and clinicians, is not useful anymore. We need to build bridges, to hire hybrid people with good communication skills capable of understanding other people's jobs and duties. Successful teams have to be interdisciplinary, integrating people with different areas of expertise and mentalities. We have to value collaborative people, instead of critiquing them because they seem unfocused. Of course we need very focused people, but they often don't understand each other because they are too specialized. And often their disconnected work doesn't lead to real progress.

Building networks is time- and energy-consuming. But it is an amazing task full of great moments. And most importantly, in the difficult times, you are truly inspired by the idea that this is the way to go, the way to make progress in medicine. Working separately is simply non efficient and boring. If you are a young researcher who wants to be successful in biomedicine, be open minded and aim to understand the work of other people.

We have to remove layers, boundaries and change the mentality of people who are too protective of their work and are unable to share their achievements. Instead, we have to promote reciprocity, reward those who cooperate, promote transparency between teams, build tools that favor communication. We have no other option for the future.

I want to share two talks that exemplify very well the topic of this post. I found the fist talk in the TED webpage, that I often visit. A French motivational speaker, Yves Morieux, researches how corporations can adapt to a modern and complex business landscape. In this energetic talk, Yves offers six rules for "smart simplicity." He is funny and entertaining. I love this talk specially when he talks about sharing the TV with his wife.

The second talk was recommended by the friend Juan G. Abraldes, a good example of a modern and brilliant academician. The speaker is Joe Loscalzo, a professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine, from Harvard University. He points out that the composition of the teams that can bring progress of medicine has to be highly interdisciplinary. Again, it is all about integrating complex parts of the puzzle together.