The 10 knowledge areas problem solvers need to be knowledgeable about

Anyone who wants to be good at understanding problems and solving them in an imaginative way can't be just a specialist and besides her core expertise, she needs to be knowledgeable about a wide breadth of topics.

 Based on own experience and research done about creating high performing innovation teams, this is the distilled list of topics that everybody needs to have a minimum understanding of. Instead of talking about specific disciplines in which problem solvers have to be competent, we have organized it in 10 knowledge areas:

• Understanding how the world functions. Relevant to understand the larger context of the problem you are trying to solve. Related disciplines: geopolitics, contemporary history, global trade, business, global trend analysis, environmentalism 
• Understanding how society works. Relevant to understand how the problem is influenced by how society is organized, the activities conducted, its norms, its values, its processes, etc. Related disciplines: Sociology, social anthropology 
• Understanding how humans think and behave. Relevant to understand the thinking of the people who are affected by the problem. How do they make decisions? What motivates them? Related disciplines: Anthropology, Cognitive Psychology, Behavioral Economics 
• Understanding how scarcity management and efficiency works. Relevant to understand how a problem can be solve in the most efficient way with the least amount of effort. How to deal with trade-offs? What is the most optimal solution? Related disciplines: economics, macroeconomics, microeconomics 
• Understanding how value is understood, created, and delivered. Relevant to understand how the problem will be solved in the environment in which the business operates. Related disciplines: business management, business analysis, product management, sales, marketing. 
• Understanding how things work and how they are built. Relevant to understand how existing solutions to similar problems work. Related disciplines: Engineering, Systems thinking, Statistics, Quantitative Analysis 
• Understanding how new possibilities are imagined. Relevant to understand how to imagine future desired states. Related disciplines: innovation, design, arts, science fiction, literature, cinema, 
• Understanding how new knowledge is acquired, managed and created. Relevant to understand how the abstract components of a problem are manipulated based on the given intellectual objective. Related disciplines: knowledge management, learning thinking, synthesis 
• Understanding how reasoning and understanding works. Relevant to understand and improve the mechanism we use to think and reason in order to arrive to better solutions. Related disciplines: critical reasoning, analytical reasoning, literary criticism, philosophy 
• Understanding how communication works. Relevant to understand how information and knowledge is transferred in order to improve the quality of the collective thinking. Related disciplines: Writing, speaking, storytelling, conversation, information visualization. 

As an example, here the profile of an hypothetical team formed by a social scientist, an engineer, a designers and a business analyst. Besides their own areas of knowledge, all of them have different strengths based on the nature of their disciplines, their background education, and personal preferences around topics of interest. Ideally, once you overlap the domain areas of your team members you should have a balanced renaissance team that is collectively strong in all areas required for problem solving.

See "Defining the breadth of skills of T-shaped people" for a related article on the skills that are going to be more critical in the next decades.