September 2022 – Integration and Implementation Insights

Resolving disagreements by negotiating agreements in the right way

September 2, 2025September 27, 2022

By Lawrence Susskind

How can interdisciplinary teams avoid getting stuck on questions like:

What kinds of data do we need to collect?
What methods or techniques should we use to analyze our data?
How should we handle gaps or incongruities in our findings?
What are the policy implications or prescriptions that follow from our findings?

I want to share some lessons I’ve learned about handling disagreements on these four questions.

Research Design

One interdisciplinary project I worked on many years ago involved trying to assess the feasibility of burying nuclear waste in the ocean floor.

Systems thinking in public policy: Making space to think differently

November 4, 2025September 20, 2022

By Catherine Hobbs

catherine-hobbs_2021 — Catherine Hobbs (biography)

Why does public policy go wrong? How can researchers who are systems thinkers begin to create the conditions in which those involved in public policy may flourish within their possible spheres of ‘horizontal’ influence?

The public policy context and why it goes wrong

Jake Chapman’s System Failure: Why Governments Must Learn to Think Differently (2002; 2004) remains a much-quoted report. In his second (2004) edition, however, Chapman reflects that, despite an enthusiastic reception, there had been “very little substantive shift in either policy or management styles within government” (2004: p.10). Chapman identified a number of difficulties, including:

What transdisciplinary researchers should know about evaluation: Origins and current state

September 30, 2025September 13, 2022

By Wolfgang Beywl and Amy Gullickson

authors_wolfgang-beywl_amy-gullickson — 1. Wolfgang Beywl (biography)
2. Amy Gullickson (biography)

Efforts to develop evaluation in transdisciplinary research have mostly been conducted without reference to the evaluation literature, effectively re-inventing and re-discussing key concepts. What do transdisciplinary researchers need to know to build on the in-depth knowledge available in evaluation science?

Here we add to other key contributions about evaluation in i2Insights, especially:

Belcher and colleagues, who provide a tool for evaluating transdisciplinary research
Nagy and Schäfer, who describe how to systematically design transdisciplinary project evaluation
Meagher and Edwards, who provide a framework to evaluate the impacts of research on policy and practice
Louder and colleagues, who discuss ways of choosing a framework to assess research impact.

Multidisciplinary perspectives on unknown unknowns

October 7, 2025September 6, 2022

By Gabriele Bammer

gabriele-bammer_nov-2021 — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

This is part of a series of occasional “synthesis blog posts” drawing together perspectives on related topics across i2Insights contributions.

How can different disciplines and practitioners enhance the ability to understand and manage unknown unknowns, also referred to as deep uncertainty?

Seventeen blog posts have addressed these issues, covering:

how unknown unknowns can be understood
exploiting unknown unknowns
accepting unknown unknowns
reducing unknown unknowns.

How unknown unknowns can be understood

It is useful to review understanding of unknown unknowns from the perspective of the individual and the system, before turning to the project level.