Month: November 2022

A responsible approach to intersectionality

By Ellen Lewis and Anne Stephens

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1. Ellen Lewis (biography)
2. Anne Stephens (biography)

What is intersectionality? How can it be used systemically and responsibly?

When you google the term over 66,400,000 results are returned. It is a term used by government and businesses, as well as change agents. But is it helpful and are there ways that we should be thinking about intersectionality and its inclusion in our everyday lives?

After describing intersectionality, we introduce a framework for systemic intersectionality that brings together issues that arise within three social dimensions: gender equality, environments and marginalised voices. We refer to this as the GEMs framework.

What is Intersectionality?

Intersectionality is a term first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. It is a prevalent way to understand the effect of more than one type of discrimination.

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Improving cross-disciplinary collaboration with strategy knotworking and ecocycle planning

By Nancy White

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Nancy White (biography)

How can cross-disciplinary teams improve their project results and cross-team learning, especially when they are part of a portfolio of funded projects?

I have worked with cross disciplinary teams in international agriculture development, ecosystems management and mental health. For the most part, these are externally funded initiatives and have requirements both for results (application of the work) and for cross-team learning. Often there is not useful clarity about how funder and grantee agendas work in sync. And there is rarely opportunity or support for shared optimization and exploration across different portfolios of funded work.

I have used the six knotworking questions plus ecocycle planning from Liberating Structures to make it possible for a group to look back critically, assess the current state, and prospectively generate options to move forward.

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Dealing with differences in interests through principled negotiation

By Gabriele Bammer

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Gabriele Bammer (biography)

How can the interests of a diverse group of researchers and stakeholders tackling a complex societal problem be understood and managed?

Interests arise when a person has a stake in something and stands to gain or lose depending on what happens to that something:

  • researchers commonly have a stake in advancing their work and careers,
  • stakeholders affected by a societal problem generally have a stake in improving the problem, and
  • stakeholders in a position to do something about a problem generally have a stake in improving outcomes for the problem through their sphere of influence.

Interests relate not only to personal conditions or stakes (self-interest), but also to principles such as reducing inequities and promoting justice.

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Creative destruction

By Keith McCandless

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Keith McCandless (biography)

My favorite part of working with groups is helping people notice and stop counterproductive behavior. We all have self-limiting individual and group behaviors. Of course, they are easier to spot in others than in ourselves. So, finding seriously fun ways to help people discover for themselves what they can stop doing is important.

I use an activity called TRIZ from Liberating Structures. The purpose of TRIZ is to:

  • Make it possible to speak the unspeakable and get skeletons out of the closet
  • Make space for innovation
  • Lay the ground for creative destruction by doing the hard work in a fun way
  • TRIZ may be used before or in place of visioning sessions
  • Build trust by acting all together to remove barriers.

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Why complex problems need abductive reasoning

By Mariana Zafeirakopoulos

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Mariana Zafeirakopoulos (biography)

How does the way we approach complex problems differ from how we approach problems that are familiar or obvious?

In this i2Insights contribution, I explore four kinds of reasoning:

  • Deduction
  • Induction
  • Abduction
  • Design abduction.

Design abduction is the brain-child of Professor Kees Dorst (2015). In simplified terms, these different kinds of reasoning can be compared as follows (Watson and Dorst, 2022, p. 3; taken from Dorst, 2015, pp. 46-49):

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