By Adrian Wolfberg.
How can solving today’s most complex challenges reckon with four fundamentally different ways of knowing? How can the collision of their distinct epistemic strengths and blind spots be harnessed for innovation in threat assessment and decision-making on complex problems?
Let me unpack these four ways of knowing and how they shape, support, and sometimes undermine each other. Here, I use the example of climate security intelligence, but the insights and lessons are likely to apply to a wider range of complex societal and environmental issues. The four ways of knowing are:
- Scientific knowledge from the physical sciences
- Scientific knowledge from the social sciences
- Judgment under uncertainty by knowledge-producing professionals
- Practical decision-making by practitioners who are senior executives.
Using climate security intelligence as the example, the figure below illustrates the divide between science as knowledge, highlighted by the physical and social sciences, and experience as knowledge, highlighted by professional intelligence analysts and practitioners who are senior executives.
1. Scientific Knowledge from the Physical Sciences
Physical scientists—such as climatologists, hydrologists, oceanographers, atmospheric physicists—work in a domain driven by rigorous empiricism, model-based projection, and a demand for precision. Their methods are transparent and peer-reviewed. For these scientists, knowledge is not just testable—it is cumulative, built incrementally through the logic of replication and controlled uncertainty.
As illustrated in the figure above, these scientists operate primarily on the left-hand side of the knowledge production spectrum: science as knowledge. Their insights, while indispensable, rarely grapple with the political or social meaning of those insights. Notably, while the science of climate change is increasingly robust, its implications for security are often probabilistic and indirect.
2. Scientific Knowledge from the Social Sciences
Social scientists explore how societies respond or fail to respond to stress associated with complex problems. For example, political scientists analyze regime stability; economists forecast financial disruption; anthropologists and sociologists trace cultural resilience and migration. Their methods are more interpretive, often operating through qualitative analysis, comparative case studies, and scenario building.
Yet their orientation toward explanation over prediction introduces a different kind of rigor, one that values context, complexity, and contingency. Still, many knowledge-producing professionals and policymaker practitioners may find the assumptions of the social sciences elusive or even contradictory, particularly when causality is difficult to establish. Here again, the above figure reveals the social sciences as essential but sometimes epistemically siloed.
3. Judgment Under Uncertainty by Knowledge-Producing Professionals
The third way of knowing comes from knowledge-producing professionals. In relation to climate security intelligence, they can come from national security, defense, or even the commercial sector. These professionals are experts in drawing conclusions under conditions of ambiguity, limited data, and high stakes. They produce judgments rather than certainties. Their craft is grounded in inference, analytic tradecraft, and structured methods that often prioritize decision-relevance over academic rigor. Their knowledge generally aims to be “good enough” to support action.
The following figure illustrates just how deep the cultural divide can be between academic and professional organizations, with the latter again focusing on professionals from climate security intelligence. The former prioritizes openness, debate, and long-term knowledge production. The latter thrives on compartmentalization, classification, and the logic of immediate utility. These divergent cultural norms create friction at the boundary of collaboration.
4. Practical Decision-Making by Practitioners who are Senior Executives
The final way of knowing by decision-making practitioners is perhaps the most grounded and the most political. It is the realm of mayors, chief executive officers, generals, agency heads, and elected officials. These decision-makers must act, often under pressure and with incomplete knowledge. For them, decisions are not abstractions but commitments with real-world consequences. Their judgments are shaped not only by facts and forecasts but by power, values, constituencies, and risk calculus.
I describe this as the “practical knowing” of those embedded in social, political, and economic institutions. Their decisions shape the futures that science models, that social science explains, and that intelligence warns about.
Why These Four Ways Clash—and Must Be Integrated
These four ways of knowing are not just epistemological differences; they are institutional, cultural, and cognitive distinctions that define how people see the world and act within it. They create knowledge boundaries that are hard to cross.
The first figure above offers a visual taxonomy of the transdisciplinary participants needed to bridge these boundaries. It distinguishes not only domains (science versus experience) but also institutional affiliations from public to private, for-profit to non-profit, and indigenous communities to government authorities.
What’s missing in most efforts to integrate these perspectives is a shared mental model of how each contributes to the whole. Integration is not consensus. It is about coherence without uniformity. That means allowing each way of knowing to retain its integrity while contributing to a shared understanding of risk, threat, and opportunity.
A Tool for Integration: The Knowledge-Producing Professional Mindset, Reimagined
An important tool for bringing these ways of knowing together is to reimagine the role of the knowledge-producing professional in this mix, in this case viewing the intelligence community more broadly. This requires adaptation by this community.
Intelligence, like other knowledge generation efforts, when viewed as a platform for knowledge integration, has the potential to be more than a collector of data and/or secrets. It can be a bridge-builder across epistemic divides. But this requires a shift in mindset from control to collaboration, from secrecy to transparency where possible, and from rigid analytic frames to adaptive synthesis. In this vision, intelligence is not just a producer of classified reports. It is a co-creator of transdisciplinary insight.
The Path Ahead
Tackling complex problems requires invention of a new capability, one that thrives on difference, invites discomfort, and makes use of multiple logics of inquiry. This requires hybrid roles, flexible institutions, and leaders who can recognize the value of judgment, evidence, experience, and politics, all at once. As described above, one contribution to achieving this is through reimagining the professional mindset.
What other options can you see? How else can the collision of these four ways of knowing be reconceptualized from being a problem to be solved to a resource to be cultivated?
To find out more:
Wolfberg, A. (2025). Climate security intelligence: From knowledge transfer to co-creation. Springer: Cham, Switzerland. (Online) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-86259-5
Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Generative artificial intelligence was used as a copyediting tool to improve grammar and spelling in the development of this i2Insights contribution. (For i2Insights policy on generative artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)
Biography: Adrian Wolfberg PhD is currently the founder and president of Organizational Insight Consulting LLC and an independent scholar in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA. His research interests include human versus generative artificial cognition, knowledge transfer, decision-making, effects of information overload and ambiguity on knowledge production, organizational learning, creativity, organizational and temporal boundaries, and boundary crossing.
Leaving out psychology in the chart is surprising. I would argue that psychology is far more of a science than anthropology or Sociology. There’s biopsychology, neuropsychology, mathematical psychology, psychological geography, cognitive psychology, behavioral economics involves psychology. and there is psychophysics, etc. etc.
Ron, not an intentional omission. Below the chart and above the caption are the words “not intended to be a complete listing.” I totally agree psychology and its derivatives are extremely important.
Through my lens, this is a critically important statement:
“But this requires a shift in mindset from control to collaboration, from secrecy to transparency where possible, and from rigid analytic frames to adaptive synthesis.”
I’d love to tease out of this group a conversation about the difference between two terms: “integration” and “federation”.
I’ll offer this thought: I have found that the first term is less effective when talking about surrendering control to collaboration, the second term: less so. While I cannot point to particular scholarship on that thought, it’s been a part of my experience in thinking through new kinds of epistemic social networks.
My thought is that integration, as I have used the term in the blog, is a means to an end. Integration, in this sense, is a process. The means is finessing the collision of ways of knowing. The end-state is the fusion of disparate knowledge states across boundaries having various degrees of permeability. Such fusion is used by organizational entities such as a federation in pursuit of their collective mission. The end-state is an outcome.
Federation implies some type of partnership, and the key to whether control is surrendered to collaboration depends on the nature of the partnership relationship between members of the federation. Is there a controlling actor(s)? Do the members have an equal say and decision authority? Who has influence and who has more influence, and who has control over what? What is the context of the relationship between members, and in any given situation, what is the context during that specific time? Is the federation more concerned with process or driven by outcome? Where does decision-making authority reside?
If there is a control-based federation, there is more concern with outcome. If there is control-based integration, similarly, there is more concern with outcome. In both cases, integration and federation are less effective. If there is knowledge-based integration or federation, there is more concern with process and consequently a greater emphasis on collaboration.
Thanks Adrian for this great post!
It made me think of the working group on integration experts of the Global Alliance for Inter/Transdisciplinarity https://itd-alliance.org/working-groups/integration-experts/ [Gabriele is a member] I would be curious what you think of the need for integration experts that can facilitate conversations among the four types of knowledge you describe.
I think that such integration experts would need two sets of skills. One set is primarily social: getting people to explain where they are coming from in a way that others can understand, and encouraging others to listen and understand (asking the sort of question that Bruce recommends). The second set is primarily cognitive: understanding how quite different ideas can potentially be integrated into a shared understanding [My sense is that scholars of transdisciplinarity have much to say about the first while scholars of interdisciplinarity often focus on the second.]
Thanks again, Rick
Oh, I definitely think facilitation experts having the essential acquaintance with the challenges of knowledge integration are needed to facilitate conversations among diverse types of knowledge and their boundary conditions. In my research and practitioner experience, I have always found cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions are interwoven in problem-solving and attaining a common ground. So, I would be more inclined to reduce the effect of the type of knowledge integration “familiarity” and, rather, emphasize both sets of skills you mention as necessary. Further, I would be inclined to label these two skills more broadly than just being cognitive or social, rather an intertwining to cognitive, emotional, and/or social. For example, “getting people to explain where they are coming from in a way that others understand” requires a mixture cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions. In order for someone to explain where they are coming from requires self-reflection, an emotional level of maturity, and a cognitive ability to form their language accordingly. To ensure the “others understand,” requires the cognitive, emotional, and social ability of perspective-taking of the “other,” understanding where the “other” is coming from along with these abilities to gauge the “other’s” ability to absorb and use the incoming knowledge, the “other’s” absorption capacity. The skill of “understanding how quite different ideas can potentially be integrated into a shared understanding” is, I agree, more cognitive but there are also important emotional and social ingredients involved. In order to achieve such transformative thinking—whether integrating interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary knowledge boundaries because both types of knowledge integrations terminate in new models of thinking—being comfortable and experience with the process of insight is fundamental. Insight, based on my research and others, is profoundly a combination of cognition and emotion, and not a function of personality or professional training.
Having said all the above, I do believe that those who have experience in transdisciplinary discourse by its very nature will have an edge over those without it. I believe this not because of any distribution of cognitive, emotional, and/or social dimensions that benefit one type of integration over another, but rather because of the greater conceptual distance between science and practice in transdisciplinary activities than between the conceptual distances between the sciences in interdisciplinary activities, whether within the natural sciences, the social sciences, or a combination of both natural and social sciences. I say this because at least the sciences (natural and social) within interdisciplinary activities use a common practice of the scientific method, there is something to build upon, whereas in a transdisciplinary context that common practice is absent because of the inclusion of practitioners, e.g., policymakers, operators who implement policy, the public, social organizations, etc. This is not to say facilitating interdisciplinary activities are easier than transdisciplinary activities, rather those with the latter experience have dealt with a broader set of perspectives, and are likely to be more flexible in understanding others, where they come from and ability to absorb language, and, most importantly, be able to detect when breakdowns in common ground occur. When they do, they pause the activity to reconcile the breakdown before moving on. If not down, separate pathways will continue further reducing the chances for establishing a common language.
Thank you for sharing your way of looking at knowledge its creation and transmission. You mention in passing that one of the challenges of getting integrated value from these different ways of knowing is seeking what coherence exists between them to establish a way of gaining value from all in a specific situation. As a systemics practitioner I work with people in hospitals, businesses, and government agencies whose everyday challenge is to integrate these different ways of knowing. In that work we have found that those who operate from a particular way of knowing have great difficulty in understanding how they can best contribute to another with a different way if knowing, the silos have very solid walls. We have found that building the integrating conversation around the question – “What do you need from me to make your contribution more effective?” – catalyses the interactions you suggest, and I agree, are needed.
Your approach when people occupying different boundary spaces are faced with “very solid walls” — that is to say, when the knowledge boundary permeability is very low, as in the most difficult transom to cross and to attain a common ground — is a great way to move towards effective problem-solving. The question you use to integrate conversation creates new boundary conditions allowing an opportunity for people to organically modify the boundary they face and adjust its wall’s “solidity.” Its benefit to creating a shared space for discourse is its invitation feature, that is, by asking others how their contribution can be more effective, people can shape their perspective in terms that those on the other side of the “wall” can absorb and use within their context. The facilitators of such a realignment are “boundary architects” because you and others have designed and constructed pathways through the wall via new “doors or windows.”
I am interested to note the intersections between your work and mine on Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S). While I haven’t been thinking about the 4 types of knowledge in the way that you have, I have been thinking about expertise researchers need to develop to better deal with complex problems – especially developing a more comprehensive understanding and better supporting policy and practice change. A key aspect is dealing with imperfection, as perfect answers are never possible.
An infographic on i2S can be found in:
Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) 3.0: An updated framework to foster expertise for tackling complex problems by Gabriele Bammer https://i2insights.org/2024/04/16/i2s-updated-framework/
It outlines 11 key areas in which expertise is required (systems, context, unknowns, diversity, integration, decision making, research implementation, change, communication, teamwork and stakeholder engagement).
There is a discussion of imperfection in
Dealing with imperfection in tackling complex problems by Gabriele Bammer https://i2insights.org/2025/02/25/dealing-with-imperfection/
For progress on complex problems, I expect we need to enhance expertise among researchers, knowledge producing professionals and decision-making practitioners
Looking at the graphic of the I2insight framework version 3.0, the “supporting policy and practice improvement” domain, it is essential for experts to be able to recognize and adjust one’s worldview accordingly. How that is done is a developmental task. Within the domain of supporting policy and practice improvement, there is also the essential need to be knowledgeable about knowledge boundaries and the implications thereof. Being a boundary spanner, e.g., allows one to appreciate, understand, translate, and transform knowledge in a way that various actors involved can communicate, leading to the next domain.
In the “interacting effectively” domain, the mechanics of communication methods are driven by psychological and social psychological factors of the ability to determine the “others/recipients” absorptive capacity. This requires on the part of “sender” a capable perspective-taking ability. Not having these relegates the recipient to the dilemma of uncertainty absorption. These three phenomena are key underlying capabilities to achieve the communication area of the framework. Regarding stakeholder engagement, stakeholders should be involved from the very beginning, from the design phase moving forward, and that if new stakeholders enter the play without joining at the beginning, the chances for success diminish accordingly unless a reset is accomplished.
In the domain of “understanding problems and potential actions” context is incredibly important. Context is invisible, requiring imagination and a motivation to fill in a web of connections. Context affects the understanding of the problem under consideration, one that is also subject to perspectives through multiple levels of analysis. This gets to having an appreciation of the multilevel realities of individual and social integration. Cognitive diversity is critical as well, and there is a temporal aspect to this.