By Gabriele Bammer.
How can i2Insights best capitalise on its first ten years and the wealth of resources contributed from around the world? How can you contribute to strengthening the i2Insights toolkit?
On 25 November 2025, i2Insights celebrates its 10th birthday as a toolkit to support researchers and educators tackling complex societal and environmental problems, specifically providing tools to understand and address complexity. It sets out to be:
- global, with contributions from around the world
- comprehensive, tackling all aspects of addressing complex problems
- living, continuing to grow and stay up-to-date.
It’s a good time to reinvigorate the aims, strengthen the toolkit and celebrate achievements.
Reinvigorating the aims of i2Insights
The aims of i2Insights have been refreshed to focus on:
- systematically attending to the multiple facets of tackling complex problems
- encompassing tools from diverse approaches that address complexity
- providing accessible entry points to tools for tackling complexity
- using the toolkit to support community building and institutionalisation of expertise.
Aim #1. Systematically attend to the multiple facets of tackling complex problems.
i2Insights aims to provide tools for tackling all of the multiple facets of complexity inherent in most societal and environmental problems. Further, it aims to provide a systematic approach to this complexity by using the framework for Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S), which is a budding discipline focused on building expertise to better understand, and bring about improvements in, complex societal and environmental problems.
i2Insights tools are indexed using the 11 main topics in the i2S framework:
- systems, context, unknowns, diversity, and integration, which are involved in understanding problems more comprehensively
- decision making, research implementation and change, which are central to supporting policy and practice change to address problems
- communication, teamwork and stakeholder engagement, which are essential for interacting effectively.
Core to this systematic way of tackling complex problems is recognising the inevitability of imperfection, meaning that problems cannot be fully understood, improvements will not work for everyone or for all time, and interactions will always be challenging (see https://i2insights.org/2025/02/25/dealing-with-imperfection/).
Aim #2. Encompass tools from diverse approaches that address complexity
i2Insights aims to encompass tools from multiple approaches that can be useful in tackling complexity, both formalised approaches such as systems thinking, complexity science, action research, transdisciplinarity, implementation science and team science, and also tools from approaches that may not be recognised in Western knowledge systems, such as culturally-appropriate inclusion of Indigenous knowledge and country- or region-specific approaches.
This focus of i2Insights also builds on the budding Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) discipline, which seeks to connect, rather than supersede, this wide range of approaches. i2Insights aims to recognise commonalities and differences in tools used by different approaches and to make accessible all useful tools from any approach, thereby increasing the tools at the disposal of researchers and educators. It also aims to move beyond Western knowledge systems to provide a toolkit that is globally relevant and globally useful.
Aim #3. Provide accessible entry points to tools for tackling complexity
Both the individual tools and the i2Insights toolkit aim to be accessible.
Each individual blog post aims to be a short, easy-to-read, self-contained, “gold nugget” of information about a specific tool, providing enough basic information to give readers a good idea about whether it may be useful in their own work. i2Insights tools range from descriptions of simple useful methods and frameworks, to guidelines for more intricate processes, to insights into complex concepts and theories.
Each blog post is indexed according to “resource type,” ie., methods, processes, concepts and so on, as well as by the topics described above, such as systems, decision making and communication. Each topic is further described by one or more tags, which often name a specific method, process, concept, etc.
The toolkit aims to make relevant tools easy to find through the index and search functions. It also aims to accommodate diverse terminology, with descriptions provided for all aspects of the index.
Aim #4: Use the toolkit to support community building and institutionalisation of expertise
As a toolkit that is built through the contributions of researchers and educators world-wide and that invites comments on those contributions, i2Insights aims to promote connections and community building, globally and across approaches, as well as involving those tackling different kinds of complex societal and environmental problems, such as health, environment and security, which often use different approaches. In addition, i2Insights also aims to build connections across career types and levels, with contributors both inside and outside the academic mainstream, and at all career levels ranging from students to professors and university executives.
By providing a recognised toolkit and helping foster a community, i2Insights aims to contribute to strengthening recognition and institutionalisation of expertise in tackling complex problems in mainstream academic research and education practice, policy and funding. Critically, by building the toolkit as a global resource encompassing tools developed world-wide, i2Insights aims to progress community building and institutionalisation as a global endeavour.
Celebrating 10 years by strengthening the toolkit – and how you can contribute!
Over the next year, i2Insights will publish a “birthday series” of blog posts that focus on strengthening how the toolkit meets these aims. The birthday series will run alongside the i2Insights mainstay activity of sharing tools, so please also keep contributing those.
To join the celebration and contribute,
please contact me at gabriele.bammer@anu.edu.au
Don’t hesitate to put forward ideas that you would like to share. To start your thinking, contributions are especially welcome addressing questions such as:
- How can i2Insights productively manage inequities, different languages, international political tensions and other barriers to establishing a global toolkit plus community of researchers and educators?
- What more can i2Insights do to support the institutionalisation of expertise for tackling complex problems?
- How can i2Insights better recognise aspects of diversity that are often not considered (such as experiences of living in more than one country or changing disciplines) and how they inform tools that tackle complex problems?
- What can i2Insights do to highlight the benefits and risks of transferring concepts, methods and other tools across approaches (such as between systems thinking and implementation science), and of working across different worldviews (such as Western and Indigenous knowledge systems)?
- How can i2Insights be globally relevant in culturally appropriate ways and avoid being extractive?
- How can i2Insights foster effective use of artificial intelligence in building, improving and disseminating tools for tackling complex societal and environmental problems?
Highlights from the first 10 years
The achievements for the first 10 years are summarised in the figure below.
Many thanks for your encouraging messages over the years, including:
Although I don’t get to read all the blog posts, I look at a lot of them, and I often share them with my colleagues. Not too long ago, I shared this wonderful post … with a colleague who is helping a newly-appointed Vice President for Research develop transdisciplinary research programs at a major US university. Of course, that blog post is just one of many that provide enormously helpful insights about the important challenges and opportunities we’re facing in our collective efforts to address complex societal problems.
I am so happy to see that your blog is open to early-career researchers … It’s so important that early-career researchers … can count on communities like i2Insights to take [them] seriously and help [them] get [their] valuable ideas out there.
… that blog has also led to further really interesting engagement with others, for which I’m grateful and appreciative.
… the first conversation we ever had, started with her i2Insights article.
Publishing our post on i2Insights was a turning point for us and our workshop; we’re really grateful for the opportunity, and for your advice along the way.
I used certain keywords to search the blog and extracted all relevant articles for my emerging typology.
… used some of these posts as inspiration for our transdisciplinary course and in building the framework that we use.
There are very good contributions on your i2Insights site, all with novel ideas and ways of offering strategies for making transformations. And the commentary is also very interesting.
I must say I’m positively impressed with the thoughtfulness of the comments.
I frequently visit and download resources … and have for years. They are great resources!
… my favorite and most steadfast reading habit.
… it sure becomes more interesting and inspiring from year to year.
Concluding questions
What have you found to be most useful about i2Insights? Has it made complexity graspable and broadened your view of complexity? Are there key aspects of complexity that have been missed? Are there other changes or additions that you would suggest? Are there specific issues that have prevented you from contributing to, or using, this toolkit? Are there other ways it can be used for community building or institutionalisation of expertise?
Acknowledgments
The Australian National University, through the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, has been a supportive home for i2Insights. Various partners have assisted its development, most notably the US National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Centre (SESYNC). i2Insights would not exist without the many authors, commenters and readers – thanks to you all! Many thanks also to:
- Peter Deane, who carefully manages all the technical aspects, provides a wise sounding board and generally infuses the production of i2Insights with good sense, informed by his own interests both in transdisciplinarity and related approaches, and in providing the best possible experience for i2Insights readers.
- Caryn Anderson, who advocated for an index and provided valuable advice for its development.
- Ali Wetherell, whose artwork has enlivened i2Insights, now with the birthday logo and highlights table.
- The i2Insights Ambassadors, who play an essential role in recruiting contributors and viewers.
Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Generative artificial intelligence was not used 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: Gabriele Bammer PhD is Professor of Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at The Australian National University in Canberra. i2S provides theory and methods for tackling complex societal and environmental problems, especially for developing a more comprehensive understanding in order to generate fresh insights and ideas for action, supporting improved policy and practice responses by government, business and civil society, and effective interactions between disciplinary and stakeholder experts. She is the inaugural President of the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity. In December 2024 she received the ANU’s most prestigious accolade, the Peter Baume Award, which “recognises eminent achievement and merit of the highest order.”
This is a great post!
When I describe “epistemic communities”, I talk about them through the use of Disneyland as a metaphor: a theme park where there are many different adventures, which maps to many different ways of interacting in a serious social network the theme of which is sensemaking, be it local to global.
My thesis has been that you don’t want those communities to become islands or silos, that you want to “federate” them in such a way that they are all participating in the co-fabrication of a grand digital public library, one that can be trusted to not be affected by the needs of advertising or stockholders. That is, such a digital public library becomes a library of well-organized (by subject and relations among them) worldviews and their justifications (biographies); it does not offer truth, only a well-groomed idea salad.
I feel like this post is teasing along the same lines.
Thanks, Jack, for this insightful description, which resonates strongly. What more could i2Insights do to strengthen the “digital public library?” And what actions could others take?
Gabriele, that’s a powerful question, one which – through my lens – enables a very large number of responses. I’ll mention what’s most important to me:
I don’t think it’s a controversial comment that the planet is overheating and society, on average, is highly polarized in ways of thinking about solutions. In that context, after defending my thesis proposal in the space of improving the quality of online conversations about climate change, I began to think that the primary problem lies in human behavior, and that, given time – assuming we have that time – this is a partially solvable problem.
In that context, we have the scholarship which occurs in this very venue, but we need to take it to the people ‘out there’, and I think of that as those epistemic communities popping up everywhere (I call them K-Hubs, short for Knowing Hubs, where people practice civil engagement – a kind of learning experience which supports improved human behavior).
You ask, what could i2Insights and others do in this context; I believe that it’s possible to use this venue to explore – in some sense, as it already does – what a proper epistemic community can be, a truly serious social network architecture I think we sorely need. I acknowledge that others besides me are chasing parallel visions and dreams, but, it always comes down to the issue of “herding cats”, each of which is chasing the same scarce resource (funding).
I think this venue is already – I’m going to say: partially – in this space. It’s a great venue.
Thanks for those additional thoughts. In addition to shortage of funding, time to engage is hard to find, especially to bring together those with “parallel visions and dreams” and to take the scholarship to “the people ‘out there'”. That’s not helped by the urgency of the problems that we face.