Moderator note: We are aware that the ‘Select date range’ field in the search box below is not currently working. We are seeking a solution and once obtained, will remove this warning box. All other fields in the advanced search box below are working correctly. Last updated 6 November 2025.
Results from your search will be shown on this page below the search form – you may need to scroll down to the results if the page does not automatically take you there after you submit your search.
Instructions:
- All blog posts are searched (pages from the menu are not searched)
- Search outputs are weighted by relevance.
- If searching with two or more words, the system uses an AND operator.
- Selecting a tag, author tag and/or category binds the search to only those posts which have those taxonomy term/s.
- A search output can be obtained by filling out any one field (ie., the search box; or, categories; or, tags; or, authors; or, date). If all fields are left blank, then the search returns the blog scroll.
- Exact word combinations can be searched for by using quotation marks (eg., “transdisciplinary learning”).
- Keyword matching is on partial words.
- The reset button (beneath the ‘Submit search’ button) will clear all entries in the search form, as will clicking on the ‘Advanced search…’ link in the top of the right sidebar.
- For more information on how advanced search works, see the ‘in-detail’ instructions below.
The search function checks all blog posts but not pages (ie., it does not check the ‘About’, ‘Index’ and other pages listed in the main menu).
For posts, search checks within titles, body text, category and tag text, and comments.
Searches are weighted by relevance, with affects the order in which posts appear, with titles and content getting the most weighting, tags and categories lesser weighting, and comments the least weighting.
Increasing the number of search terms and selections generally focuses the search output (ie., decreases the number of outputs).
Keyword matching is based on partial word/s, ie., the search will find any word containing the term you are searching on, provided the word begins or ends with the search term (eg., searching for ‘ion’ will not only find the word ‘ion’ but will also find ‘caution’ or ‘ionized’, but not “cautionary’).
If you enter two or more words into the search box, the relationship between the words is based on an AND operator (meaning the more words you add, the tighter (less content is returned in) the search output).
- For example, entering transdisciplinary learning into the search box would provide an output that lists all posts with both the word transdisciplinary and the word learning anywhere in the text, Posts with only transdisciplinary in the text or posts with only learning in the text would not be included in the output.
To find a specific word combination (eg., critical systems), wrap in quotation marks (ie., “critical systems“).
When you open a post that was found by your search, you can find where your specific word or word combination appears by using your computer’s search function (eg., on a computer running Microsoft Windows, Control ‘F’ will allow you to search the post (as well as anything else in the active screen)).
Restrict searches to particular tags, categories and/or author tags by using the dropdown selectors.
- Eg., if you choose the tag Advocacy, the search will only be conducted within posts that have that tag assigned to them.
- If you added the category Cases to that search, then only posts that had both the tag Advocacy and the category Cases assigned to them would be searched.
An alternative to selecting categories, tags or authors from their respective long drop-down list is to type the term or author name you are looking for in the relevant selector field. Typing one letter will jump to the lead word in the alphabetical listing (ie, typing ‘s’ takes you to the first tag or category in the list of those starting with ‘s’). Further addition of letters will home in on a tag, category or author until it is found or until the choice of letters exhausts the possible set of tags, categories or authors (in which case that tag, category or author is not in our list). NOTE: all authors are also available in reverse name order under ‘Authors‘ in the menu bar.
In the category, tag and author dropdown list, the number in brackets after each entry indicates the number of posts with that category, tag or author assigned to them.
Tags or authors with a zero in brackets “(0)”, placed after the tag or author text, are not currently linked to any blog posts. In the case of tags, most of these tags identify alternative tags, which, if searched, will yield a result. For example, “Assumptions – see ‘Mental models’ tag (0)” signifies that blog posts about ‘assumptions’ are tagged with ‘mental models’ and not ‘assumptions.’ Occasionally there will be a tag (or author tag) with “(0)” which refers to a new tag (or author tag) on a blog post which has not yet been made public. This tag (or author tag) will be searchable once the blog post is public (usually within a week).
For the category selector, choosing one of the two parent categories (main topics or resource types) searches all blog posts, as all blog posts are assigned a main topic and a resource type.
Harnessing the collision of four ways of knowing
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.
Transdisciplinarity in Africa: Key issues in achieving higher education’s third mission
By Basirat Oyalowo.
How can transdisciplinarity in Africa help achieve higher education’s third mission, namely making a contribution to society? What are the best pathways for achieving this? What are the key obstructions and potential ways around them?
Higher education’s third mission involves adding to the first two missions of teaching and research towards providing service to society. However, general pathways to achieving this are still unclear. A few studies have explored how and why the local impacts of universities need to be measured, but these are generally from outside Africa and concentrate more on quantitative methods to measure specific impact, such as economic impact.
Transdisciplinarity provides opportunities to consider the diversity of societal needs and values, to benefit from local knowledge, to involve scientific disciplines, stakeholders and target groups.
Planning transdisciplinary stakeholder workshops: Four practical lessons
By Maxine Fromm.
How can transdisciplinary researchers best organise workshops that create a collaborative space for different stakeholders? What practical planning is required? How can organisers meet the challenges of translating a project idea into concrete workshops?
This i2Insights contribution offers four practical lessons gathered throughout a dialogue series on a just industry transition between Dutch representatives from industry, non-governmental organisations, academia and ministries, which was organised by the Sustainable Industry Lab.
Lesson 1: Planning should start from your stakeholders’ needs
As Lisa Andrews and colleagues noted in their i2Insights contribution, Three lessons for mainstreaming transdisciplinarity, you need to ‘reach stakeholders where they are’ and take into account their knowledge levels, interests and agendas.
How individual members can contribute to effective team functioning
Edited by Gabriele Bammer.
For team dynamics to work effectively, what is the range of contributions that needs to be covered by different team members? How can diversity in skills relevant to team functioning be effectively recognised and harnessed? Here the focus is not on the actual task the team is trying to accomplish, but rather the dynamics of working together and the different contributions or roles required for effective team functioning.
A number of proprietary products (i.e., products owned by companies that need to be purchased to be used) have been developed to help teams assess the strengths and weaknesses of individual team members in contributing to effective team performance. The focus in this Editor’s Addition is to use one such product, CliftonStrengths®, to highlight one set of understandings about what key team dynamics are. Information available on the CliftonStrengths® website is used in abbreviated form and without the summary terms used to encapsulate each team and personal attribute.
Why interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are not enough for addressing complex problems
By Gabriele Bammer.
As the importance of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research approaches becomes more widely recognised, how can we overcome the danger that they are seen to be all that is needed for tackling complex problems? What are the limitations of these approaches? What else might be required?
My starting point is that improved understanding of, and action on, a complex societal or environmental problem usually requires a number of research questions to be addressed. Different questions require different kinds of research approaches. Let’s illustrate this by considering the following complex problem:
As effort goes into making cities more sustainable, how can we incorporate illicit drug users into a more sustainable city X?
The SPIRAL of systems leadership
By Josep M. Coll.
How can systems leadership be structured in a way that facilitates clarity and organization in its implementation and use, especially given that it is a collective type of leadership that harnesses the power of collective intelligence for solving a complex or wicked problem, in order to enable system-level change?
The SPIRAL of systems leadership is a practical model aimed at framing, developing and facilitating the transformative power of systems leadership for conscious and impactful organizations and practitioners that work in the domain of systemic transformation, regeneration and sustainable development.
SPIRAL is a name mnemonic that helps in remembering the five principles and in organizing the five phases of the model: S for Systeming, P for Purposing, I for Inviting, R for Re-designing and AL for Adaptive Learning, which are shown in the figure below.