Integration and Implementation Insights

Scaling up amidst complexity

October 9, 2025June 27, 2017

By Ann Larson

How can new or under-utilized healthcare practices be expanded and institutionalized to achieve audacious and diverse global health outcomes, ranging from eliminating polio to reversing the rise in non-communicable diseases? How can complex adaptive systems with diverse components and actors interacting in multiple ways with each other and the external environment best be dealt with? What makes for an effective scale-up effort?

Four in-depth case studies of scale-up efforts were used to explore if there were different pathways to positively change a complex adaptive system.

Keys to transformation: Interactions of values, rules and knowledge

February 10, 2025June 20, 2017

By Russell Gorddard, Matthew Colloff, Russell Wise and Michael Dunlop

gorddard_colloff_wise_dunlop — 1. Russell Gorddard (biography)
2. Matthew Colloff (biography)
3. Russell Wise (biography)
4. Michael Dunlop (biography)

Adapting to climate change can require profound alterations in environmental management and policy. However the social context of a decision process limits options and resists change, often dooming attempts to adapt to climate change even before they begin. How can decision makers in policy and management more effectively see the institutional and social water they swim in, in order to better drive change?

Values, rules and knowledge (vrk) provide a useful heuristic to help decision makers analyze how the social system shapes their decision context. Put simply, decisions require:

knowledge of options and their implications
values to assess the options
rules that enable implementation.

Improving mutual consultation among key stakeholders to optimize the use of research evidence

August 24, 2022June 15, 2017

By Allison Metz

Processes to support the uptake of research evidence call for each of the key stakeholders to consider the challenges faced by other key stakeholders in making good use of research evidence. When stakeholders have the opportunity to consider perspectives other than their own, they will generally have a broader understanding of the problem space, and, in turn a greater commitment to co-creating prototypes for improving research translation.

Let’s consider a real world example in New York City’s public child welfare system.

What’s in a name? The role of storytelling in participatory modeling

August 24, 2022June 13, 2017

By Alison Singer

That which we call a rose,
by any other name would smell as sweet.

That Shakespeare guy really knew what he was talking about. A rose is what it is, no matter what we call it. A word is simply a cultural agreement about what we call something. And because language is a common thread that binds cultures together, participatory modeling – as a pursuit that strives to incorporate knowledge and perspectives from diverse stakeholders – is prime for integrating stories into its practice.

To an extent, that’s what every modeling activity does, whether it’s through translating an individual’s story into a fuzzy cognitive map, or into an agent-based model. But I would argue that the drive to quantify everything can sometimes make us lose the richness that a story can provide.

Learning from Google about inter- and transdisciplinary leadership

July 1, 2021June 6, 2017

By Janet G. Hering

Like most engineers, the Google leadership had assumed that the leader of an engineering team must be at least as competent technically as the members of the team. As Laszlo Bock described in his 2015 book Work Rules!, however, a data-driven assessment disproved this assumption. The counter-intuitive result of “Project Oxygen” was that having “important technical skills that help advise the team” only ranked number eight in the list of key attributes differentiating the most from the least effective managers.

This is very good news for leaders of inter- and transdisciplinary synthesis projects since it’s highly unlikely that these leaders could have all the subject expertise relevant to their projects. If subject expertise is not the most important characteristic of leadership, then what kind of expertise should leaders have and what kind of roles do they play? How important are leaders and leadership in such synthesis projects?

Sharing integrated modelling practices – Part 2: How to use “patterns”?

October 9, 2023June 1, 2017

By Sondoss Elsawah and Joseph Guillaume

authors_sondoss-elsawah_joseph-guillaume — 1. Sondoss Elsawah (biography)
2. Joseph Guillaume (biography)

In part 1 of our blog posts on why use patterns, we argued for making unstated, tacit knowledge about integrated modelling practices explicit by identifying patterns, which link solutions to specific problems and their context. We emphasised the importance of differentiating the underlying concept of a pattern and a pattern artefact – the specific form in which the pattern is explicitly described.

In order to actually use patterns to communicate about practices, the artefact takes on greater importance: what form could artefacts describing the patterns take, and what mechanisms and platforms are needed to first create, and then share, maintain, and update these artefacts?

While the concepts of ‘problem, solution and context’ should be discussed in some way, there is no single best way of representing patterns as artefacts. The form of artefacts will differ depending on many factors, including how the users perceive the ease of:

Sharing integrated modelling practices – Part 1: Why use “patterns”?

September 12, 2024May 30, 2017

By Sondoss Elsawah and Joseph Guillaume

How can modellers share the tacit knowledge that accumulates over years of practice?

In this blog post we introduce the concept of patterns and make the case for why patterns are a good candidate for transmitting the ‘know-how’ knowledge about modelling practices. We address the question of how to use patterns in a second blog post.

In broad terms, a pattern links a solution to a problem and its context. As a means of externalizing understanding of practices, the concept has been used productively in various fields, including architecture, computer science, and design science. For a more general introduction to patterns, see Scott Peckham’s blog post. While a “pattern” is ultimately a simple idea, there tends to be disagreement about a precise definition. This poses a problem for this blog post.

Looking for patterns: An approach for tackling tough problems

October 9, 2023May 23, 2017

By Scott D. Peckham

What does the word ‘pattern’ mean to you? And how do you use patterns in addressing complex problems?

Patterns are repetitions. These can be in space, such as patterns in textiles and wallpaper, which include houndstooth, herringbone, paisley, plaid, argyle, checkered, striped and polka-dotted.

The pattern concept can also be applied to repetitions in time, as occur in music. Those who know the temporal patterns can classify a piece of music as a blues, waltz or salsa. For each of these types of music, there are also classic dance steps, that usually go by the same name; these are patterns of movement in space and time.

These examples get to the idea that patterns can be viewed more generally as any type of repetitive structure or recurring theme that we can look for and potentially recognize or discover and then assign a memorable name to, such as “houndstooth” or “waltz”.

Impacts of social learning in transformative research

February 11, 2025May 16, 2017

By Flurina Schneider, Lara M. Lundsgaard-Hansen, Thoumthone Vongvisouk, and Julie G. Zähringer

authors_schneider_lundsgaard-hansen_vongvisouk_zahringer — 1. Flurina Schneider (biography)
2. Lara M. Lundsgaard-Hansen (biography)
3. Thoumthone Vongvisouk (biography)
4. Julie G. Zähringer (biography)

How can science truly support sustainability transformations?

In our research projects we often find that the very process of co-producing knowledge with stakeholders has transformative impacts. This requires careful design and implementation. Knowledge co-production in transdisciplinary and other research leads to social learning and can make a difference in the lives of those involved.

Knowledge co-production is, therefore, not only a cognitive endeavour that will result in new, action-oriented knowledge, but also a broad social learning process that includes relational, normative, and emotional dimensions.

The following three examples from recent research on sustainable land use and poverty alleviation in Laos and Myanmar illustrate how it can work.

Methods for integration in transdisciplinary research

January 10, 2020May 9, 2017

By Matthias Bergmann

To make progress in contributing to the solution of complex real-world problems, transdisciplinary research has come to the forefront. By integrating multiple disciplines as well as the expertise of partners from societal practice, transdisciplinary researchers are able to look at a problem from many angles, with the goal of making both societal and scientific advances.

But how can these different types of expertise be integrated into both a better understanding of the problem and more effective ways of addressing it?

Colleagues and I have collected 43 methods from a number of transdisciplinary research projects dealing with a variety of research topics. We have grouped them into seven classes following an epistemological hierarchy. We start with methods in the narrower sense, progressing to integration instruments.

A guide to ontology, epistemology, and philosophical perspectives for interdisciplinary researchers

December 18, 2024May 2, 2017

By Katie Moon and Deborah Blackman

authors_katie-moon_deborah-blackman — 1. Katie Moon (biography)
2. Deborah Blackman (biography)

How can understanding philosophy improve our research? How can an understanding of what frames our research influence our choices? Do researchers’ personal thoughts and beliefs shape research design, outcomes and interpretation?

These questions are all important for social science research. Here we present a philosophical guide for scientists to assist in the production of effective social science (adapted from Moon and Blackman, 2014).

Going beyond ‘context matters’: A lens to bridge knowledge and policy

December 18, 2024April 25, 2017

By Leandro Echt and Vanesa Weyrauch

authors_leandro_echt_vanesa-weyrauch — 1. Leandro Echt (biography)
2. Vanesa Weyrauch (biography)

The role and importance of context in the interaction between research and policy is widely recognized. It features in general literature on the subject, in case studies on how research has successfully influenced policy (or not), and in practitioners´ reflections on the results of their work. But how does context specifically matter? Can we move beyond generic statements?

To find some answers to these complex questions, Purpose & Ideas and the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) embarked on a joint knowledge systematization effort, combining a literature review with in-depth interviews with 48 experts and policymakers, mostly in developing countries.

What do we mean by context?

Our first challenge was to define what we concretely mean by context.