Bethany Laursen – Integration and Implementation Insights

By Bethany Laursen, Stephen Crowley and Chad Gonnerman

authors_bethany-laursen_stephen-crowley_chad-gonnerman — 1. Bethany Laursen (biography)
2. Stephen Crowley (biography)
3. Chad Gonnerman (biography)

Have you ever been part of a team confronting a moral dilemma? Or trying to manage deep disagreements? For that matter, on a more down-to-earth level, how many times has your team tried to settle an agreed file naming convention? Many team troubles arise from value pluralism—members having different values or holding the same values in different ways. Below, we describe problematic value pluralism and suggest steps for dealing with it.

What are values, and how do they cause problems?

Here, we’re talking about a “value” as a desire (conscious or unconscious) that directs a person’s actions. It could be a guiding ideal or a whimsical preference, for example. Most of us have multiple values and over time we have organized them so that they provide us with guidance in most of the situations we encounter.

Forming a team, especially one made up of folks with diverse backgrounds, creates the challenge of managing the interaction of multiple values.

By Bethany Laursen

How do we know when we have good answers to research questions, especially about wicked problems?

Simply and profoundly, we seek answers that make good sense. Every formal method, framework, or theory exists, in the end, to help us gain insight into a mystery. When researching wicked problems, choosing methods, frameworks, and theories should not be guided by tradition or disciplinary standards. Instead, our design choices need to consider more fundamental justifications that cut across disciplinary boundaries. A fundamental criterion for good research is that it makes good sense. By making this criterion our “true North” in wicked problems research, we can more easily find and justify integrating disciplinary (or cultural, or professional) perspectives that apply to a particular problem.

So, how do we make good sense in wicked problems scholarship?

Basic steps for dealing with problematic value pluralism

Making sense of wicked problems