Gemma Jiang – Integration and Implementation Insights

How to organize an “all-hands” meeting

September 19, 2023September 12, 2023

By Gemma Jiang, Diane Boghrat and Jenny Grabmeier

authors_emma-jiang_diane-boghrat_jenny-grabmeier — 1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Diane Boghrat (biography)
3. Jenny Grabmeier (biography)

What is an “all-hands” meeting? What’s required to assemble an effective planning team? What should the planning team consider in setting parameters for the meeting?

What is an “all-hands” meeting?

Here we consider all-hands meetings in the context of our experience with a large cross-disciplinary institute, where members are geographically distributed. An annual all-hands meeting is an effective mechanism many such organizations employ to bring all members together in person.

An all-hands meeting differs from a science conference in two main ways. First, its participants are identified members within the boundary of the organization. It is usually not open to a wider audience. Second, its topic areas extend beyond the research projects supported by the organization. Such topics can include strategic planning among leadership, community building among early career researchers, professional and interpersonal capacity building topics, and development of team science competency.

An effective way to organize research coordination meetings

March 21, 2023March 21, 2023

By Gemma Jiang, Diane Boghrat and Jenny Grabmeier

How can large cross-disciplinary science institutes consisting of multiple teams working on multiple research projects overcome significant challenges to research coordination? Key aspects are:

Visibility: how to keep different project teams informed of each other’s progress?
Learning: how to support cross-project learning?
Accountability: how to keep project teams accountable for their goals and deliverables?

Tackling these challenges requires a combination of asynchronous communications such as Slack, newsletters and emails, as well as synchronous communications such as research coordination meetings.

We describe an effective way of organizing weekly research coordination meetings in an institute bridging the gap between computer science and biology and share key reflections.

A process for generating new cross-disciplinary projects

July 12, 2022July 12, 2022

By Gemma Jiang

author_gemma-jiang — Gemma Jiang (biography)

What is a good way for researchers in large cross-disciplinary science initiatives, who may not know each other well, to generate viable project ideas?

This blog post introduces a field-tested “double helix” process that leverages the benefits of idea generation by a large group and idea refinement in small groups.

This double helix process is most helpful in large cross-disciplinary science initiatives that meet at least one of the following three characteristics:

Tackling wicked problems with both scientific and societal significance
Requiring deep integration across multiple disciplines that will eventually lead to new meta-disciplines
Consisting of more than 20 core research members.

Enhancing mutual learning in developing a cross-disciplinary team

February 15, 2022February 1, 2022

By Eric Schearer and Gemma Jiang

authors_eric-schearer_gemma-jiang — 1. Eric Schearer (biography)
2. Gemma Jiang (biography)

How can newly forming cross-disciplinary teams develop effective strategies for working together?

We provide lessons from our experience preparing a cross-disciplinary research proposal for which we leant heavily on the mutual learning mindsets and norms which are the central elements for the Team Effectiveness Model for Science (Schwarz and Bennett, 2021). The principal investigator (Schearer) enlisted the help of a leadership consultant (Jiang).

Mutual learning mindsets and norms

As shown in the figure below, mutual learning comprises a mindset, composed of core values and assumptions, plus specific behaviors derived from the mindset that, together, are essential for effective working relationships.

A tool for transforming resistance to insights in decision-making

April 15, 2022November 30, 2021

By Gemma Jiang

Do you encounter resistance from your team members, especially in regard to difficult decisions? How might decision-making processes be better facilitated to generate insights instead of resistance?

I describe a conceptual framework and an accompanying practical tool from Lewis Deep Democracy (2021) that can transform resistance to insights in decision-making processes.

The conceptual framework: Understanding how decision making generates resistance

It is important first to understand the consciousness of a team. If you think of a team’s consciousness as an iceberg, the ideas and opinions that are expressed are the conscious part above the waterline, while those that are not expressed are the unconscious part below the waterline. If decisions are made based only on the team’s expressed ideas and opinions, those below the waterline will likely form resistance. This is often what happens with “majority rules” democracy.

Developing facilitation capacities in graduate students

November 9, 2021

By Gemma Jiang and Robert Hacku

authors_gemma-jiang_robert-hacku — 1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Robert Hacku (biography)

What does it take for graduate students to become good at facilitation? What skills do they need to learn and how can such skills best be imparted?

A facilitator is someone trained in the skill of shaping group dynamics and collective conversations. In cross-disciplinary research, thoughtful facilitation is necessary to enable effective interaction across disciplines and sectors.

We describe an apprentice facilitator program developed in a cross-disciplinary research team comprised of nine faculty and 15 graduate students from four academic institutes, representing six disciplines.

Five apprentices were selected from the graduate students on the team. The program was one semester long and took on average one hour per week.

Seven tips for developing large-scale cross-disciplinary research proposals

August 3, 2023June 15, 2021

By Gemma Jiang, Jin Wen and Simi Hoque

authors_gemma-jiang_jin-wen_simi-hoque — 1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Jin Wen (biography)
3. Simi Hoque (biography)

What are the key ingredients for successfully developing large-scale cross-disciplinary research proposals? What’s required for a team to successfully work together at the proposal development stage?

Here we provide seven lessons based on our experience, divided into:

team characteristics
structuring the grant proposal writing process.

Team characteristics

Lesson 1: Invite a mix of new blood and established experience.
It is useful to have team members at various stages of their careers, as well as researchers who have worked together previously and those who have never met before. It can work well to have clusters of researchers who have worked intensively within the cluster, but who are new to each other across clusters.

Enabling divergent and convergent thinking in cross-disciplinary graduate students

July 1, 2021May 4, 2021

By Gemma Jiang

How can we enable graduate students to think in ways that open new possibilities, as well as to make good decisions based on diverse cross-disciplinary insights?

Here I describe how we have embedded 14 graduate students in a research team with nine faculty from four academic institutes, representing six disciplines (for simplicity only three disciplines – engineering, economics, and anthropology – are considered here). Our research addresses the circular economy. I have developed a three-step model (summarised in the figure below) to operationalize the “divergence-convergence diamond,” which is key to our teaching method.

The “divergence – convergence diamond” is widely used in design thinking. The divergent mode helps open new possibilities while the convergent mode helps evaluate what you have and make decisions.

Three complexity principles for convergence research

September 24, 2021February 4, 2021

By Gemma Jiang

How can principles adapted from complexity thinking be applied to convergence research? How can such principles help integrate knowledge, methods, and expertise from different disciplines to form novel frameworks that catalyze scientific discovery and innovation?

I present three principles from the complexity paradigm that are highly relevant to convergence research. I then describe three types of transformative containers that I have developed to create enabling conditions for applying complexity principles to convergence.

1. Ecosystem consciousness: An inversion of perspectives

Ecosystem consciousness is necessary because in complex systems the whole (ecosystem) is bigger than the sum of its parts; the wellbeing of the whole and the parts are interdependent and mutually reinforcing.