Collaborative cultures characterized by psychological safety, transparency, and an ability to engage in productive conflict provide the strongest foundation for accountability.
What roles do research and development agencies have in actively preparing research teams to engage productively in collaborative research? Is it enough to require that teams engaging in funded research prepare themselves to collaborate effectively?
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator Program was launched in 2019 to fast track the development of ideas into real-world applications and solutions intended to have substantive societal and economic impact. Building upon basic research and discovery and using a convergent approach, the program accelerates use-inspired research toward impact by funding multidisciplinary teams from a wide range of disciplines and sectors to solve complex societal and economic challenges.
How might teams create norms to scaffold the use of confidentiality and anonymity in team settings? How could a team integrate language about confidentiality and anonymity into their collaboration agreement? How can teams use these approaches and simultaneously build psychological safety and trust?
In an earlier i2Insights contribution, we provided a collaboration agreement template to help teams improve their chances of collaboration success by facilitating dialogue about shared values, norms, and processes of collaboration. This template is designed around three central dimensions of collaborative research: team management, team dynamics, and team communication.
Do confidentiality and anonymity have a place in teamwork? What are the risks and how might they be mitigated? Can teams move past the need for confidentiality and anonymity?
It takes time and intentional effort to create an environment within a team that is safe for interpersonal risk-taking (ie., a psychologically safe environment). As a team works to develop a psychologically safe environment, teammates will likely be more and more willing to speak openly about challenges. As part of this work, and in an effort to make certain all team members are comfortable sharing issues and challenges, teams may suggest adopting confidential and/or anonymous communication channels; however, there are significant risks associated with their use in teams. Here we detail some of the common risks and provide a set of design elements for dealing with them.
Confidentiality
Teammates who have concerns and are uncomfortable sharing them openly with the full team might choose to communicate confidentially with another person, who may be on the team or outside of the team.
As scientific research continues to move towards collaborative knowledge production, scientists must become more adept at working in teams. How can teams improve their chances of collaboration success? What is a good way to facilitate dialogue about shared values, norms and processes of collaboration? Are there ways of anticipating, identifying, and addressing obstacles as they arise?
We have designed a collaboration agreement template to assist teams in:
Making explicit and therefore transparent important aspects of their approach to collaboration
Ensuring they have a shared vision for their work together
Recognizing that their working relationships are dynamic, individually and as a team, and will require flexibility and a willingness to adapt over time
Establishing expectations for working together, including what they do and say
Preparing for disagreements and even conflicts, especially in the early stages and along the way when there are changes in team composition.
Have you collaborated with people on a complex project and wondered why it is so difficult? Perhaps you’ve asked yourself, “Do my collaborators even conceive of the project and its goals in the way I do?” Projects involving collaborators from different disciplines or professions seem almost ready made to generate this kind of bewilderment. Collaborators on cross-disciplinary projects like these often ask different kinds of questions and pursue different kinds of answers.
This confusion can bedevil cross-disciplinary research. The allure of such research is its promise of solving complex problems by bringing together a variety of perspectives that when combined lead to solutions that any one perspective would fail to find.
What makes interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research challenging? What can go wrong and lead to failure? What has your experience been?
Modes of research that involve the integration of different perspectives, such as interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, are notoriously challenging for a host of reasons. Interdisciplinary research requires the combination of insights from different academic disciplines and it is common that these:
bear the stamp of different epistemologies; and,
involve different types of data collected using different methods in the service of different explanations.
