Integration – Integration and Implementation Insights

Towards a taxonomy of synthesizing

September 19, 2023

By Howard Gardner

“Synthesis” seems to be in the atmosphere. The capacity to synthesize, the need for syntheses, and improvement of the quality of syntheses—these are seemingly of interest to many.

A preliminary working definition:

A synthesis is an attempt to bring together various ideas, strands, concepts, and materials. A good synthesis enhances one’s understanding of a question, puzzle, phenomenon (or multiples of these). Familiar examples are school term papers, doctoral dissertations, position papers, landscape analyses, executive summaries, and textbooks. But one can easily extend the list beyond the verbal—to chemical syntheses, equations in physics or mathematics, works of art (poems, paintings, dioramas)—indeed any creation or invention that brings together disparate elements in a satisfying and illuminating way.

Of course, it’s important to avoid the situation where just about everything qualifies as a synthesis.

Making the Nominal Group Technique more accessible

September 5, 2023

By Jason Olsen

Looking to gain real insights from those with lived experience about a specific topic? Interested in a low-cost method that fosters equal participation and discussion over participant domination in a research focus group? Want to know about modifications to make pan-disability (ie., working with participants with different impairments) research focus groups more inclusive?

The Nominal Group Technique developed by Ven and Delbecq (1972) has been used for more than 50 years. Key to its success is the posing of a single unambiguous and unbiased question about a problem that can generate a wide range of answers. The process structures the meeting to enable critical dimensions of the question to be identified, ranked and rated in a way that:

limits the influence of the researcher leading the project, as well as the influence of attendees,
allows participants to clarify the question’s dimensions and gaps,
increases the likelihood of equal participation for all group members,
affords equal influence to different, and potentially conflicting, values and ideas.

Interdisciplinary teamwork: Expert and non-expert at the same time

September 19, 2023August 22, 2023

By Annemarie Horn and Eduardo Urias

authors_annemarie-horn_eduardo-urias — 1. Annemarie Horn (biography)
2. Eduardo Urias (biography)

How do teams engage in interdisciplinary knowledge integration and how can they be supported in doing so? Why does simple sharing and questioning of knowledge not necessarily lead to interdisciplinary knowledge integration? And what does it mean to act as both an expert and a non-expert in interdisciplinary teamwork, and why is it hard?

In a five month course, we supervised a team of eight master students in the integration of insights and concepts from their individual, discipline-based projects into a joint work about circular economy. Based on our earlier research, described in our i2Insights contribution on four typical behaviours in interdisciplinary knowledge integration, we expected that if we helped the students to share their own knowledge and to engage with each other’s knowledge, that integration would emerge. We therefore had students prepare and give presentations about their individual projects, background, and conceptual underpinnings to share their knowledge.

Towards a theory of change to institutionalise integration experts and expertise

August 3, 2023June 6, 2023

By The Aeschiried Integrators

authors_the-aeschiried-integrators — Author biographies

Integration experts and expertise are crucial for realising the full potential of inter- and transdisciplinary research. However, the expertise of those who lead integration is poorly recognized in the current academic system and these academics often experience a range of impediments to their careers. What can be done to recognise integration experts and expertise and to support the careers of such experts?

We define integration experts as specialists “who lead, administer, manage, monitor, assess, accompany, and/or advise others on integration” in order to achieve the full potential of inter- and transdisciplinary research (Hoffmann et al. 2022).

This i2Insights contribution presents the results of a pilot workshop held in Aeschiried, a mountain village in Switzerland, in February 2023 to develop a theory of change focused on Germany and Switzerland to achieve the following:

An analytical framework for knowledge co-production

September 5, 2023May 30, 2023

By Marianne Penker

How can students and academics starting out in transdisciplinary research begin to come to grips with knowledge co-production?

Colleagues and I developed a useful analytical framework comprising the following four elements:

typology of actor roles (who?)
research phases (when?)
objectives and forms of actor integration (why?)
types of knowledge (what?).

These four elements are illustrated in the figure below.

The development of the framework was based on the literature and our experiences in running a doctoral school on transdisciplinary sustainability research (see Enengel et al. 2012).

Improving facilitated modelling

May 23, 2023

By Vincent de Gooyert

Here I explore two outcomes of facilitated modelling – cognitive change and consensus forming – and ask: how can achieving those outcomes be improved?

But first, what is facilitated modelling?

Facilitated modelling is an approach where operational researchers act as facilitators to model an issue collaboratively with stakeholders, usually in a workshop. Operational research, also known as operations research, seeks to improve decision-making by developing and applying analytical methods.

Two central aims of facilitated modelling are to achieve cognitive change and to form consensus.

Cognitive change is the idea that participants of facilitated modelling workshops come in with a certain worldview, and that the intervention leads them to learn about the issue and accordingly change their minds.

Integration in inter- and transdisciplinary research: how can the leadership challenges be addressed?

February 21, 2023February 14, 2023

By Lisa Deutsch and Sabine Hoffmann

authors_lisa-deutsch_sabine-hoffmann — 1. Lisa Deutsch (biography)
2. Sabine Hoffmann (biography)

How can the integration required in large inter- and transdisciplinary programs be effectively led? What challenges do leaders of integration in such programs face and how can they address them? What are the particular challenges in using a theory of change as an integrative tool?

We describe five key challenges that we encountered when leading the integration for a large 10-year inter- and transdisciplinary research program, which explored novel non-grid water and sanitation systems that can function as comparable alternatives to conventional large network-based systems. We experienced these challenges when applying the tool Theory of Change to facilitate communication, collaboration and integration among the team members (for more on theory of change see the i2Insights contribution by Heléne Clark). We also share the strategies we employed to address these challenges. The lessons we developed are likely to be applicable to other inter- and transdisciplinary research programs.

Dealing with differences in interests through principled negotiation

November 15, 2022

By Gabriele Bammer

gabriele-bammer_nov-2021 — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

How can the interests of a diverse group of researchers and stakeholders tackling a complex societal problem be understood and managed?

Interests arise when a person has a stake in something and stands to gain or lose depending on what happens to that something:

researchers commonly have a stake in advancing their work and careers,
stakeholders affected by a societal problem generally have a stake in improving the problem, and
stakeholders in a position to do something about a problem generally have a stake in improving outcomes for the problem through their sphere of influence.

Interests relate not only to personal conditions or stakes (self-interest), but also to principles such as reducing inequities and promoting justice.

Ten dialogue methods for integrating judgments

June 21, 2023August 2, 2022

By David McDonald, Gabriele Bammer and Peter Deane

authors_david-mcdonald_gabriele-bammer_peter-deane — 1. David McDonald (biography)
2. Gabriele Bammer (biography)
3. Peter Deane (biography)

What formal dialogue methods can assist researchers in synthesising judgments about a complex societal or environmental issue when a range of parties with different perspectives are involved? How can researchers decide which methods will be most suitable for their purposes?

We review ten dialogue methods. Our purpose is not to describe the dialogue methods in detail, but instead to review the circumstances in which each method is likely to be most useful in a research context, bearing in mind that most methods a) were not developed for research, b) can be applied flexibly and c) have evolved into different variations. The methods are clustered into six groups:

Three lessons for community engagement in international research

August 23, 2022July 26, 2022

By Aysha Fleming

What’s required for researchers to effectively engage with local communities in international research tackling complex socio-ecological problems?

In a project involving Indonesian and Australian researchers working with local communities to restore peatlands in Indonesia, we identified three key elements for international collaboration with stakeholders:

project design
individual and collective skills and competencies
processes to support knowledge integration.

Project design

Four typical behaviours in interdisciplinary knowledge integration

September 20, 2023May 17, 2022

By Annemarie Horn and Eduardo Urias

Why do some collaborators in interdisciplinary teamwork clash? And why does collaboration between others seem smooth but not yield anything? What causes these differences in collaboration, and how can this inform interventions to support interdisciplinary collaboration and integration?

When we started teaching an interdisciplinary masters course, we expected it to become a battlefield, based on our reading of countless lists of the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration. We thought that the students’ diverse study backgrounds – ranging from arts to medicine, and from social sciences to mathematics – would cause tensions; that they would disagree with each other about theories and methods that they were unfamiliar with and held opinions about.

Boosting the transformative power of transdisciplinarity with quantum theory

October 12, 2021October 12, 2021

By Cyrille Rigolot

How can transdisciplinarity improve its ability to foster very deep, very fast and very large transformations toward sustainability?

Quantum theory might be a major source of insights in that direction. Although quantum theory is not new to transdisciplinarity, lately it has become much more accessible, practical, and potentially transformative on the ground.

Quantum theory for transdisciplinarity research

In the debates last century about the emerging transdisciplinary research field, quantum theory inspired theorist Basarab Nicolescu to develop three basic ‘axioms’, which he argues should be recognized at the core of transdisciplinarity research, namely: