Where do the benefits of diverse teams come from and how can those benefits be unlocked? What are the pitfalls to watch out for in constructing a team that is greater than the sum of its parts?
To boost innovation and creativity in teams I suggest we need to develop diversity science, which has 5 elements:
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.
What can leadership discourse in the business literature tell us for leadership in participatory modelling?
Here we explore:
the difference between leadership and management in participatory modelling
different leadership styles and participatory modelling
three key leadership issues in participatory modelling: responsibility for best practices and ethics, competences, and who in the participatory modelling team should lead.
How does leadership differ from management in participatory modelling?
It is useful to think about teams as having three dimensions:
the team as a whole
the individuals in the team
the subteams within the overall team, or the smaller subsets of team members who cluster together to work on specific tasks. With teams taking on more and more complex tasks, it is not uncommon for members with similar skills to tackle various assignments over a period of time and then integrate their outputs into the larger, overall team.
How does a leader know when to focus on which dimension?
The secret lies in knowing how a particular team best carries out its tasks, specifically a concept known as interdependence. Team interdependence refers to the extent to which a team requires members to communicate, collaborate, integrate, and coordinate their efforts to get their jobs done.
What are the attitudinal, behavioral, and cognitive issues that influence interdisciplinary collaborations?
The illustrations I provide here are based upon 20 years of experience working in research environments with scholars ranging from philosophers, anthropologists, and sociologists, to historians, economists, and ecologists, to psychologists, computer scientists, and neuroscientists. This experience has helped to illuminate what creates challenges during interdisciplinary interactions and what also can contribute to effective collaborations and help scholars learn from each other.
Attitudinal issues
Often times interaction is stifled when collaborators maintain some form of disciplinary disdain. The characteristics of disciplinary disdain include lack of respect or a form of contempt for another disciplinary approach, or condescension toward another discipline.
What is an effective way of providing students with practical experience in stakeholder engagement? How can students learn to communicate and engage with community members on a transdisciplinary project, as well as how to create a space for those community members to reflect on their daily lives through interactions and discussions with the student outsiders? What makes it possible for students to broaden their horizons and to acquire new competences and skills?
We present our reflections on how the Winter School 2020 “Science meets Practice” run by ETH Zürich successfully contributed to our transdisciplinary learning process. We suggest there are six key lessons for those who want to design a successful course.
Lesson 1: A diverse and motivated group
A key element in fostering the transdisciplinary learning process was the diversity of the participant cohort.
What can librarians contribute to interdisciplinary research teams working on complex problems? We suggest that librarians add value in the following three ways:
finding and accessing information resources across disciplines
connecting teams to experts and resources, and
improving collaboration and communication strategies.
Our experience comes from being part of the University of Miami’s Laboratory for Integrative Knowledge initiative, also known as U-LINK, which aims to address the world’s most compelling problems through interdisciplinary inquiry. From 2018-2020, teams of scholars from multiple disciplines have received funding to pursue solutions to global challenges.
Librarians have been embedded in each of the teams. This opportunity has provided librarians with direct knowledge of the needs and demands of interdisciplinary teams.
What are the research hotspots in the Science of Team Science (SciTS) field? How have they evolved in the last decade?
We used conference programs from the annual International Science of Team Science (INSciTS) conferences held between 2010-2019 and the CorTexT Platform (https://www.cortext.net/) to select the top terms used with high frequency in the 852 titles and abstracts.
High-frequency terms and their evolution
The top 25 terms and their evolution are shown in Figure 1: evaluation / assessment (89 mentions), team science training (63), leadership (31), communication (30), curriculum (14),community (29), funding (13), mixed methods (13), model (13), Toolbox Project / Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (13), Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) (11), graduate students (11), networks (26), education (20), tools (20), productivity (16), bibliometrics (19), framework (14), gender (11), readiness (8), distributed collaboration (7), multi-team systems (7), research network tools (8), team performance (7), multiple levels (5).
How can online workshops be productive, engaging, caring and fun? How can researchers creatively adapt to a ‘virtual normal’ and develop caring and co-operative ways of working?
In March 2020, we – 20 international sustainability science colleagues – were prohibited from meeting face-to-face by COVID-19-related travel restrictions. Yet, we had time blocked out and a detailed workshop schedule. Within 48 hours, with invaluable help from experienced facilitator Concepción Piñeiro, we shifted the workshop online, adapting for virtual collaboration.
Here, we share how we made our online workshop productive, engaging and caring.We share what we learned about contrasts with in-person meetings, and identify additional skills and habits for great online interaction in a more detailed report (The Care Operative 2020).
The key principles are: seek to recreate the best things about face-to-face sessions and creatively adapt them to enhance online collaboration.
How can we ignite discovery conversations and foster open, psychologically safe conversations among researchers from different disciplines who have not met previously?
This blog post is based on the findings of a workshop with pre-doctoral trainees (Strekalova and McCormack 2020), but is likely to have broader relevance. The workshop was structured around the initial steps of Strategic DoingTM (Morrison et al., 2019), a disciplined approach to facilitating complex collaborative projects. The conversations in the room progressed by addressing five key PROBE-Action questions.
Question 1. What personal expertise and interests are represented in the room?
Six lessons emerged from the seven plenary panels at the May 2019 Science of Team Science conference hosted by Michigan State University in the US.
1. Understanding the nature of team science is crucial to monitoring team behavior, including managing conflict, diverse voices, and strong leadership.
The Science of Groups and Teams plenary panel affirmed one approach alone is not sufficient. It featured perspectives from psychology, management, and organizational behavior in two regional research institutions, the University of Michigan and Michigan State University.
2. Networking and collaboration increase access to pertinent expertise and skills, equipment, and other resources including funding, relevant techniques, education and training, visibility and recognition.
In this blog post we review the benefits and difficulties of working in teams before introducing a new web site whose goal is to help those carrying out collaborative interdisciplinary projects to solve problems and be more effective.
Benefits of working in teams
Working in teams has at least five major benefits:
