Unknowns – Integration and Implementation Insights

Cultivating epistemic humility in research teams

June 2, 2026

By Faye Miller.

faye-miller_2025 — Faye Miller (biography)

What makes it so challenging for research teams to be truly receptive to being wrong? And what can teams do to make doubt expressible and useful?

Being aware that knowledge is always situational, incomplete, and prone to error, as well as the willingness to hold opinions tentatively, be receptive to change, and recognise the boundaries of understanding, are all components of epistemic humility. Humility about what one knows and can know is an intellectual quality in individual researchers. Yet epistemic humility also has a structural dimension: which doubts get expressed, whose knowledge is heard, and how teams handle what they don’t yet know, are challenges that go beyond the individual researcher to shape how research teams function.

This i2Insights contribution is an attempt to highlight two challenges that need to be addressed:

the confidence trap, built on the pressure to exude certainty, and
the silence trap, arising from the social dynamics that can suppress productive doubt.

Stories of self, us, and now: A tool for navigating uncertainty

November 25, 2025November 18, 2025

By Gemma Jiang, Alexis Niki, Darius Melvin and Sarah Hind.

authors_jiang_niki_melvin_hind — 1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Alexis Niki (biography)
3. Darius Melvin (biography)
4. Sarah Hind (biography)

In times of uncertainty, especially when the role of research, as well as research funding are under threat, how can research teams effectively respond? How can storytelling help?

We show how Marshall Ganz’s (2009) Stories of Self, Us, and Now framework can move groups from individual experiences of uncertainty (Self) to shared meaning (Us), and toward concrete action steps (Now).

Workshop Context

Leadership team members from a large transdisciplinary, cross-institutional research center, entering the fifth (final) year of their funding cycle, partnered with an external team science expert

Lessons for transformative research from co-creating a conference without a fixed plan

November 27, 2025September 23, 2025

By Thomas Bruhn.

In developing a conference, what does it take for people to leave their comfort zones to co-design something new? What possibilities does this open up for more meaningful conference designs? What are the broader lessons for transformative research?

In 2023–2024, I worked with the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to develop a conference format for the German sustainability research community – something to help re-establish connection after the isolating COVID pandemic years, and to strengthen interdisciplinary exchange. The Ministry wanted something new and innovative.

Early in the conversation, I sensed hesitation when unconventional, interactive conference formats were suggested.

Dealing with imperfection in tackling complex problems

March 4, 2025February 25, 2025

By Gabriele Bammer.

gabriele-bammer_nov-2021 — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

Why is an appreciation of imperfection and its inevitability important for those seeking to understand and act on complex societal and environmental problems? Which traps can imperfection lead to and what are the most effective ways of dealing with it?

The inevitability of imperfection

Imperfection is inevitable both in attempting to develop a comprehensive understanding of complex societal and environmental problems and in acting on them. The multiple underpinning reasons include:

● Complex problems are systems problems, and all systems views are partial, so that the whole system cannot be taken into account. Even then, boundaries need to be set to effectively deploy available resources and these artificial boundaries further constrain understanding of the whole system.

Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) 3.0: An updated framework to foster expertise for tackling complex problems

February 24, 2025April 16, 2024

By Gabriele Bammer

How can researchers interested in tackling complex societal and environmental problems easily find and draw on what they need from inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, systems thinking, action research, post-normal science and a range of other ways of combining disciplinary and stakeholder perspectives in order to bring about improvements? How can the necessary expertise be fostered and supported in a systematic way?

These are the questions that I have been addressing for more than 20 years in considering whether a new discipline – Integration and Implementation Sciences or i2S – could provide a way forward. i2S 3.0 is the third conceptualization of this discipline and the current version is summarised in the figure below.

At this stage in its development, i2S is focused on providing a framework and conduit for sharing concepts, methods, processes and other tools that are currently fragmented across inter- and transdisciplinarity, systems thinking, action research, post-normal science and other approaches.

The Strategic Choice Approach in shaping public policies

April 3, 2025October 31, 2023

By Catherine Hobbs

catherine-hobbs_2021 — Catherine Hobbs (biography)

How can we be inspired, rather than overwhelmed, by differing perspectives in the inter-organisational planning required to more effectively address cross-cutting issues, or interacting areas of policy? How can we learn from the achievements of public policy action research, in the light of the local and global uncertainties of the 2020s?

Strategic Choice Approach was developed by John Friend with Allen Hickling, originating during the 1960s and 1970s. It emerged through a series of collaborative action research projects applied to public policy challenges in a number of countries, so that its origins are empirical rather than theoretical.

Friend described Strategic Choice Approach as being helpful as a practical approach to planning under pressure where “people of different outlooks and allegiances are working together with a shared concern to move rapidly towards commitments to action or to changes of policy on difficult issues of shared concern” (Friend, no date).

Lessons for strengthening community-university partnerships

June 21, 2023May 16, 2023

By David D. Hart, Bridie McGreavy, Anthony Sutton, Gabrielle V. Hillyer and Darren J. Ranco

authors_david-hart_bridie-mcgreavy_anthony-sutton_gabrielle-hillyer_darren-ranco — 1. David D. Hart; 2. Bridie McGreavy; 3. Anthony Sutton; 4. Gabrielle V. Hillyer; 5. Darren J. Ranco (biographies)

In an increasingly polarized world, how can partnerships between communities and universities strengthen the kinds of deliberative and democratic practices that might help address many local and global challenges? How can such partnerships improve practices that involve listening and responding across differences (the deliberative part)? How can they help find ways to make shared decisions and take joint actions, knowing that complete agreement or mutual understanding may never be possible (the democratic part)?

We have reflected on our partnerships with people from Maine communities and Wabanaki (“People of the Dawnland”) Tribal Nations in North America, especially regarding challenges faced by communities that harvest clams and other bivalve mollusks from the intertidal mudflats along the length of this region’s enormous coastline (Hart et al., 2022). Here we present some of the key lessons from that work.

Common ground?

Some challenges facing local communities are less about competing ideologies and more about pragmatic concerns such as reducing water pollution, which can make it easier for people to listen to and learn about each other in the context of community planning.

Participatory scenario planning

February 17, 2026December 6, 2022

authors_maike-hamann_tanja-hichert_nadia-sitas — 1. Maike Hamann (biography)
2. Tanja Hichert (biography)
3. Nadia Sitas (biography)

By Maike Hamann, Tanja Hichert and Nadia Sitas

Within the many different ways of developing scenarios, what are useful general procedures for participatory processes? What resources are required? What are the strengths and weaknesses of involving stakeholders?

Scenarios are vignettes or narratives of possible futures, and when used in a set, usually depict purposefully divergent visions of what the future may hold. The point of scenario planning is not to predict the future, but to explore its uncertainties. Scenario development has a long history in corporate and military strategic planning, and is also commonly used in global environmental assessments to link current decision-making to future impacts. Participatory scenario planning extends scenario development into the realm of stakeholder-engaged research.

Multidisciplinary perspectives on unknown unknowns

October 7, 2025September 6, 2022

By Gabriele Bammer

This is part of a series of occasional “synthesis blog posts” drawing together perspectives on related topics across i2Insights contributions.

How can different disciplines and practitioners enhance the ability to understand and manage unknown unknowns, also referred to as deep uncertainty?

Seventeen blog posts have addressed these issues, covering:

how unknown unknowns can be understood
exploiting unknown unknowns
accepting unknown unknowns
reducing unknown unknowns.

How unknown unknowns can be understood

It is useful to review understanding of unknown unknowns from the perspective of the individual and the system, before turning to the project level.

Ignorance: Vocabulary and taxonomy

June 3, 2025June 28, 2022

By Michael Smithson

How can we better understand ignorance? In the 1980s I proposed the view that ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge, but is socially constructed and comes in different kinds (Smithson, 1989). Here I present a brief overview of that work, along with some key subsequent developments.

Defining ignorance

Let’s begin with a workable definition of ignorance and then work from there to a taxonomy of types of ignorance. Our definition will have to deal both with simple lack of knowledge but also incorrect ideas. It will also have to deal with the fact that if one is attributing ignorance to someone, the ignoramus may be a different person or oneself. I proposed the following definition:

Five lessons to improve how models serve society

February 18, 2025May 3, 2022

By Andrea Saltelli

Models are mathematical constructs better understood by their developers than by users. So should the public trust models? What insights can help society demand the quality it needs from modeling?

Mathematical modelling is a multiverse, where each scientific discipline adopts its own styles of modeling and quality control. Very little in the way of ‘user instructions’ is available to those affected by modeling practices.

This blog post presents five lessons to improve modelling that were developed as a manifesto by a cross-disciplinary group of natural and social scientists (Saltelli et al., 2020).

Lesson 1: Mind the assumptions

Uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis are complementary approaches to measuring the robustness of model predictions.

Judgment and decision making with unknown states and outcomes

April 15, 2022February 15, 2022

By Michael Smithson

What issues arise for effective judgments, predictions, and decisions when decision makers do not know all the potential starting positions, available alternatives and possible outcomes?

A shorthand term for this collection of possible starting points (also known as prior states), alternatives, and outcomes is “sample space.” Here I elucidate why sample space is important and how judgments and decisions can be influenced when it is incomplete.

Why is sample space important?

When it comes to dealing with unknowns, economists and others traditionally distinguish between “risk” (where probabilities can be assigned to every possible outcome) and “uncertainty” (where the probabilities are vague or unknown). Both of those versions of unknowns assume that decision makers know everything about the sample space.