Concepts – Integration and Implementation Insights

The essential conditions for, and characteristics of, complexity

May 5, 2026May 5, 2026

By Jean Boulton.

What are the underpinning necessities or conditions—the essential ingredients—that lead to and engender the qualities or characteristics of the complex world, especially its processual and emergent nature?

Three conditions for complexity: the essential ingredients

A watch or intricate machine is not complex. Nor is a saucer of water. So, when do we regard something as complex? What are the necessary conditions for complexity fully to be realised?

These are:

open boundaries
diversity
reflexive inter-relationships among constituents.

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Five structural levers to reopen feedback loops that are resistant to external evidence

April 21, 2026

By Lachlan S. McGill.

lachlan-mcgill — Lachlan S. McGill (biography)

When feedback loops have become resistant to external evidence, what are some potential ways of intervening to reopen them?

This i2Insights contribution builds on my previous post which covers understanding why feedback loops can become resistant to external evidence and how to diagnose such a structural problem.

Here I introduce five structural ways to intervene in such a closed feedback loop. These are structural levers, each targeting a different aspect of how signals flow, how authority is allocated, and how evaluative standards are defined.

One practical note before beginning. Applying the interventions below often requires institutional authority, coalition building, or regulatory support, so that isolated actors may not be able to deploy them fully, leaving the problematic dominant structure intact.

Understanding and diagnosing when feedback loops become resistant to external evidence

May 5, 2026April 21, 2026

By Lachlan S. McGill.

Why does better evidence sometimes fail to improve decision making? How can we tell if this is caused by feedback loops becoming resistant to external evidence?

Understanding how structural patterns become problematic

In most organisations, decisions are embedded in feedback loops that connect indicators, incentives, and authority structures. These loops determine what counts as success, which signals influence decisions, and how performance is evaluated over time.

When feedback loops are well aligned with system goals, they support learning. However, feedback loops can also evolve in ways that reinforce a narrow definition of success. This is generally associated with a system relying on a small number of indicators to guide decisions. Common examples include financial return on investment, productivity or output measures, growth targets, publication counts or grant income, and compliance indicators.

A framework for considering context in evaluation of transdisciplinary research projects

April 21, 2026March 31, 2026

By Julia Schegg, Rea Pärli, Manuel Fischer and Eva Lieberherr.

authors_schegg_parli_fischer_lieberherr — 1. Julia Schegg (biography)
2. Rea Pärli (biography)
3. Manuel Fischer (biography)
4. Eva Lieberherr (biography)

How do contextual factors influence the effects of transdisciplinary research projects? How can assessment of transdisciplinary research move from only considering outcome effectiveness to understanding the reasons behind how and why something works?

Our framework considers both context and the effects of transdisciplinary research projects, as summarised in the figure below. Each aspect of the framework is described in more detail.

Context

The Cultiv8 tool Part 1: Actionable insights for cultivating trust

March 19, 2026March 17, 2026

By Julia E. Moore and Sobia Khan.

authors_julia-moore_sobia-khan — 1. Julia E Moore (biography)
2. Sobia Khan (biography)

What are some useful ways of thinking about trust when developing plans to implement your research or strengthen your team? More importantly, what are some practical ways to build trust both as an individual and as an organisation?

Indeed, when asked about some of the most challenging parts of implementing changes and taking part in research collaborations, people often talk about trust. Trust is essential for equity and for working with people in effective ways, but so few of us are trained in how to build trust.

This i2Insights contribution provides a practical approach to thinking about trust, along with actionable steps to cultivate trust to help you achieve your goals, whether you are working with others to implement evidence or looking to strengthen your team dynamics.

From slogan to practice: Restoring transdisciplinarity as a serious way of working

March 19, 2026March 10, 2026

By Hussein Zeidan.

Do you sense a growing gap between the promise of transdisciplinarity and the way it is often practised? Have you recognised instances where a paper praises integration, yet treats it as little more than a symbolic gesture, instead of a serious intellectual and ethical commitment?

How did we get here, and how can we reclaim transdiscipinarity from superficial habits that weaken its potential?

How did we get here?

The rise of transdisciplinarity has been remarkable. Funding agencies promote it. Universities showcase it. New centres and programmes are built around it. This visibility has helped many people experiment with new forms of collaboration.

Moving from epistemic paternalism to transformative transdisciplinarity

February 17, 2026

By David Ludwig and Charbel N. El-Hani.

authors_david-ludwig_charbel-el-hani — 1. David Ludwig (biography)
2. Charbel N. El-Hani (biography)

How can we overcome the epistemic paternalism that has long shaped relations between science and society? How can a transformative vision of transdisciplinarity emerge from the interplay between epistemic diversity and epistemic decolonization?

Demands for transdisciplinary research reflect an intricate politics of knowledge that can be described through a triad of paternalism, diversity, and decolonization. Epistemic paternalism has become widely criticized in many debates about development and modernization. For example, international development projects are often deeply paternalistic by assuming that science and technology of the “developed world” should be simply exported into the “underdeveloped world,” where they are imagined as generating economic growth and societal progress.

Recognize and value linguistic and conceptual pluralism!

February 24, 2026February 12, 2026

By Ulli Vilsmaier.

How can we best recognise and value linguistic and conceptual pluralism in naming what we do when we work in international environments? What are the limitations of descriptors such as transdisicplinarity, participatory action research and co-creation?

Terminology is really an issue when working across linguistic, disciplinary and professional boundaries. Working internationally we are now accustomed to using the hyper-centralized language, English; we tend to delegate translation more and more to machine-based algorithms; and we easily forget the consequences of working in a language that is not our mother tongue nor anchored in our cultural and social environment.

A hyper-centralized language has great benefits, but also major weaknesses.

Training specialists to solve wicked problems

February 10, 2026

By Vladimir Mokiy.

vladimir-mokiy_2026 — Vladimir Mokiy (biography)

How can a modern university train highly qualified specialists who are able to rethink and unambiguously solve wicked problems?

Here I build on my previous i2Insights contribution Systems transdisciplinarity as a metadiscipline, the methodology of which aims to unify and generalize complementary and non-complementary disciplinary knowledge and methodologies. This metadiscipline provides the basis of a proposed curriculum for a two-year training program at the masters level. The intention is that specialists would be trained in systems transdisciplinarity using a single curriculum to ensure a uniform level of professional capabilities and competencies.

The curriculum

The curriculum involves the organization of training in four sections.

Understanding and responding to a chaotic world

February 10, 2026January 27, 2026

By Jamais Cascio.

Is it helpful to conceive the world as Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible or BANI? What do these terms mean and what mental models can help us survive in a BANI world?

I created BANI as an acronym in 2018 to better describe an increasingly chaotic world. BANI is a sense-making framework that recognises recurring themes in disruptions that make it increasingly difficult to understand the big picture and to make decisions. BANI is not saying something about the world, but rather about how we perceive it. It comes from a human inability to fully understand what to do when pattern-seeking and familiar explanations no longer work. It involves seeing the world as it is and letting go of illusions of system strength, control, predictability and certainty. BANI sets out to illuminate systems, but operates at a human level in a visceral and experiential way.

The Möbius strip of knowledge: Rethinking the boundaries of knowing / Le ruban de Möbius du savoir : repenser les frontières de la connaissance

January 20, 2026January 13, 2026

By Frédéric Darbellay.

A French version of this post is available

frederic-darbellay_2023 — Frédéric Darbellay (biography)

How can we move beyond current definitions of disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, which reproduce a logic inherited from classificatory and cumulative thinking that rests on the principles of classical logic – identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded third? Instead how can we think about knowledge as mutually transforming, traversing, and reinventing itself in line with research processes that do not follow a linear progression but unfold through movements of torsion, resonance, and tension? How can we think about the dynamics of knowledge less as a trajectory than a living space in continuous transformation?

Navigating power: A partial pragmatic map

December 2, 2025December 2, 2025

By Katie Moon.

In research, how can we start to appreciate unexamined assumptions about what power is, where it resides, how it works, and who holds it, especially how these assumptions influence not only the problems we recognize, but the solutions we pursue? And importantly, who decides? How can we get a better idea of how power informs how we act: what interventions we attempt, whose knowledge we value, whose interests we centre, and what consequences we anticipate?

In this i2Insights contribution I provide an intentionally simplified orienting map that disaggregates power into six dimensions that mirror the ways researchers tend to separate and locate power into distinct domains to rationalise and evaluate interventions. I match these dimensions to three onto-epistemological frames—objective, constructionist, and relational—which were described in a previous i2Insights contribution A guide to ontology, epistemology, and philosophical perspectives for interdisciplinary researchers.