Teamwork

Dealing with differences in interests through principled negotiation

By Gabriele Bammer

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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.

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Resolving disagreements by negotiating agreements in the right way

By Lawrence Susskind

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Lawrence Susskind (biography)

How can interdisciplinary teams avoid getting stuck on questions like:

  1. What kinds of data do we need to collect?
  2. What methods or techniques should we use to analyze our data?
  3. How should we handle gaps or incongruities in our findings?
  4. What are the policy implications or prescriptions that follow from our findings?

I want to share some lessons I’ve learned about handling disagreements on these four questions.

Research Design

One interdisciplinary project I worked on many years ago involved trying to assess the feasibility of burying nuclear waste in the ocean floor. The engineers assumed the problem had an engineering solution.

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Advancing considerations of affect in interdisciplinary collaborations

By Mareike Smolka, Erik Fisher and Alexandra Hausstein

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1. Mareike Smolka (biography)
2. Erik Fisher (biography)
2. Alexandra Hausstein’s biography

Have you ever had a fleeting impression of seeing certainty disrupted, the impulse to laugh when your expectations were broken, or a startling sense of something being both familiar and foreign at the same time?

As social scientists engaged in collaborative studies with natural scientists and engineers, we have had these experiences repeatedly while doing research. Whenever we recognized that our social science paradigm was confronted with a different approach to knowing the world, unsettling experiences of difference emerged, which we later analyzed as moments of disconcertment.

In a comparative analysis of the affective substrates of interdisciplinary collaboration (Smolka et al., 2020), we found that attending to disconcertment facilitated collaborative knowledge production. By affective substrates we mean emotional and other bodily feelings that occur during interdisciplinary collaborations.

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Collaboration agreement template

By L. Michelle Bennett, Edgar Cardenas and Michael O’Rourke

1. L. Michelle Bennett (biography)
2. Edgar Cardenas (biography)
2. Michael O’Rourke (biography)

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.

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A process for generating new cross-disciplinary projects

By Gemma Jiang

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Gemma Jiang (biography)

What is a good way for researchers in large cross-disciplinary science initiatives, who may not know each other well, to generate viable project ideas?

This blog post introduces a field-tested “double helix” process that leverages the benefits of idea generation by a large group and idea refinement in small groups.

This double helix process is most helpful in large cross-disciplinary science initiatives that meet at least one of the following three characteristics:

  • Tackling wicked problems with both scientific and societal significance
  • Requiring deep integration across multiple disciplines that will eventually lead to new meta-disciplines
  • Consisting of more than 20 core research members.

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Understanding diversity primer: 9. Team roles

By Gabriele Bammer

primer_diversity_9_team-roles

What is the range of roles that members of a team need to cover in order for the team to be effective? What strengths and weaknesses are associated with each role?

Teamwork is common in research on complex societal and environmental problems. The Belbin team roles identify nine clusters of skills that need to be included within a team for it to be most effective. An individual can bring more than one cluster of skills to the team, with most people having two or three Belbin team roles that they are comfortable with.

Each of the nine roles described below is considered to be equally important and each has strengths and weaknesses. Different roles are likely to be required at different times during a team’s work.

Resource Investigator
These team members use their inquisitive nature to find ideas to bring back to the team.

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Clarifying incentives and expectations in research collaborations

By Alisa Zomer and Varja Lipovsek

authors_alisa-zomer_varja-lipovsek
1. Alisa Zomer (biography)
2. Varja Lipovsek (biography)

In which areas do research collaborations between academics and practitioners often run into trouble? What difficult questions can we ask ourselves and our partners at the outset of a research collaboration that can set us up for a successful partnership? How can we learn from past successful and failed aspects of research partnerships?

In our experience four areas where collaborations can have problems are:

  • Incentives and expectations
  • Timelines
  • Collaborative decision making and team buy-in
  • Learning and dissemination.

In our guide, “How to have difficult conversations” (MIT Governance Lab, 2020), we designed sets of questions for both academic and practitioner partners to clarify priorities and assumptions, so that potential tensions can be turned into productive and creative exchanges.

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Understanding diversity primer: 8. Personality

By Gabriele Bammer

primer_diversity_8_personalityWhat is a useful way of understanding personality and why is it important? How could personality affect how problems are framed, understood and responded to? How does personality affect how well those contributing to the research work together?

Personality is one of the most evident ways in which people differ. A useful way of coming to terms with this aspect of diversity is to focus on traits that predict behaviour. The HEXACO model is considered to be valid across cultures and focuses on 6 traits:

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Managing risk and equity in collaborative research

By Alisa Zomer and Selmah Goldberg

authors_alisa-zomer_selmah-goldberg
1. Alisa Zomer (biography)
2. Selmah Goldberg (biography)

How do the perceived costs, benefits and risks that researchers envision compare to reality when a project is implemented? How can we best support equitable exchange and decision-making for all actors involved in research study design and implementation?

We have developed a risk and equity matrix to stimulate systematic consideration of potential impacts for stakeholders, researchers and others involved in a research process, to ensure that risks and benefits of research collaborations are distributed in a more equitable manner.

The risk and equity matrix is meant to:

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Understanding diversity primer: 7. Culture

By Gabriele Bammer

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How can we begin to understand cultural diversity? How does culture affect how problems are framed, understood and responded to? How does culture affect how well those contributing to the research work together?

In this primer, the term ‘culture’ is used to describe the social behaviours and norms of groups in society. There is, therefore, overlap with values, but culture and values are not identical. Cultural differences are commonly thought of in relation to the inhabitants of different countries, but can also apply to occupations, religions, age-groups, members of different social classes and much more.

Geert Hofstede’s framework for measuring national cultures provides a useful starting point for understanding cultural diversity. I have used different labels for the six dimensions of the framework, each of which can be seen as a gradation. The dimensions also generally work for social groups other than nations.

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Understanding diversity primer: 6. Interests

By Gabriele Bammer

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What are interests and why are they important? How do they affect how problems are framed, understood and responded to? How do they affect how well those contributing to the research work together?

What are interests?

Interests will be familiar through attention paid to ‘conflicts of interest,’ ‘vested interests’ and ‘interest groups.’ Yet interests are challenging to pin down.

The common definition of interests as things that a person is curious about has some relevance for research. It needs to be rounded out by another aspect of interests, which is about having a stake in something and standing to gain or lose depending on what happens to that something.

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Understanding diversity primer: 5. Values

By Gabriele Bammer

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How can differences in values be understood? How do differences in values affect research on complex societal and environmental problems, especially how problems are framed, understood and responded to, as well as how well those contributing to the research work together?

Ten basic personal values

Shalom Schwartz’s theory of basic values (2012) identifies ten broad personal values, which are differentiated by their underlying goal or motivation, as described in the table below. These values seem to be culturally robust.

Overall, each value helps humans cope with one or more of three requirements of existence, namely the needs of:

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