Competencies

Training specialists to solve wicked problems

By Vladimir Mokiy.

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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.

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Participatory content analysis

By Andréanne Chu Breton-Carbonneau.

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Andréanne Chu Breton-Carbonneau (biography)

How can participatory action research with trusted community-based organizations ensure that communities most impacted take part in interpretating the data, turning findings into deeper insights and more meaningful community-led solutions?

Participatory content analysis is a final step in participatory action research and enables a community research team to analyze data to identify content themes, visually map relationships, and derive actionable insights based on local knowledge and lived expertise. The community research team comprises academic researchers, community-based organization partners, and “resident researchers,” who are community members recruited—with support from the community-based organization partners—from groups most impacted by the research area.

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A self-assessment checklist to improve interdisciplinarity in research projects / Un questionnaire d’auto-évaluation pour améliorer les projets de recherche interdisciplinaire

By Flore Nonchez.

A French version of this post is available

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Flore Nonchez (biography)

How can researchers improve the quality of their interdisciplinary proposals? What would help in clarifying project formulation, enriching description, maximizing relevance, facilitating workplan implementation (by anticipating possible difficulties) and enhancing impact?

The self-assessment checklist provided below aims to help project leaders and their research teams systematically consider the specific interdisciplinary aspects of an interdisciplinary research project, whatever their original discipline or experience of interdisciplinarity.

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Five capacities for human–artificial intelligence collaboration in transdisciplinary research

By Faye Miller

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Faye Miller (biography)

How can transdisciplinary researchers work with artificial intelligence as a genuine collaborator while maintaining integrative thinking? What new capabilities should be developed to ensure that artificial intelligence enhances, rather than fragments or compromises, cross-disciplinary human insights? 

What can trandisciplinary researchers learn from human–artificial intelligence collaboration across disciplines?

Before moving on to capacities, let’s examine the growth in human–artificial intelligence research partnerships to see what lessons can be adapted by transdisciplinary researchers in their work. In particular, I suggest that integrative methodologies can be developed by understanding what is happening within the following domain-specific approaches.

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How individual members can contribute to effective team functioning

Edited by Gabriele Bammer.

For team dynamics to work effectively, what is the range of contributions that needs to be covered by different team members? How can diversity in skills relevant to team functioning be effectively recognised and harnessed? Here the focus is not on the actual task the team is trying to accomplish, but rather the dynamics of working together and the different contributions or roles required for effective team functioning.

A number of proprietary products (i.e., products owned by companies that need to be purchased to be used) have been developed to help teams assess the strengths and weaknesses of individual team members in contributing to effective team performance. The focus in this Editor’s Addition is to use one such product, CliftonStrengths®, to highlight one set of understandings about what key team dynamics are. Information available on the CliftonStrengths® website is used in abbreviated form and without the summary terms used to encapsulate each team and personal attribute.

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Navigating the spectrum of leadership styles

By Gemma Jiang, Jenny Grabmeier and Joan Lurie.

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1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Jenny Grabmeier (biography)
3. Joan Lurie (biography)

When you are in a leadership role, are you able to shift your leadership style to accommodate the needs of your team and project? When consensus is hard to reach, are you able to step in with a directive approach? Are you able to hold back from being directive when creativity and participation are needed?

A Spectrum of Leadership Styles

Lewin, Lippitt and White in their foundational 1939 study on group dynamics suggested three leadership styles. In the context of cross-disciplinary science, we do not see these as separate styles or the only three styles, but as reference points along a continuum. At one end of their spectrum lies directive leadership, and at the other, delegative leadership, and somewhere in the middle, participative leadership.

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What roles do you play in inter- and transdisciplinary projects?

By Hanna Salomon, Benjamin Hofmann and Sabine Hoffmann.

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1. Hanna Salomon (biography)
2. Benjamin Hofmann (biography)
3. Sabine Hoffmann (biography)

What roles do researchers typically play in inter- and transdisciplinary projects? How can they be made transparent in order to reflect on them?

Inter- and transdisciplinary projects typically require different roles and the researchers involved may play one or more of them. There is a plethora of literature describing various ideal-typical roles and we used the literature on researchers’ roles in sustainability science to develop a reflection tool on researcher roles in inter- and transdisciplinary projects.

A Role Reflection Tool

The reflection tool consists of a role survey for individual researchers, a spider web graph for immediate role visualization on the individual and project team level, and a set of questions for individual and project team reflections.

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The enablers of effective knowledge exchange between science and policy

By Vivian Nguyen and Chris Cvitanovic.

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1. Vivian Nguyen (biography)
2. Chris Cvitanovic (biography)

What are the practical enabling conditions necessary for effectively implementing strategies to enhance knowledge exchange at the science-policy interface?

To address this question, we undertook a comprehensive and global review of the published literature in the field of environmental management. Specifically, following established scoping review protocols, we examined 56 empirical case studies that document enablers of effective knowledge exchange between science and policy. By doing so, we also identified and provided actionable insights that can help anyone working at the interface of science and policy to enhance their knowledge exchange efforts, ultimately leading to more impactful and desirable outcomes, and ensuring that the benefits of knowledge exchange efforts outweigh the cost of implementation.

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Understanding exclusion, sharing benefits and building in reflection in transdisciplinary collaborations

By Annisa Triyanti, Corinne Lamain, Jessica Duncan and Jillian Student

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1. Annisa Triyanti (biography)
2. Corinne Lamain (biography)
3. Jessica Duncan (biography)
4. Jillian Student (biography)

How are ways of knowing excluded in transdisciplinary collaborations? How can transdisciplinary collaborations provide fair compensation for all who dedicate time and effort to the collaboration? How can transdisciplinary processes be made more fair, inclusive and equitable by including reflective processes?

Transdisciplinary collaborations aim to bring together different forms of knowledge, for example academic knowledge with knowledge of practitioners, activists, community groups, etc. Important questions to unpack the politics of transdisciplinary collaborations include:

  • Who decides which societal challenges are addressed?
  • Who has the most access and power to mobilize actions and resources?
  • Who decides who will be involved?
  • Who receives benefits?

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Team development is an essential team science competency

By Gaetano R. Lotrecchiano, L. Michelle Bennett and Yianna Vovides

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1. Gaetano R. Lotrecchiano (biography)
2. L. Michelle Bennett (biography)
3. Yianna Vovides (biography)

How does a team develop purposefully from an assembly of individuals with a shared research interest to an integrated and interdependent team? What process can they put in place to explore and discover not just their own but each other’s motivations, needs, and values? What needs to be put in place to collaboratively establish a team culture, norms, and processes from which they can agree to operate?

Here we describe the Reflective-Reflexive Design Method that addresses intra- and inter-personal dynamics for team development. Two assumptions underpin it:

  1. reflection and reflexivity are necessary dynamics for teaming success, and
  2. interventions that build successful teams take advantage of both dynamics in context and as intersection points.

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Towards fair transdisciplinary collaborations that honour epistemic justice

By Annisa Triyanti, Barbara van Paassen, Corinne Lamain, Jessica Duncan, Jillian Student, Jonas Collen Ladeia Torrens and Nina de Roo

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1. Annisa Triyanti; 2. Barbara van Paassen; 3. Corinne Lamain; 4. Jessica Duncan; 5. Jillian Student; 6. Jonas Collen Ladeia Torrens; 7. Nina de Roo  (biographies)

What principles need to be upheld to fund and support fair, inclusive, and equitable transdisciplinary collaborations? What competences and attitudes are required for transdisciplinary collaborations to foster epistemic justice? And what do mushrooms have to do with this?!

It is widely acknowledged that to address complex societal problems and harness plural ways of knowing, a wider range of actors, perspectives and types of knowledge are needed than is traditionally the case in other forms of knowledge creation. Transdisciplinary collaborations are different from traditional forms of science in:

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

By Gabriele Bammer

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Gabriele Bammer (biography)

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.

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