Competencies – Page 2 – Integration and Implementation Insights

What is 3-dimensional team leadership?

February 1, 2023December 1, 2020

By Bradley L. Kirkman

authro_bradley-kirkman — Bradley L. Kirkman (biography)

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.

Interdisciplinary competencies and innovation

June 28, 2023November 24, 2020

By Colleen Knechtel

author_colleen-knechtel — Colleen Knechtel (biography)

What interdisciplinary competencies are required for innovation? How can such interdisciplinary competencies be implemented to foster innovation?

Keys to stimulating innovation are cultivating interdisciplinary mindsets and skillsets. Interdisciplinary mindsets involve recognizing diverse knowledge to enable collaboration to enhance collective creativity, whereas interdisciplinary skillsets embrace relational competencies, work experiences, the sciences, humanities, trades and technologies. Integrating such diverse knowledge and skills is key to innovation.

Strategies for implementing interdisciplinary competencies

1. Recognizing prior knowledge and skills

A ‘growth mindset’ that focuses on strengths and competencies that is grounded in transformative learning strengthens confidence, affirms lifelong learning abilities, and motivates individuals to identify and address learning gaps.

Practical actions for fostering cross-disciplinary research

April 29, 2021September 8, 2020

By Yan Ding, Justin Pulford, Susie Crossman and Imelda Bates

author_mosaic-images_ding_pulford_crossman_bates — 1. Yan Ding (biography)
2. Justin Pulford (biography)
3. Susie Crossman (biography)
4. Imelda Bates (biography)

How can we facilitate cross-disciplinary research in practice? What practical actions are considered important for participating in cross-disciplinary research? How do these actions change at the individual, research team/programme and institutional/funder level?

Cross-disciplinary research approaches allow for the interchange of knowledge and experience to stimulate innovative responses to complex research challenges.

Individual researchers

The individual researcher requires certain personal attributes for effective participation in cross-disciplinary research.

Choosing a suitable transdisciplinary research framework

March 22, 2023May 26, 2020

By Gabriele Bammer

Author - Gabriele Bammer — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

What are some of the key frameworks that can be used for transdisciplinary research? What are their particular strengths? How can you choose one that’s most suitable for your transdisciplinary project?

The nine frameworks described here were highlighted in a series for which I was the commissioning editor. The series was published in the scientific journal GAIA: Ecological Perspectives in Science and Society between mid-2017 and end-2019.

Choosing among them is not a matter of right or wrong, but of each being more or less helpful for a particular problem in a particular context. And, of course, different frameworks can also be used in combination.

The brief descriptions and figures that follow aim to encapsulate each framework’s key strengths.

Finding expertise in research integration and implementation to tackle complex problems

June 7, 2023May 19, 2020

By Gabriele Bammer

When you are pulling together a team to tackle a complex societal or environmental problem, where can you find the expertise to deal with:

Research integration challenges such as: deciding which disciplines and stakeholders to include, setting limits around the problem, dealing with competing problem definitions, managing intractable unknowns, and synthesising different perspectives?
Research implementation challenges such as: identifying likely change agents, taking context into account, developing tools and processes for research to support more effective actions to ameliorate the problem?

Currently there is no one place to find all this expertise, but there are two major groups who can contribute parts of it:

How can expertise in research integration and implementation help tackle complex problems?

October 11, 2021March 10, 2020

By Gabriele Bammer

What is expertise in research integration and implementation? What is its role in helping tackle complex societal and environmental problems, especially those dimensions that define complexity?

Expertise in research integration and implementation

Addressing complex societal and environmental problems requires specific expertise over and above that contributed by existing disciplines, but there is little formal recognition of what that expertise is or reward for contributing it to a research team’s efforts. In brief, such expertise includes the ability to:

identify relevant disciplinary and stakeholder inputs
effectively integrate them for a more comprehensive understanding of the problem
support more effective actions to ameliorate the problem.

Fourteen knowledge translation competencies and how to improve yours

April 19, 2022August 13, 2019

By Genevieve Creighton and Gayle Scarrow

authors_genevieve-creighton_gayle-scarrow — 1. Genevieve Creighton (biography)
2. Gayle Scarrow (biography)

Knowledge translation encompasses all of the activities that aim to close the gap between research and implementation.

What knowledge, skills and attitudes (ie., competencies) are required to do knowledge translation? What do researchers need to know? How about those who are using evidence in their practice?

As the knowledge translation team at the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, we conducted a scoping review of the skills, knowledge and attitudes required for effective knowledge translation (Mallidou et al., 2018). We also gathered tools and resources to support knowledge translation learning.

Adaptive social learning for systemic leadership

December 9, 2021April 23, 2019

By Catherine Hobbs

What’s involved in developing human capacity to address complexity, taking a mid- to longer-term viewpoint than is usual? How can we create the conditions in which people can cope with the daily challenges of living in a complex world and flourish? What form of leadership is required to inspire and catalyse this transformation?

Framework for adaptive social learning

The need for systems thinking is often referred to, but rarely considered, as a rich and comprehensive resource which could be developed further and applied.

Skilful conversations for integration

August 15, 2022November 6, 2018

By Rebecca Freeth and Liz Clarke

mosaic_authors_rebecca-freeth_liz-clarke — 1. Rebecca Freeth (biography)
2. Liz Clarke (biography)

Interdisciplinary collaboration to tackle complex problems is challenging! In particular, interdisciplinary communication can be very difficult – how do we bridge the gulf of mutual incomprehension when we are working with people who think and talk so very differently from us? What skills are required when mutual incomprehension escalates into conflict, or thwarts decision making on important issues?

It is often at this point that collaborations lose momentum. In the absence of constructive or productive exchange, working relationships stagnate and people retreat to the places where they feel safest: their own disciplines, their offices, or the colleagues who are on their ‘side’. As a consequence, prospects for meaningful collaboration and integration dwindle.

Linking learning and research through transdisciplinary competences

March 17, 2021July 10, 2018

By BinBin Pearce

What are the objectives of transdisciplinary learning? What are the key competences and how do they relate to both educational goals and transdisciplinary research goals? At Transdisciplinarity Lab (TdLab), our group answered these questions by observing and reflecting upon the six courses at Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD levels that we design and teach in the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

Six competence fields describe what we hope students can do with the help of our courses. A competence field contains a set of interconnected learning objectives for students. We use these competence fields as the basis for curriculum design.

Leading large transdisciplinary projects

September 21, 2022May 8, 2018

By Sanford D. Eigenbrode, Lois Wright Morton, and Timothy Martin

What’s required to lead exceptionally large projects involving many dozens of participants from various scientific disciplines (including biophysical, social, and economic), multiple stakeholders, and efforts spanning a gamut from discovery to implementation? Such projects are common when investigating social-ecological systems which are inherently complex and large in spatial and temporal scales. Problems are commonly multifaceted, with incomplete or apparently contradictory knowledge, stakeholders with divergent positions, and large economic or social consequences.

Leaders of such very large projects confront unique challenges in addition to those inherent to directing interdisciplinary efforts:

Overcoming a paradox? Preparing students for transdisciplinary environments

June 24, 2020January 30, 2018

machiel -keestra_jan-2018 — Machiel Keestra (biography)

By Machiel Keestra

How can we adequately prepare and train students to navigate transdisciplinary environments? How can we develop hybrid spaces in our universities that are suitable for transdisciplinary education?

These questions were considered by a plenary panel, which I organised and chaired at the International Transdisciplinarity Conference 2017 at Leuphana University, Germany. Three major educational requirements were identified:

long-term collaborations with businesses, as well as non-governmental, governmental and community organisations
teaching particular dispositions and competencies
preparing students for intercultural endeavours.