Processes – Page 4 – Integration and Implementation Insights

Transdisciplinarity in Africa: Key issues in achieving higher education’s third mission

May 20, 2025

By Basirat Oyalowo.

basirat-oyalowo_2025 — Basirat Oyalowo (biography)

How can transdisciplinarity in Africa help achieve higher education’s third mission, namely making a contribution to society? What are the best pathways for achieving this? What are the key obstructions and potential ways around them?

Higher education’s third mission involves adding to the first two missions of teaching and research towards providing service to society. However, general pathways to achieving this are still unclear. A few studies have explored how and why the local impacts of universities need to be measured, but these are generally from outside Africa and concentrate more on quantitative methods to measure specific impact, such as economic impact.

Transdisciplinarity provides opportunities to consider the diversity of societal needs and values, to benefit from local knowledge, to involve scientific disciplines, stakeholders and target groups.

Planning transdisciplinary stakeholder workshops: Four practical lessons

May 13, 2025

By Maxine Fromm.

How can transdisciplinary researchers best organise workshops that create a collaborative space for different stakeholders? What practical planning is required? How can organisers meet the challenges of translating a project idea into concrete workshops?

This i2Insights contribution offers four practical lessons gathered throughout a dialogue series on a just industry transition between Dutch representatives from industry, non-governmental organisations, academia and ministries, which was organised by the Sustainable Industry Lab.

Lesson 1: Planning should start from your stakeholders’ needs

As Lisa Andrews and colleagues noted in their i2Insights contribution, Three lessons for mainstreaming transdisciplinarity, you need to ‘reach stakeholders where they are’ and take into account their knowledge levels, interests and agendas.

Why interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are not enough for addressing complex problems

April 29, 2025April 29, 2025

By Gabriele Bammer.

gabriele-bammer_nov-2021 — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

As the importance of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research approaches becomes more widely recognised, how can we overcome the danger that they are seen to be all that is needed for tackling complex problems? What are the limitations of these approaches? What else might be required?

My starting point is that improved understanding of, and action on, a complex societal or environmental problem usually requires a number of research questions to be addressed. Different questions require different kinds of research approaches. Let’s illustrate this by considering the following complex problem:

As effort goes into making cities more sustainable, how can we incorporate illicit drug users into a more sustainable city X?

The SPIRAL of systems leadership

April 22, 2025

By Josep M. Coll.

How can systems leadership be structured in a way that facilitates clarity and organization in its implementation and use, especially given that it is a collective type of leadership that harnesses the power of collective intelligence for solving a complex or wicked problem, in order to enable system-level change?

The SPIRAL of systems leadership is a practical model aimed at framing, developing and facilitating the transformative power of systems leadership for conscious and impactful organizations and practitioners that work in the domain of systemic transformation, regeneration and sustainable development.

SPIRAL is a name mnemonic that helps in remembering the five principles and in organizing the five phases of the model: S for Systeming, P for Purposing, I for Inviting, R for Re-designing and AL for Adaptive Learning, which are shown in the figure below.

Navigating the spectrum of leadership styles

April 15, 2025

By Gemma Jiang, Jenny Grabmeier and Joan Lurie.

authors_gemma-jiang_jenny-grabmeier_joan-lurie — 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.

Three key strategies enabling artificial intelligence to bridge inequities

April 8, 2025

By Kerstin Nothnagel.

With artificial intelligence transforming many aspects of society, from healthcare to education to economic development, how can it be used to reduce rather than perpetuate inequalities? In particular, given that artificial intelligence can widen gaps by exacerbating existing inequalities through biased datasets, lack of infrastructure, and limited access to resources, how can the benefits of artificial intelligence be brought into the reach of low-income nations and marginalised communities? What practical steps can be taken to ensure artificial intelligence is developed and applied in a way that is inclusive and benefits everyone?

My work has been in the health field, but the findings are likely to be more broadly applicable. I suggest three strategies that would enable artificial intelligence to reduce inequities. The first two are key contributions that researchers can make. The third is a call to policy makers and funders. An example is provided for each strategy.

An approach for operationalizing and sustaining systems improvements

March 25, 2025

By Dintle Molosiwa.

How can we develop more effective interventions that address root causes of insufficient system performance? How can systems-informed interventions achieve and sustain more impactful system improvements? What strategies ensure multisectoral collaboration in systems improvement initiatives?

This i2Insights contribution is based on experience in improving health systems in South Africa, Senegal, Zambia, Botswana and Chemonics global health supply chain portfolio, but is likely to have wider relevance for other systems and countries.

Colleagues and I (Chemonics Health Practice and SYSTAC Africa Hub, 2024) distilled existing system thinking frameworks into a four-step cycle: examine; co-create; implement and adapt; and adopt and scale.

Mobilizing the Arnstein Gap for better planning

March 18, 2025

By Keiron Bailey.

What is the Arnstein Gap? How can the Arnstein Gap usefully inform future citizen or stakeholder engagement?

Arnstein’s Ladder and the Arnstein Gap

Let’s begin with a brief reminder of Arnstein’s Ladder, which is a description of eight levels of public participation in government decision making developed by Sherry Arnstein in 1969 and illustrated in the figure below. More detail is available in the i2Insights blog post Stakeholder engagement: Learning from Arnstein’s ladder and the IAP2 spectrum by Gabriele Bammer.

In 2006 my colleague Dr. Ted Grossardt and I introduced the Arnstein Gap (Bailey and Grossardt, 2006), which is the difference between the perceived and desired levels of public involvement according to Arnstein’s Ladder.

Designing for role clarity: An essential leadership skill

March 11, 2025

By Gemma Jiang and Joan Lurie.

authors_gemma -jiang_joan-lurie — 1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Joan Lurie (biography)

How can leaders design roles and role relations within their project teams? How can leaders recalibrate and re-align role relations as their project contexts shift? Why is designing for role clarity an essential leadership skill, beyond technical and interpersonal skills?

Just as we sign contracts outlining job descriptions and authority when starting a new position, a similar role contracting process should be initiated at the beginning of each project. This ensures that everyone understands their specific responsibilities and authority within the project context. This practice is particularly crucial when team members have overlapping roles outside the project. For instance, in one project, a faculty member might lead while their department chair takes on a supporting role. How should these two define their project roles to distinguish them from their ongoing department chair–faculty relationship?

Using cross-cultural dialogue to break down inappropriate knowledge hierarchies

March 4, 2025

By Roxana Roos.

How can indigenous, local, artisanal, craft, tacit, counter, gendered and experiential knowledge better inform solutions to complex problems, such as climate change? How—when faced with conditions of complexity, uncertainty and competing tenable knowledge claims—can the actionable knowledge base be pluralized and diversified to include the widest possible range of high-quality, potentially actionable knowledges and sources of relevant wisdom? What are the pitfalls and challenges ahead?

I start with some cautions for the usual practice of transdisciplinary research and then highlight key aspects of cross-cultural dialogue, alongside pitfalls and challenges.

Integration can reproduce undue asymmetries

Dealing with imperfection in tackling complex problems

March 4, 2025February 25, 2025

By Gabriele Bammer.

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.

Transforming North-South academic collaborations through collective reflexivity

March 18, 2025February 18, 2025

By Adriana Moreno Cely, Kewan Mertens and Viola Nilah Nyakato.

authors_adriana-moreno-cely_kewan-mertens_viola-nilah-nyakato — 1. Adriana Moreno Cely (biography)
2. Kewan Mertens (biography)
3. Viola Nilah Nyakato (biography)

How can we challenge entrenched colonial dynamics in North-South academic collaborations and foster meaningful transformation? How can we move away from power asymmetries where Northern partners assume roles as donors and agenda-setters, leaving Southern collaborators as recipients and implementers? How can we promote equitable knowledge production, allowing diverse voices to speak while being open to listening to them?

In grappling with these challenges in our own collaborations, we used collective reflexive dialogues to unpack our complicity in reproducing problematic power dynamics.