Theories – Integration and Implementation Insights

Open Systems Theory: Producing successful strategic plans

December 8, 2025November 11, 2025

By Merrelyn Emery.

How can we produce strategic plans that people actually want to implement? How can the process create a sense of belonging and allow members of communities and organizations to take control over their own affairs?

Fred Emery and I tackled these questions while producing Open System Theory.

Open Systems Theory: The framework

Open Systems Theory has two basic concepts:

1. The world consists of systems with permeable boundaries, ie., systems which are open to their environments. This gives us co-evolution, the mutual determination of system and environment.

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

February 24, 2025April 16, 2024

By Gabriele Bammer

gabriele-bammer_nov-2021 — 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.

Diffusion of innovations

August 1, 2023August 1, 2023

By James W. Dearing

james_dearing — James W. Dearing (biography)

How—and why—do people decide to try new things?

Studies of diffusion have frequently demonstrated a mathematically consistent sigmoid pattern (the S-shaped curve, see figure below) of over-time adoption for innovations. Innovations include new beliefs, practices, programs, policies, and technologies.

The “S” shape is due to the positive engagement of informal opinion leaders in talking about and modeling an innovation for others to hear about and see. The initial slow rate of adoption gives way to a rapidly accelerating rate, which then slows as fewer non-adopters remain. Alternatively and more commonly, when informally influential people do not get positively engaged or when they ignore or actively reject an innovation, diffusion does not occur and the resulting slope of a cumulative curve stays flat or turns negative.

Viable System Model: A theory for designing more responsive organisations

March 17, 2026January 24, 2023

By Angela Espinosa

How can communities, businesses, regions, and nations – which can all be thought of as organisations – be designed to be capable of dealing quickly and effectively with environmental fluidity and complexity?

The Viable System Model, often referred to as VSM, is a theory that posits that a complex organisation is more capable of responding to a changing and unpredictable environment, if it is:

composed of autonomous, effective, and agile subsidiary organisations,
highly connected to each other, and
cohesively operating with shared ethos, purpose, processes, and technologies.

A complex organisation therefore has multiple levels of nested organisations, each adhering to these principles.

Understanding diversity primer: 5. Values

September 30, 2025May 19, 2022

By Gabriele Bammer

primer_diversity_5

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:

individuals as biological organisms
coordinated social interaction
group survival and welfare.

Understanding values: Schwartz theory of basic values

March 18, 2025May 10, 2022

By Shalom H. Schwartz

shalom-schwartz — Shalom H. Schwartz (biography)

Why are values important for tackling complex societal and environmental problems? Can personal values that are robust across cultures be identified? Can these personal values help explain conflicts in values?

Six main features of values

All values have six features in common and these illustrate why values are important in researching and acting on complex problems.

1. Values are beliefs linked inextricably to affect. When values are activated, they become infused with feeling.

2. Values refer to desirable goals that motivate action.

Four building blocks of systems thinking

February 20, 2023April 12, 2022

By Derek Cabrera and Laura Cabrera

authors_derek-cabrera_laura-cabrera — 1. Derek Cabrera (biography)
2. Laura Cabrera (biography)

Systems thinking itself is a complex adaptive system. Supported by empirical evidence, DSRP theory describes 4 simple rules that dynamically combine to explain the complexity of physical, natural, and social systems. Awareness of these patterns can help us to solve many societal and environmental problems.

We briefly present DSRP theory which describes four universal patterns and their underlying elements—identity (i) and other (o) for Distinctions (D), part (p) and whole (w) for Systems (S), action (a) and reaction (r) for Relationships (R), and point (p) and view (v) for Perspectives (P).

We describe these four building blocks and show how they can be mixed and matched. We conclude with some additional key aspects of the theory.

Boosting the transformative power of transdisciplinarity with quantum theory

October 12, 2021October 12, 2021

By Cyrille Rigolot

How can transdisciplinarity improve its ability to foster very deep, very fast and very large transformations toward sustainability?

Quantum theory might be a major source of insights in that direction. Although quantum theory is not new to transdisciplinarity, lately it has become much more accessible, practical, and potentially transformative on the ground.

Quantum theory for transdisciplinarity research

In the debates last century about the emerging transdisciplinary research field, quantum theory inspired theorist Basarab Nicolescu to develop three basic ‘axioms’, which he argues should be recognized at the core of transdisciplinarity research, namely:

Systems transdisciplinarity as a metadiscipline

July 5, 2023October 27, 2020

By Vladimir Mokiy

author_vladimir-mokiy — Vladimir Mokiy (biography)

In 1990, specialists from the Russian School of Transdisciplinarity began to develop the type of systems transdisciplinarity proposed by Erich Jantsch in 1972. He argued for the coordination of all disciplines and interdisciplines in the education and innovation system on the basis of a generalized axiomatic and an emerging epistemological pattern.

Since this approach has a philosophical rationale, conceptual and methodological basis, and appropriate technological methods, it can be considered as an independent metadiscipline – systems transdisciplinarity.

Transdisciplinarity as a meta-discipline has the following basic attributes:

a meta-theory; and,
a meta-narrative.

Managing innovation dilemmas: Info-gap theory

August 11, 2023October 8, 2019

By Yakov Ben-Haim

Author - Yakov Ben-Haim — Yakov Ben-Haim (biography)

To use or not to use a new and promising but unfamiliar and hence uncertain innovation? That is the dilemma facing policy makers, engineers, social planners, entrepreneurs, physicians, parents, teachers, and just about everybody in their daily lives. There are new drugs, new energy sources, new foods, new manufacturing technologies, new toys, new pedagogical methods, new weapon systems, new home appliances and many other discoveries and inventions.

Furthermore, the innovation dilemma occurs even when a new technology is not actually involved. The dilemma arises from new attitudes, like individual responsibility for the global environment, or new social conceptions, like global allegiance and self-identity transcending all nation-states. Even the enthusiastic belief in innovation itself as the source of all that is good and worthy entails a dilemma of innovation.

An innovation’s newness and the uncertainty of its promise for improvement is the source of the dilemma. Tomorrow we will understand the innovation better, its dangers and its benefits, but today we must decide.

Managing uncertainty in decision making: What can we learn from economics?

August 11, 2023June 4, 2019

By Siobhan Bourke and Emily Lancsar

authors_siobhan-bourke_emily-lancsar — 1. Siobhan Bourke (biography)
2. Emily Lancsar (biography)

How can researchers interested in complex societal and environmental problems best understand and deal with uncertainty, which is an inherent part of the world in which we live? Accidents happen, governments change, technological innovation occurs making some products and services obsolete, markets boom and inevitably go bust. How can uncertainty be managed when all possible outcomes of an action or decision cannot be known? In particular, are there lessons from the discipline of economics which have broader applicability?

While uncertainty is often discussed alongside risk, a fundamental difference between uncertainty and risk is that risk involves events with known probabilities (or probabilities based on reliable empirical evidence), whereas under uncertainty probabilities are unknown and reflect an individual’s subjective belief concerning the likelihood of a given outcome. Given the subjectivity, that likelihood can differ from person to person. It can also involve a perceived zero probability in the case of unforeseen events (or ‘unknown unknowns’).

Transforming transdisciplinarity: Interweaving the philosophical with the pragmatic to move beyond either/or thinking

November 17, 2025November 13, 2018

By Katie Ross and Cynthia Mitchell

authors_katie-ross_cynthia-mitchell — 1. Katie Ross (biography)
2. Cynthia Mitchell (biography)

Can a dive into the philosophical depths of transdisciplinarity provide an orientation to the fundamental purpose and need for transdisciplinarity?

The earlier philosophers of transdisciplinarity – such as Erich Jantsch (1980), Basarab Nicolescu (2002), and Edgar Morin (2008) – all aim to stretch or transcend the dominant Western paradigm, which arises in part from Aristotle’s rules of good thought. Aristotle’s rules of good thought, or his epistemology, state essentially that to make meaning in the world, we must see in terms of difference; we must make sense in terms of black and white, or dualistic and reductive thinking.