Conflict management – Integration and Implementation Insights

Dealing with differences in interests through principled negotiation

November 15, 2022

By Gabriele Bammer

gabriele-bammer_nov-2021 — 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.

Resolving disagreements by negotiating agreements in the right way

June 16, 2023September 27, 2022

By Lawrence Susskind

How can interdisciplinary teams avoid getting stuck on questions like:

What kinds of data do we need to collect?
What methods or techniques should we use to analyze our data?
How should we handle gaps or incongruities in our findings?
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.

Basic steps for dealing with problematic value pluralism

August 3, 2023February 22, 2022

By Bethany Laursen, Stephen Crowley and Chad Gonnerman

authors_bethany-laursen_stephen-crowley_chad-gonnerman — 1. Bethany Laursen (biography)
2. Stephen Crowley (biography)
3. Chad Gonnerman (biography)

Have you ever been part of a team confronting a moral dilemma? Or trying to manage deep disagreements? For that matter, on a more down-to-earth level, how many times has your team tried to settle an agreed file naming convention? Many team troubles arise from value pluralism—members having different values or holding the same values in different ways. Below, we describe problematic value pluralism and suggest steps for dealing with it.

What are values, and how do they cause problems?

Here, we’re talking about a “value” as a desire (conscious or unconscious) that directs a person’s actions. It could be a guiding ideal or a whimsical preference, for example. Most of us have multiple values and over time we have organized them so that they provide us with guidance in most of the situations we encounter.

Forming a team, especially one made up of folks with diverse backgrounds, creates the challenge of managing the interaction of multiple values.

Gradients of agreement for democratic decision-making

August 3, 2023May 25, 2021

By Hannah Love

How does your team make decisions? Do you vote? Does the loudest voice usually win? Does everyone on the team generally feel heard? Does your team have a charter to provide guidance? Or maybe there is often just silence and the team assumes agreement?

The next time your team makes a decision, here is something new you can try! Kaner (2014) proposes using a gradients of agreement scale. The gradients of agreement, also known as the consensus spectrum, provides an alternative to yes/no decision-making by allowing everyone to mark their response along a continuum, as shown in the figure below.

What are the gradients of agreement and the benefits of using them?

This is a tool to support democratic decision-making. The gradients of agreement has a scale with numbers (1-8) and short descriptions.

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.

Strategies to deal with forced hostile collaborations

April 4, 2023April 7, 2020

By Kristine Lund

author-kristine-lund — Kristine Lund (biography)

What can you do when a national funding umbrella organization asks you to add a new partner to a collaborative project, especially when that partner has a poor reputation for collaborating?

Here I share lessons based on my experience of leading a multi-million Euro grant, where two interdisciplinary language sciences laboratories, which had worked together successfully for 8 years, were preparing a bid for a 5-year continuation in funding. In the process of preparing that bid, our national umbrella organization suggested that a third language sciences laboratory that had strong links to neurosciences join the consortium.

Strategy 1: Try to make it work

Based on previous experience, neither of the two founding member labs wanted to accept the new collaborative partner.

Agent-based modelling for knowledge synthesis and decision support

April 15, 2022June 25, 2019

By Jen Badham

The most familiar models are predictive, such as those used to forecast the weather or plan the economy. However, models have many different uses and different modelling techniques are more or less suitable for specific purposes.

Here I present an example of how a game and a computerised agent-based model have been used for knowledge synthesis and decision support.

The game and model were developed by a team from the Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD), a French agricultural research organisation with an international development focus. The issue of interest was land use conflict between crop and cattle farming in the Gnith community in Senegal (D’Aquino et al. 2003).

Long-term collaboration: Beware blaming back and blaming forward

September 29, 2021August 21, 2018

By Charles Lines

How can conflict be minimised in long-term collaborations where there is the potential to change priorities over time?

Partners who contributed to creating a collaborative initiative or who joined it early might, quite naturally, prefer to look back at the times when they were most influential and able to shape priorities and contribute significantly to achievements in which they believed.

Also, quite naturally, those who joined a collaborative initiative later may prefer to look forwards towards new approaches and ways of doing things that might increase their influence and enable them to shape priorities and achieve things important to them.