Cross-disciplinarity

Navigating the spectrum of leadership styles

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.

Read more

Designing for role clarity: An essential leadership skill

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?

Read more

Boundary spanning: A leadership perspective

By Gemma Jiang, Jenny Grabmeier, Diane Boghrat and Susan Simkins.

authors_jiang,_grabmeier_boghrat_simkins
1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Jenny Grabmeier (biography)
3. Diane Boghrat (biography)
4. Susan Simkins (biography)

What does boundary spanning in cross-disciplinary science teams entail, and how does it relate to leadership?

At its core, boundary spanning is about bridging differences. These differences usually fall into two categories:

  1. Interdisciplinary differences, which involve varying perspectives across different disciplines, such as vocabulary, methods, epistemologies, and cultures.
  2. Transdisciplinary differences, which involve perspectives from science, society, policy, and practice that transcend institutional and sectoral boundaries.

The expertise required to bridge these differences is often referred to as “integration expertise” (Hoffman et al., 2024) or as one of us (Simkins) refers to it “interdisciplinary translation.” For simplicity, we’ll refer to all these forms of expertise as “boundary spanning,” and those who play these roles as “boundary spanners.”

Read more

Being a “conscious” leader: Three foundational commitments

By Gemma Jiang and Jeni Cross.

authors_gemma-jiang_jeni-cross
1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Jeni Cross (biography)

As a leader, are you prone to defensiveness, blame and avoidance? Is your team trapped in a similar pattern? What is the alternative and how to get there?

The Conscious Leadership framework’s 15 commitments (Dethmer, Chapman and Klemp, 2014) offer powerful tools for addressing these questions. Central to this framework is the distinction between operating “above the line,” which involves openness, curiosity, and a commitment to growth, and “below the line,” characterized by defensiveness, blame, and avoidance. The first three commitments—taking radical responsibility, learning through curiosity, and feeling all feelings—serve as foundational steps for leaders and teams to maintain an “above the line” mindset. This post explores these commitments and the associated tools to empower leaders in guiding their teams from below to above the line.

Read more

Setting up your team for knowledge integration

By Shalini Misra, Megan A. Rippy and Stanley B. Grant.

authors_shalini-misra_megan-rippy_stanley-grant
1. Shalini Misra (biography)
2. Megan A. Rippy (biography)
3. Stanley B. Grant (biography)

What kinds of collaborative arrangements best foster knowledge integration? Should you keep your team together by forming one big group to work toward your shared goals? Or should you differentiate tasks by breaking work into smaller components and assign the pieces to sub-groups? How large should sub-groups be and how should they be composed? What types of engagement processes lead to successful knowledge integration?

If you have led a large cross-disciplinary research effort, you have grappled with these questions.

We addressed these questions by assessing the linkages between integration processes and research products in a self-evaluation of the first two years of our National Science Foundation Growing Convergence Research project on inland freshwater salinization (Misra, Rippy and Grant, 2024).

Read more

Six lessons from Iran for strengthening cross-disciplinary research

By Reza Dehnavieh

reza-dehnavieh
Reza Dehnavieh (biography)

How can universities in countries which have centralised and traditional discipline-based systems encourage cross-disciplinary research and education?

Here I describe lessons from the work of the Institute for Futures Studies in Health, which is an Iran-based organization specializing in foresight activities in Iran’s health system. The Institute is affiliated with Kerman University of Medical Sciences, and was launched in 2012. The Institute utilizes knowledge management in combination with the development of a more desirable future as the key concept at the core of its identity and follows four main goals:

  1. evidence-based decision-making,
  2. networking among stakeholders within and outside the health sector,
  3. developing capabilities and empowerment of stakeholders, and
  4. outlining strategic perspectives on health.

Read more

An effective way to organize research coordination meetings

By Gemma Jiang, Diane Boghrat and Jenny Grabmeier

authors_emma-jiang_diane-boghrat_jenny-grabmeier
1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Diane Boghrat (biography)
3. Jenny Grabmeier (biography)

How can large cross-disciplinary science institutes consisting of multiple teams working on multiple research projects overcome significant challenges to research coordination? Key aspects are:

  1. Visibility: how to keep different project teams informed of each other’s progress?
  2. Learning: how to support cross-project learning?
  3. Accountability: how to keep project teams accountable for their goals and deliverables?

Tackling these challenges requires a combination of asynchronous communications such as Slack, newsletters and emails, as well as synchronous communications such as research coordination meetings.

Read more

Improving cross-disciplinary collaboration with strategy knotworking and ecocycle planning

By Nancy White

nancy-white
Nancy White (biography)

How can cross-disciplinary teams improve their project results and cross-team learning, especially when they are part of a portfolio of funded projects?

I have worked with cross disciplinary teams in international agriculture development, ecosystems management and mental health. For the most part, these are externally funded initiatives and have requirements both for results (application of the work) and for cross-team learning. Often there is not useful clarity about how funder and grantee agendas work in sync. And there is rarely opportunity or support for shared optimization and exploration across different portfolios of funded work.

I have used the six knotworking questions plus ecocycle planning from Liberating Structures to make it possible for a group to look back critically, assess the current state, and prospectively generate options to move forward.

Read more

A process for generating new cross-disciplinary projects

By Gemma Jiang

author_gemma-jiang
Gemma Jiang (biography)

What is a good way for researchers in large cross-disciplinary science initiatives, who may not know each other well, to generate viable project ideas?

This blog post introduces a field-tested “double helix” process that leverages the benefits of idea generation by a large group and idea refinement in small groups.

This double helix process is most helpful in large cross-disciplinary science initiatives that meet at least one of the following three characteristics:

  • Tackling wicked problems with both scientific and societal significance
  • Requiring deep integration across multiple disciplines that will eventually lead to new meta-disciplines
  • Consisting of more than 20 core research members.

The nature of the challenges, the depth of integration and the size of the group in such large initiatives require systemic support to move ideas to projects.

Read more

Enhancing mutual learning in developing a cross-disciplinary team

By Eric Schearer and Gemma Jiang

authors_eric-schearer_gemma-jiang
1. Eric Schearer (biography)
2. Gemma Jiang (biography)

How can newly forming cross-disciplinary teams develop effective strategies for working together?

We provide lessons from our experience preparing a cross-disciplinary research proposal for which we leant heavily on the mutual learning mindsets and norms which are the central elements for the Team Effectiveness Model for Science (Schwarz and Bennett, 2021). The principal investigator (Schearer) enlisted the help of a leadership consultant (Jiang).

Mutual learning mindsets and norms

As shown in the figure below, mutual learning comprises a mindset, composed of core values and assumptions,

Read more

Developing facilitation capacities in graduate students

By Gemma Jiang and Robert Hacku

authors_gemma-jiang_robert-hacku
1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Robert Hacku (biography)

What does it take for graduate students to become good at facilitation? What skills do they need to learn and how can such skills best be imparted?

A facilitator is someone trained in the skill of shaping group dynamics and collective conversations. In cross-disciplinary research, thoughtful facilitation is necessary to enable effective interaction across disciplines and sectors.

We describe an apprentice facilitator program developed in a cross-disciplinary research team comprised of nine faculty and 15 graduate students from four academic institutes, representing six disciplines.

Five apprentices were selected from the graduate students on the team. The program was one semester long and took on average one hour per week.

Read more

Seven tips for developing large-scale cross-disciplinary research proposals

By Gemma Jiang, Jin Wen and Simi Hoque

authors_gemma-jiang_jin-wen_simi-hoque
1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Jin Wen (biography)
3. Simi Hoque (biography)

What are the key ingredients for successfully developing large-scale cross-disciplinary research proposals? What’s required for a team to successfully work together at the proposal development stage?

Here we provide seven lessons based on our experience, divided into:

  • team characteristics
  • structuring the grant proposal writing process.

Team characteristics

Lesson 1: Invite a mix of new blood and established experience.
It is useful to have team members at various stages of their careers, as well as researchers who have worked together previously and those who have never met before. It can work well to have clusters of researchers who have worked intensively within the cluster, but who are new to each other across clusters.

Read more