Expertise

Training specialists to solve wicked problems

By Vladimir Mokiy.

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Vladimir Mokiy (biography)

How can a modern university train highly qualified specialists who are able to rethink and unambiguously solve wicked problems?

Here I build on my previous i2Insights contribution Systems transdisciplinarity as a metadiscipline, the methodology of which aims to unify and generalize complementary and non-complementary disciplinary knowledge and methodologies. This metadiscipline provides the basis of a proposed curriculum for a two-year training program at the masters level. The intention is that specialists would be trained in systems transdisciplinarity using a single curriculum to ensure a uniform level of professional capabilities and competencies.

The curriculum

The curriculum involves the organization of training in four sections.

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i2Insights@10years: Strengthening a global, comprehensive, living toolkit for tackling complex problems

By Gabriele Bammer.

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How can i2Insights best capitalise on its first ten years and the wealth of resources contributed from around the world? How can you contribute to strengthening the i2Insights toolkit?

On 25 November 2025, i2Insights celebrates its 10th birthday as a toolkit to support researchers and educators tackling complex societal and environmental problems, specifically providing tools to understand and address complexity. It sets out to be:

  • global, with contributions from around the world
  • comprehensive, tackling all aspects of addressing complex problems
  • living, continuing to grow and stay up-to-date.

It’s a good time to reinvigorate the aims, strengthen the toolkit and celebrate achievements.

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Harnessing the collision of four ways of knowing

By Adrian Wolfberg.

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Adrian Wolfberg (biography)

How can solving today’s most complex challenges reckon with four fundamentally different ways of knowing? How can the collision of their distinct epistemic strengths and blind spots be harnessed for innovation in threat assessment and decision-making on complex problems?

Let me unpack these four ways of knowing and how they shape, support, and sometimes undermine each other. Here, I use the example of climate security intelligence, but the insights and lessons are likely to apply to a wider range of complex societal and environmental issues. The four ways of knowing are:

  1. Scientific knowledge from the physical sciences
  2. Scientific knowledge from the social sciences
  3. Judgment under uncertainty by knowledge-producing professionals
  4. Practical decision-making by practitioners who are senior executives.

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

By Basirat Oyalowo.

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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.

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What roles do you play in inter- and transdisciplinary projects?

By Hanna Salomon, Benjamin Hofmann and Sabine Hoffmann.

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1. Hanna Salomon (biography)
2. Benjamin Hofmann (biography)
3. Sabine Hoffmann (biography)

What roles do researchers typically play in inter- and transdisciplinary projects? How can they be made transparent in order to reflect on them?

Inter- and transdisciplinary projects typically require different roles and the researchers involved may play one or more of them. There is a plethora of literature describing various ideal-typical roles and we used the literature on researchers’ roles in sustainability science to develop a reflection tool on researcher roles in inter- and transdisciplinary projects.

A Role Reflection Tool

The reflection tool consists of a role survey for individual researchers, a spider web graph for immediate role visualization on the individual and project team level, and a set of questions for individual and project team reflections.

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Fostering transdisciplinary research in the Global South: Lessons for funders

By Flurina Schneider, Zarina Patel, Katsia Paulavets, Tobias Buser, Jacqueline Kado and Stefanie Burkhart.

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1. Flurina Schneider; 2. Zarina Patel; 3. Katsia Paulavets; 4. Tobias Buser; 5. Jacqueline Kado; 6. Stefanie Burkhart (biographies)

How can research funding programmes address existing inequalities in global science systems? How can they foster science-society-policy interactions and transdisciplinary research in the Global South?

Inequalities in science disadvantage the Global South in terms of classical science metrics such as the number of researchers and publications, but also in terms of access to research, funding and infrastructure. Early career researchers are particularly affected.

To address these inequalities, financial investment in research capacity is needed from both national governments and international donors. However, dependence on international funding reinforces the influence of the Global North in setting research agendas in the Global South. We argue that international research funders can mitigate this challenge by supporting transdisciplinary research, because transdisciplinary research integrates different perspectives to resonate with local realities and problems.

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

By Gabriele Bammer

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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.

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Competencies for systems thinking practitioners. Part 2: Skills and behaviours

Edited by Gabriele Bammer

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What skills and behaviours are required by those seeking to provide expert systemic analysis, advice and facilitation to support decision-makers in understanding and addressing complex problems?

This is the second of two blog posts presenting the systems thinking competencies provided by the UK Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (no date) and completes an overview of what decision makers should be able to expect from systems thinking practitioners, along with the knowledge, skills and behaviour competencies such systems thinking practitioners should have. The first blog post provided overall expectations of what systems thinking practitioners should be able to do and knowledge competencies.

Skills competencies

Skills in 11 areas are required for a systems thinking practitioner.

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Competencies for systems thinking practitioners. Part 1: Overall expectations and knowledge

Edited by Gabriele Bammer

editors-addition_systems

What knowledge, skills and behaviours are required by those seeking to provide expert systemic analysis, advice and facilitation to support decision-makers in understanding and addressing complex problems, ie., problems that have no single ‘owner’ or cause, and no simple solution? What should decision makers be able to expect from the systems thinking practitioners they engage with?

The UK Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (no date) provides competencies in knowledge, skills and behaviours and these are reproduced here (knowledge competencies), and in a companion blog post (skills and behaviour competencies). This list of competencies provides a very useful way of getting an overview of systems thinking and the skills required.

What should systems thinking practitioners be able to do?

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Generating evidence using the Delphi method

By Dmitry Khodyakov

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Dmitry Khodyakov (biography)

What is Delphi? How has the Delphi method stood up over time? How can the best of Delphi be adapted to new circumstances and problems?

The Delphi method is a group-based process for eliciting and aggregating opinion on a topic with a goal of exploring the existence of consensus among a diverse group of handpicked experts. The Delphi method was developed at the RAND Corporation in the early 1950s to obtain a reliable expert consensus, which is often used as a substitute for empirical evidence when it does not exist.

The four key characteristics of the Delphi method are:

  1. anonymity, 
  2. iterative data collection,
  3. participant feedback, and
  4. statistical determination of group response.

As a result, Delphi has become best practice for quantifying the results of group elicitation processes.

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Towards a taxonomy of synthesizing

By Howard Gardner

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Howard Gardner (biography) (photo credit: Harvard Graduate School of Education)

“Synthesis” seems to be in the atmosphere. The capacity to synthesize, the need for syntheses, and improvement of the quality of syntheses—these are seemingly of interest to many.

A preliminary working definition:

A synthesis is an attempt to bring together various ideas, strands, concepts, and materials. A good synthesis enhances one’s understanding of a question, puzzle, phenomenon (or multiples of these). Familiar examples are school term papers, doctoral dissertations, position papers, landscape analyses, executive summaries, and textbooks. But one can easily extend the list beyond the verbal—to chemical syntheses, equations in physics or mathematics, works of art (poems, paintings, dioramas)—indeed any creation or invention that brings together disparate elements in a satisfying and illuminating way.

Of course, it’s important to avoid the situation where just about everything qualifies as a synthesis.

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Interdisciplinary teamwork: Expert and non-expert at the same time

By Annemarie Horn and Eduardo Urias

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1. Annemarie Horn (biography)
2. Eduardo Urias (biography)

How do teams engage in interdisciplinary knowledge integration and how can they be supported in doing so? Why does simple sharing and questioning of knowledge not necessarily lead to interdisciplinary knowledge integration? And what does it mean to act as both an expert and a non-expert in interdisciplinary teamwork, and why is it hard?

In a five month course, we supervised a team of eight master students in the integration of insights and concepts from their individual, discipline-based projects into a joint work about circular economy. Based on our earlier research, described in our i2Insights contribution on four typical behaviours in interdisciplinary knowledge integration, we expected that if we helped the students to share their own knowledge and to engage with each other’s knowledge, that integration would emerge. We therefore had students prepare and give presentations about their individual projects, background, and conceptual underpinnings to share their knowledge.

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