Imperfection – Integration and Implementation Insights

Three dimensions of context

July 7, 2026June 30, 2026

gabriele-bammer_nov-2021 — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

By Gabriele Bammer.

In research tackling complex societal and environmental problems, what is involved in taking context into account when aiming for more comprehensive understanding of a problem, as well as research support for policy and practice change so that the problem is better dealt with?

As outlined in my work developing Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S), considering context involves dealing with circumstances at three levels:

social or big picture, eg., the historical, political, economic, cultural, geographical and other circumstances
organizational, especially the structure and culture of the research and stakeholder organisations involved
individual, especially the positionality or identity of researchers and stakeholders.

Each of these dimensions of context has widespread ramifications, affecting:

how a problem manifests and is understood, including what is studied and how, as well as the unknowns considered to be pertinent
what actions are likely to be considered and to have a chance of being successful.

Cultivating epistemic humility in research teams

June 2, 2026

By Faye Miller.

faye-miller_2025 — Faye Miller (biography)

What makes it so challenging for research teams to be truly receptive to being wrong? And what can teams do to make doubt expressible and useful?

Being aware that knowledge is always situational, incomplete, and prone to error, as well as the willingness to hold opinions tentatively, be receptive to change, and recognise the boundaries of understanding, are all components of epistemic humility. Humility about what one knows and can know is an intellectual quality in individual researchers. Yet epistemic humility also has a structural dimension: which doubts get expressed, whose knowledge is heard, and how teams handle what they don’t yet know, are challenges that go beyond the individual researcher to shape how research teams function.

This i2Insights contribution is an attempt to highlight two challenges that need to be addressed:

the confidence trap, built on the pressure to exude certainty, and
the silence trap, arising from the social dynamics that can suppress productive doubt.

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

January 13, 2026November 25, 2025

By Gabriele Bammer.

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 10^th 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.

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.

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

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.