Productive disagreement

Three lessons for designing serious games for educational settings

By Alice H. Aubert.

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Alice H. Aubert (biography)

What is Triadic Game Design and what lessons does it provide for designing and analysing serious games in an educational setting?

Triadic Game Design

The Triadic Game Design is a design framework for serious games that defines three essential, interrelated elements—Reality, Meaning, and Play—that need to be integrated and balanced (Harteveld 2011).

Reality ensures the game represents the real world sufficiently (ie., in a valid and reliable way that can be understood by the target players). Subject-matter experts model the Reality in the game focusing on the problem, its influencing factors, and relationships.

Meaning pertains to the game’s purpose and its transference to the real world, to create added value through playing the game.

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Six elements of effective co-design

By Will Allen.

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Will Allen (biography)

What does co-design for tackling complex challenges look like in practice?

Co-design is a collective way of navigating complexity, taking different forms depending on context. The following six elements are a reflection on patterns I’ve seen emerge through practice, especially in settings where multiple perspectives matter.

1. Starting with shared grounding: Creating early alignment through shared values, context, and purpose

In many collaborative projects, there’s a tendency to begin by defining tasks – what needs doing, by whom, and when. But in complex settings, where multiple perspectives and values come into play, it’s often more important to begin with relationships. It helps to understand where people are coming from, what matters to them, and how they see the purpose.

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A tool for developing shared awareness of team member research interests and expertise

By Melanie Bauer, Joshua Roney and Stephen M. Fiore.

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1. Melanie Bauer (biography)
2. Joshua Roney (biography)
3. Stephen M. Fiore (biography)

How can team members who have been working together for a while check assumptions, ensuring they are aware of each other’s breadth of expertise and research interests?

We have developed the “Linking-Relinking” tool to facilitate such a process. This tool supports science teams through development of a transactive memory system, which is a form of shared cognition having to do with “who knows what” on a team. Studies continually show that teams that develop an accurate transactive memory system are better able to coordinate their knowledge when working on challenging problems. The Linking-Relinking Tool can support transactive memory system development by helping members determine how accurate their knowledge is of their teammates and calibrate appropriately.

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Mindset matters for interdisciplinary teams: Choose a collaborative one

By L. Michelle Bennett

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L. Michelle Bennett (biography)
  • How often do you think about what you are thinking about?
  • How about what you believe? What your values are? Or your deep set needs?
  • Do you recognize that everything you say, do, or write as a member of an interdisciplinary team is influenced by what is in your head? And your team members by what is in theirs?

We can all relate to what it is like to be doing a project with close colleagues when things work seamlessly, the group is productive, everyone innately seems to know what to do and how to do it, people are comfortable pointing out things that need to be changed or fixed, and everyone is fully present.

I’m guessing we can all also relate to what it is like when there is tension among colleagues. Maybe there is something amiss that everyone sees or notices, but no one is willing to surface for discussion, so everyone sidesteps.

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The collaboration planning framework

Edited by Gabriele Bammer

What is the collaboration planning framework? What kinds of collaborations is it suitable for? What does it involve?

The collaboration planning framework, described by Hall and colleagues (2019), aims to help research teams identify, discuss and make decisions about ten key influences that the team science literature has shown to affect teamwork. The aim is to “lay the groundwork for success by supporting effective team functioning, identifying needed changes, and preventing or mitigating what are often predictable challenges” (p. 588). A written collaboration plan is used to capture the decisions made.

While the collaboration planning framework is most useful for large, complex teams, it can benefit any team.

The ten key elements of the framework are:
1. Rationale for team approach and team composition
2. Collaboration readiness

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Integration in inter- and transdisciplinary research: how can the leadership challenges be addressed?

By Lisa Deutsch and Sabine Hoffmann

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1. Lisa Deutsch (biography)
2. Sabine Hoffmann (biography)

How can the integration required in large inter- and transdisciplinary programs be effectively led? What challenges do leaders of integration in such programs face and how can they address them? What are the particular challenges in using a theory of change as an integrative tool?

We describe five key challenges that we encountered when leading the integration for a large 10-year inter- and transdisciplinary research program, which explored novel non-grid water and sanitation systems that can function as comparable alternatives to conventional large network-based systems. We experienced these challenges when applying the tool Theory of Change to facilitate communication, collaboration and integration among the team members (for more on theory of change see the i2Insights contribution by Heléne Clark). We also share the strategies we employed to address these challenges. The lessons we developed are likely to be applicable to other inter- and transdisciplinary research programs.

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Basic steps for dealing with problematic value pluralism

By Bethany Laursen, Stephen Crowley and Chad Gonnerman

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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.

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A tool for transforming resistance to insights in decision-making

By Gemma Jiang

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Gemma Jiang (biography)

Do you encounter resistance from your team members, especially in regard to difficult decisions? How might decision-making processes be better facilitated to generate insights instead of resistance?

I describe a conceptual framework and an accompanying practical tool from Lewis Deep Democracy (2021) that can transform resistance to insights in decision-making processes.

The conceptual framework: Understanding how decision making generates resistance

It is important first to understand the consciousness of a team. If you think of a team’s consciousness as an iceberg, the ideas and opinions that are expressed are the conscious part above the waterline, while those that are not expressed are the unconscious part below the waterline.

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Gradients of agreement for democratic decision-making

By Hannah Love

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Hannah Love (biography)

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.

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What’s required for universities to address complex societal challenges?

By David D. Hart and Linda Silka

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1. David D. Hart (biography)
2. Linda Silka (biography)

How can universities use their broad array of expertise to help in understanding and addressing complex challenges, including pandemics, environmental degradation, poverty and climate change?

For more than a decade, we have been engaged in an innovative collaboration with more than 200 faculty from nearly 30 academic disciplines to align university research with societal needs. We conceived of this initiative as an “institutional experiment,” in which our public university in the US state of Maine served as the “laboratory.”

Given Maine’s priorities and our collective expertise, we focused these problem-solving efforts on the challenge of sustainable development, which requires a dual focus on improving human well-being and protecting the environment. We created a diverse portfolio of projects on, for example, fisheries, forests, food insecurity, renewable energy, and climate adaptation.

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Guiding collaborative conversations and connections with probing questions

By Yulia A. Strekalova and Wayne T. McCormack

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1. Yulia A. Strekalova (biography)
2. Wayne T. McCormack (biography)

How can we ignite discovery conversations and foster open, psychologically safe conversations among researchers from different disciplines who have not met previously?

This blog post is based on the findings of a workshop with pre-doctoral trainees (Strekalova and McCormack 2020), but is likely to have broader relevance. The workshop was structured around the initial steps of Strategic DoingTM (Morrison et al., 2019), a disciplined approach to facilitating complex collaborative projects. The conversations in the room progressed by addressing five key PROBE-Action questions.

Question 1. What personal expertise and interests are represented in the room?

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Using discomfort to prompt learning in collaborative teams

By Rebecca Freeth and Guido Caniglia

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1. Rebecca Freeth (biography)
2. Guido Caniglia (biography)

We know that reflecting can make a marked difference to the quality of our collective endeavour. However, in the daily busyness of inter- and trans- disciplinary research collaborations, time for reflection slides away from us as more immediate tasks jostle for attention. What would help us put into regular practice what we know in theory about prioritising time to reflect and learn?

Discomfort sometimes provides the necessary nudge in the ribs that reminds us to keep reflecting and learning. The discomfort of listening to the presentation of a colleague you like and respect, but having very little idea what they’re talking about.

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