Relationships – Integration and Implementation Insights

The essential conditions for, and characteristics of, complexity

May 5, 2026May 5, 2026

By Jean Boulton.

What are the underpinning necessities or conditions—the essential ingredients—that lead to and engender the qualities or characteristics of the complex world, especially its processual and emergent nature?

Three conditions for complexity: the essential ingredients

A watch or intricate machine is not complex. Nor is a saucer of water. So, when do we regard something as complex? What are the necessary conditions for complexity fully to be realised?

These are:

open boundaries
diversity
reflexive inter-relationships among constituents.

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Boundaries as opportunities for learning

April 27, 2026April 14, 2026

By Roger Duck and Jane Searles.

author_roger-duck_jane-searles — 1. Roger Duck (biography)
2. Jane Searles (biography)

Think of a time when you noticed how different ‘they’ are from ‘us’. In that moment, did the relationship become more interesting and alive? Or did it flatten into what looked like a boundary – a barrier to be overcome or a connection to be engineered?

This i2Insights contribution is intended to stimulate your imagination by giving examples from practice of relationships between people and teams being treated as opportunities for learning, rather than boundaries.

Most readers of i2Insights work in research. We believe there is much of relevance here for any context in which people are working together, including research teams.

The context

We expand here on the idea that ‘a system boundary is simultaneously a process of drawing a distinction and identifying an active relationship of mutual learning’ (Duck and Searles 2021).

The Cultiv8 tool Part 1: Actionable insights for cultivating trust

March 19, 2026March 17, 2026

By Julia E. Moore and Sobia Khan.

authors_julia-moore_sobia-khan — 1. Julia E Moore (biography)
2. Sobia Khan (biography)

What are some useful ways of thinking about trust when developing plans to implement your research or strengthen your team? More importantly, what are some practical ways to build trust both as an individual and as an organisation?

Indeed, when asked about some of the most challenging parts of implementing changes and taking part in research collaborations, people often talk about trust. Trust is essential for equity and for working with people in effective ways, but so few of us are trained in how to build trust.

This i2Insights contribution provides a practical approach to thinking about trust, along with actionable steps to cultivate trust to help you achieve your goals, whether you are working with others to implement evidence or looking to strengthen your team dynamics.

Participatory content analysis

February 10, 2026February 3, 2026

By Andréanne Chu Breton-Carbonneau.

andreanne-chu-breton-carbonneau — Andréanne Chu Breton-Carbonneau (biography)

How can participatory action research with trusted community-based organizations ensure that communities most impacted take part in interpretating the data, turning findings into deeper insights and more meaningful community-led solutions?

Participatory content analysis is a final step in participatory action research and enables a community research team to analyze data to identify content themes, visually map relationships, and derive actionable insights based on local knowledge and lived expertise. The community research team comprises academic researchers, community-based organization partners, and “resident researchers,” who are community members recruited—with support from the community-based organization partners—from groups most impacted by the research area.

Navigating power: A partial pragmatic map

December 2, 2025December 2, 2025

By Katie Moon.

In research, how can we start to appreciate unexamined assumptions about what power is, where it resides, how it works, and who holds it, especially how these assumptions influence not only the problems we recognize, but the solutions we pursue? And importantly, who decides? How can we get a better idea of how power informs how we act: what interventions we attempt, whose knowledge we value, whose interests we centre, and what consequences we anticipate?

In this i2Insights contribution I provide an intentionally simplified orienting map that disaggregates power into six dimensions that mirror the ways researchers tend to separate and locate power into distinct domains to rationalise and evaluate interventions. I match these dimensions to three onto-epistemological frames—objective, constructionist, and relational—which were described in a previous i2Insights contribution A guide to ontology, epistemology, and philosophical perspectives for interdisciplinary researchers.

Six elements of effective co-design

October 7, 2025September 30, 2025

By Will Allen.

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.

Lessons for transformative research from co-creating a conference without a fixed plan

November 27, 2025September 23, 2025

By Thomas Bruhn.

In developing a conference, what does it take for people to leave their comfort zones to co-design something new? What possibilities does this open up for more meaningful conference designs? What are the broader lessons for transformative research?

In 2023–2024, I worked with the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to develop a conference format for the German sustainability research community – something to help re-establish connection after the isolating COVID pandemic years, and to strengthen interdisciplinary exchange. The Ministry wanted something new and innovative.

Early in the conversation, I sensed hesitation when unconventional, interactive conference formats were suggested.

Five core concepts for understanding systems

October 7, 2025September 16, 2025

By Andrei Savu.

What concepts are key to understanding systems?

A system is a set of interdependent elements whose coordinated interactions give rise to an outcome none of the pieces can deliver alone. The key word is relationship: change the relationships and the behavior of the whole shifts, even if every component remains identical.

Five core concepts for systems thinking are: purpose, boundary, feedback, leverage and emergence.

Purpose and boundary

Every system exists to fulfill a purpose, defined by boundaries that separate internal elements from external factors. These two fundamental concepts—purpose and boundary—determine how we understand, analyze, and influence systems of all types.

Key leadership practices in transdisciplinary projects

July 8, 2025

By Susanne C. Moser.

susanne-moser — Susanne C. Moser (biography)

When training transdisciplinarians, which leadership skills and practices is it helpful to encourage?

The kind of leadership that someone brings to a transdisciplinary project has decisive implications for how a project unfolds and for its likelihood of success. Conventional thinking about leadership often hinges on unspoken assumptions about hierarchies, power, and the significance and impact of a single individual; it also often implies unspoken ideas about inclusion, assignment, or sharing of rights and responsibilities, and those to praise or blame for any outcomes. At the same time, transdisciplinary research encourages practices that flatten hierarchies; challenge power; promote diversification and inclusion of different disciplines, expertise, and ways of knowing; and question traditional research processes.

Principles for place-based community participation

July 29, 2025July 1, 2025

By James A. Turner.

james-turner_2025 — James A. Turner (biography)

How can a community’s sense of connection and responsibility to care for their place be strengthened? How can this lead to ground-up change, driven by communities, to tackle complex social, economic, and environmental issues? How can such change draw on the deep sense of care and belonging people feel for their communities and environments to tailor solutions to the unique needs and context of a place?

We identified eleven key principles associated with successful place-based community-led projects. These are the first principles to be developed in-country, rather than being imported from overseas and, because these are place-based, they are specific to Aotearoa New Zealand. We share them here to illustrate what specific place-based principles look like.

A framework for creating effective team integration in interdisciplinary research

August 20, 2025June 24, 2025

By Colleen Cuddy.

What kinds of integration are required in interdisciplinary teams to truly synthesize diverse knowledge and perspectives, creating meaningful outcomes? What are the key facilitators of successful integration?

Integration is a core team process in which “ideas, data and information, methods, tools, concepts, and/or theories … are synthesized, connected, or blended” (Repko, 2012: 4), combining diverse inputs that differ from and are more than the sum of parts (National Research Council, 2015). Integration is multifaceted, and interdisciplinary teams employ several types of integration, as shown in the table below. Social, knowledge, cognitive, and conceptual integration can be seen as a spectrum, with teams utilizing multiple types of integration, often concurrently, to reach team goals, and with innovative teams moving through the spectrum towards conceptual integration.

How individual members can contribute to effective team functioning

May 7, 2025May 6, 2025

Edited by Gabriele Bammer.

For team dynamics to work effectively, what is the range of contributions that needs to be covered by different team members? How can diversity in skills relevant to team functioning be effectively recognised and harnessed? Here the focus is not on the actual task the team is trying to accomplish, but rather the dynamics of working together and the different contributions or roles required for effective team functioning.

A number of proprietary products (i.e., products owned by companies that need to be purchased to be used) have been developed to help teams assess the strengths and weaknesses of individual team members in contributing to effective team performance. The focus in this Editor’s Addition is to use one such product, CliftonStrengths^®, to highlight one set of understandings about what key team dynamics are. Information available on the CliftonStrengths^® website is used in abbreviated form and without the summary terms used to encapsulate each team and personal attribute.