Sense-making

Stories of self, us, and now: A tool for navigating uncertainty

By Gemma Jiang, Alexis Niki, Darius Melvin and Sarah Hind.

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1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Alexis Niki (biography)
3. Darius Melvin (biography)
4. Sarah Hind (biography)

In times of uncertainty, especially when the role of research, as well as research funding are under threat, how can research teams effectively respond? How can storytelling help?

We show how Marshall Ganz’s (2009) Stories of Self, Us, and Now framework can move groups from individual experiences of uncertainty (Self) to shared meaning (Us), and toward concrete action steps (Now).

Workshop Context

Leadership team members from a large transdisciplinary, cross-institutional research center, entering the fifth (final) year of their funding cycle, partnered with an external team science expert

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Designing for role clarity: An essential leadership skill

By Gemma Jiang and Joan Lurie.

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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?

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Managing deep uncertainty: Exploratory modeling, adaptive plans and joint sense making

By Jan Kwakkel

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Jan Kwakkel (biography)

How can decision making on complex systems come to grips with irreducible, or deep, uncertainty? Such uncertainty has three sources:

  1. Intrinsic limits to predictability in complex systems.
  2. A variety of stakeholders with different perspectives on what the system is and what problem needs to be solved.
  3. Complex systems are generally subject to dynamic change, and can never be completely understood.

Deep uncertainty means that the various parties to a decision do not know or cannot agree on how the system works, how likely various possible future states of the world are, and how important the various outcomes of interest are.

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Making sense of wicked problems

By Bethany Laursen

bethany-laursen
Bethany Laursen (biography)

How do we know when we have good answers to research questions, especially about wicked problems?

Simply and profoundly, we seek answers that make good sense. Every formal method, framework, or theory exists, in the end, to help us gain insight into a mystery. When researching wicked problems, choosing methods, frameworks, and theories should not be guided by tradition or disciplinary standards. Instead, our design choices need to consider more fundamental justifications that cut across disciplinary boundaries. A fundamental criterion for good research is that it makes good sense. By making this criterion our “true North” in wicked problems research, we can more easily find and justify integrating disciplinary (or cultural, or professional) perspectives that apply to a particular problem.

So, how do we make good sense in wicked problems scholarship?

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