Storytelling – Integration and Implementation Insights

Storytelling and systems change

June 16, 2023February 7, 2023

An i2Insights story based on one originally told by Thea Snow, David Murikumthara, Teya Dusseldorp, Rachel Fyfe, Lila Wolff and Jane McCracken

authors_thea-snow_david-murikumthara_teya-dusseldorp_rachel Fyfe_lila-wolff_jane-mccracken — 1. Thea Snow; 2. David Murikumthara; 3. Teya Dusseldorp; 4. Rachel Fyfe; 5. Lila Wolff; 6. Jane McCracken (biographies)

How is storytelling important in driving systems change? What does good storytelling look like? What makes it hard to tell stories about systems change work? We address these three questions.

But first, what do we mean by systems change? We use the definition developed by New Philanthropy Capital (Abercrombie et al. 2015): “Systems change aims to bring about lasting change by altering underlying structures and supporting mechanisms which make the system operate in a particular way. These can include policies, routines, relationships, resources, power structures and values.”

How is storytelling important in driving systems change?

Stories play different roles at different levels of the system. They can be used to change the system, as well to evaluate, understand and showcase the change that is occurring.

One way for stories to change the system is by supporting individuals to change how they see themselves, their communities, and their broader context. Systems change when people change: how they relate to others, who they are in relationship with, and what they believe they are capable of doing. Stories change the system by supporting individuals to:

Three narratives describing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary researchers

June 16, 2023October 11, 2022

By Laura Norton, Giulia Sonetti and Mauro Sarrica

authors_laura-norton_giulia-sonetti_mauro-sarrica — 1. Laura Norton (biography)
2. Giulia Sonetti (biography)
3. Mauro Sarrica (biography)

How do inter- and trans- disciplinary researchers talk about themselves? Do these narratives disrupt the status-quo and help integrate inter- and trans- disciplinarity into current academic institutions?

Below, we describe three narratives that can be applied to how inter- and trans- disciplinary researchers talk about themselves, namely as:

Heroes
Refugees in sanctuaries
Navigators of shifting borders.

Heroes or the individual escape narrative

This narrative sees inter- and trans- disciplinarity as an individual escape. It focuses on internal characteristics that act as drivers to leave a disciplinary context, which is a box, a silo, a shape that hinders researchers’ ways of conceiving and doing science.

Advancing considerations of affect in interdisciplinary collaborations

June 21, 2023August 16, 2022

By Mareike Smolka, Erik Fisher and Alexandra Hausstein

authors_mareike-smolka_erik-fisher_alexandra-hausstein — 1. Mareike Smolka (biography)
2. Erik Fisher (biography)
2. Alexandra Hausstein’s biography

Have you ever had a fleeting impression of seeing certainty disrupted, the impulse to laugh when your expectations were broken, or a startling sense of something being both familiar and foreign at the same time?

As social scientists engaged in collaborative studies with natural scientists and engineers, we have had these experiences repeatedly while doing research. Whenever we recognized that our social science paradigm was confronted with a different approach to knowing the world, unsettling experiences of difference emerged, which we later analyzed as moments of disconcertment.

In a comparative analysis of the affective substrates of interdisciplinary collaboration (Smolka et al., 2020), we found that attending to disconcertment facilitated collaborative knowledge production. By affective substrates we mean emotional and other bodily feelings that occur during interdisciplinary collaborations.

Facilitating narratives for knowledge co-production: A knowledge broker’s role

May 31, 2022

By Faye Miller and Jess Melbourne-Thomas

authors_faye-miller_jess-melbourne-thomas — 1. Faye Miller (biography)
2. Jess Melbourne-Thomas (biography)

How can knowledge brokers facilitate transdisciplinary knowledge co-production and mobilisation? How can a narrative approach contribute to the knowledge co-creation process?

A knowledge broker often sits between different stakeholders (researchers, end-users, policymakers) to facilitate knowledge co-creation and knowledge mobilisation. Their main role is to make evidence accessible, understandable and useful for knowledge users. As knowledge mobilisation is usually experienced by participants as a personal and social activity, a key starting point for facilitating knowledge co-production with different stakeholders is to develop a narrative approach.

Providing a richer assessment of research influence and impact

August 11, 2023April 14, 2020

By Gabriele Bammer

author - gabriele bammer — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

How can we affirm, value and capitalise on the unique strengths that each individual brings to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research? In particular, how can we capture diversity across individuals, as well as the richness and distinctness of each individual’s influence and impact?

In the course of writing ten reflective narratives (nine single-authored and one co-authored), eleven of us stumbled on a technique that we think could have broader utility in assessing influence and impact, especially in research but also in education (Bammer et al., 2019).We wrote the reflective narratives for a special issue on Julie Thompson Klein’s academic work, in our case especially her impact in Australia and New Zealand. (A taste of Klein’s work can be found in her contributions to this i2Insights blog.)

The process of writing the reflective narratives was unstructured, with each of us writing as much or as little as we wished on whatever aspect of Klein’s work had resonated with us.

A framework to evaluate the impacts of research on policy and practice

August 11, 2023March 3, 2020

By Laura Meagher and David Edwards

authors_laura-meagher_david-edwards — 1. Laura Meagher (biography)
2. David Edwards (biography)

What is meant by impact generation and how can it be facilitated, captured and shared? How can researchers be empowered to think beyond ‘instrumental’ impact and identify other changes generated by their work? How can the cloud of complexity be dispersed so that numerous factors affecting development of impacts can be seen? How can a way be opened for researchers to step back and reflect critically on what happened and what could be improved in the future? How can research teams and stakeholders translate isolated examples of impact and causes of impact into narratives for both learning and dissemination?

We have developed a framework to evaluate research impact in a way that addresses these questions. It has been piloted on 12 case studies led by Forest Research, a government research agency in UK (Edwards and Meagher 2019) and is likely to be useful to researchers more generally, perhaps especially but not exclusively those in applied fields. To date the framework has been found to be user-friendly and fit for purpose.

Using a cartoon video to achieve research impact

August 2, 2023September 17, 2019

By Darren Gray, Yuesheng Li and Don McManus

authors_darren-gray_yuesheng-li_don-mcmanus — 1. Darren Gray (biography)
2. Yuesheng Li (biography)
3. Don McManus (biography)

In the right circumstances, a cartoon video can be an effective way to communicate research information. But what’s involved in developing a cartoon video?

This blog post is based on our experience as a Chinese-Australian partnership in developing an educational cartoon video (The Magic Glasses, link at end of post) which aimed to prevent soil-transmitted helminths (parasitic worm) infections in Chinese schoolchildren. We believe that the principles we applied are more broadly applicable and share them here.

Developing the cartoon video involved three major steps: formative research, production, and pilot testing plus revision.

Formative research

The aim of the formative research is to better understand what you want to change, which in our case was a reduction in behaviours which put Chinese children at risk of being infected by soil-transmitted helminths.

Designing scenarios to guide robust decisions

April 4, 2023July 2, 2019

By Bonnie McBain

What makes scenarios useful to decision makers in effectively planning for the future? Here I discuss three aspects of scenarios:

goals;
design; and,
use and defensibility.

Goals of scenarios

Since predicting the future is not possible, it’s important to know that scenarios are not predictions. Instead, scenarios stimulate thinking and conversations about possible futures.

Key goals and purposes of scenarios can be any of the following:

Five principles of holistic science communication

April 17, 2020February 20, 2018

By Suzi Spitzer

How can we effectively engage in the practice and art of science communication to increase both public understanding and public impact of our science? Here I present five principles based on what I learned at the Science of Science Communication III Sackler Colloquium at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC in November 2017.

1. Assemble a diverse and interdisciplinary team

Scientists should recognize that while they may be an expert on a particular facet of a complex problem, they may not be qualified to serve as an expert on all aspects of the problem. Therefore, scientists and communicators should collaborate to form interdisciplinary scientific teams to best address complex issues.
Science is like any other good or service—it must be strategically communicated if we want members of the public to accept, use, or support it in their daily lives. Thus, research scientists need to partner with content creators and practitioners in order to effectively share and “sell” scientific results.
Collaboration often improves decision making and problem solving processes. People have diverse cognitive models that affect the way each of us sees the world and how we understand or resolve problems. Adequate “thought world diversity” can help teams create and communicate science that is more creative, representative of a wider population, and more broadly applicable.

Let’s stop measuring and start improving

August 24, 2022October 24, 2017

By Louise Locock

When we’re trying to improve the experience of health care, social care and other services users, is there a fast, rigorous way to include their perspectives that doesn’t involve repeatedly collecting new data from them and their families?

Measuring, understanding and improving people’s experience of services has become a priority. There is now an international focus (at least in the West) on person-centred care. The English National Health Service has led the way among health systems by introducing the first nationally mandated patient survey.

Despite the strong political and organisational focus on improving care, reports of unsatisfactory experience continue in even the best funded care systems.

What’s in a name? The role of storytelling in participatory modeling

August 24, 2022June 13, 2017

By Alison Singer

That which we call a rose,
by any other name would smell as sweet.

That Shakespeare guy really knew what he was talking about. A rose is what it is, no matter what we call it. A word is simply a cultural agreement about what we call something. And because language is a common thread that binds cultures together, participatory modeling – as a pursuit that strives to incorporate knowledge and perspectives from diverse stakeholders – is prime for integrating stories into its practice.

To an extent, that’s what every modeling activity does, whether it’s through translating an individual’s story into a fuzzy cognitive map, or into an agent-based model. But I would argue that the drive to quantify everything can sometimes make us lose the richness that a story can provide.

Getting to a shared definition of a “good” solution in collaborative problem-solving

August 24, 2022January 12, 2017

By Doug Easterling

How can collaborative groups move past their divisions and find solutions that advance their shared notions of what would be good for the community?

Complex problems – such as how to expand access to high-quality health care, how to reduce poverty, how to remedy racial disparities in educational attainment and economic opportunity, and how to promote economic development while at the same time protecting natural resources – can’t be solved with technical remedies or within a narrow mindset. They require the sort of multi-disciplinary, nuanced analysis that can only be achieved by engaging a variety of stakeholders in a co-creative process.

Bringing together stakeholders with diverse perspectives allows for a comprehensive analysis of complex problems, but this also raises the risk of a divisive process.