Vision

Navigating the spectrum of leadership styles

By Gemma Jiang, Jenny Grabmeier and Joan Lurie.

authors_gemma-jiang_jenny-grabmeier_joan-lurie
1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Jenny Grabmeier (biography)
3. Joan Lurie (biography)

When you are in a leadership role, are you able to shift your leadership style to accommodate the needs of your team and project? When consensus is hard to reach, are you able to step in with a directive approach? Are you able to hold back from being directive when creativity and participation are needed?

A Spectrum of Leadership Styles

Lewin, Lippitt and White in their foundational 1939 study on group dynamics suggested three leadership styles. In the context of cross-disciplinary science, we do not see these as separate styles or the only three styles, but as reference points along a continuum. At one end of their spectrum lies directive leadership, and at the other, delegative leadership, and somewhere in the middle, participative leadership.

Read more

Learning to use Appreciative Inquiry

By Rachel Arnold

rachel-arnold
Rachel Arnold (biography)

What is Appreciative Inquiry? How does one shift from research that focuses on problems and negative details to the strengths-based approach of Appreciative Inquiry? What are the benefits and requirements of such an approach? And what is it about Appreciative Inquiry that fosters change?

Appreciative Inquiry, developed by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, is a five-step process (originally four steps), as shown in the figure below. The steps are:

  1. Definition – deciding what to study is critical in moving humans in a positive direction
  2. Discovery – discovering and appreciating best experiences
  3. Dream – imagining the ideal – how it would be if those valued experiences happened most of the time
  4. Design – defining the dream more clearly and discussing steps towards realizing it
  5. Destiny – implementing wide ranging actions, improvisation, learning, and adjustments.

Read more

Three principles for co-designing intervention strategies

By David Lam

author-david-lam
David Lam (biography)

What processes are involved when researchers and local actors co-design context-specific intervention strategies? This ‘how to’ knowledge is outlined in the three principles described below. Local actors can include non-governmental organisations, local leaders, community groups and individual activists.

Principle 1. Explore existing and envisioned initiatives fostering change towards the desired future 

This has 3 key steps:

  1. Identifying existing initiatives and knowledge working towards the desired future
  2. Identifying who is involved and leading different existing initiatives
  3. Analysing how existing and possible future initiatives from local actors contribute to changing the state of system elements that need to change for reaching the desired vision or up to an intermediate state.

Read more

Grant proposal writing for teams: Avoiding Frankenstein’s monster

By Lauren Gee

lauren-gee
Lauren Gee (biography)

Writing a grant proposal as a team has many pluses—a plenitude of viewpoints, a wider wealth of knowledge to pull from, and a larger pool of resources to help edit and finalize the proposal. Too often, however, a team-written proposal turns out as “Frankenstein’s monster”: a mess of disparate parts, thrown onto the page. Agreement is missing throughout, with no consistency in terms of vocabulary, style, or even tense. So how can a team work together, from day one, to write a successful, cohesive proposal—how do we avoid Frankenstein’s monster?

Tip 1: Share a vision . . . and a vocabulary

One of the most important things in the team proposal writing process has nothing to do with writing. It is vital for teams to meet before writing begins in order to discuss their idea of the project’s shared vision.

Read more

Collaboration and team science: Top ten take aways

By L. Michelle Bennett and Christophe Marchand

authors_l-michelle-bennett_christophe-marchand
1. L. Michelle Bennett (biography)
2. Christophe Marchand (biography)

What are the key lessons for building a successful collaborative team? A new version of the Collaboration and Team Science Field Guide (Bennett et al., 2018) provides ten top take aways:

1. TRUST
It is almost impossible to imagine a successful collaboration without trust. Trust provides the foundation for a team. Trust is necessary for establishing other aspects of a successful collaboration such as psychological safety, candid conversation, a positive team dynamic, and successful conflict management.

Read more

Critical Back-Casting

By Gerald Midgley

gerald-midgley
Gerald Midgley (biography)

How can we design new services or strategies when the participation of marginalized stakeholders is vital to ethicality? How can we liberate people’s creativity so we can move from incremental improvements to more fundamental change?

To answer these questions, I have brought together insights from Russ Ackoff and Werner Ulrich to develop a new method that I call Critical Back-Casting.

Russ Ackoff, writing in the 1980s, is critical of organizations that focus on incremental improvements without ever asking whether they are doing the right thing in the first place. Thus, they are at risk of continually ‘improving’ the wrong thing, when they would be better off going for a more radical redesign. Ackoff makes two far-reaching prescriptions to tackle this problem.

Read more

Enabling co-creation: From learning cycles to aligning values, rules and knowledge

By Lorrae van Kerkhoff

lorrae-van-kerkhoff
Lorrae van Kerkhoff (biography)

How do we improve? In the context of sustainable development, we continually confront the question of how we can develop meaningful and positive actions towards a ‘better’ world (social, ecological, economic outcomes) despite inherent uncertainties about what the future holds.

Co-creation is one concept among several that seek to reorientate us from simplistic, largely linear ideas of progress towards more nuanced, subtle ideas that highlight that there are many different aspects of ‘progress’, and these can be deeply contested and challenging to reconcile. Enabling co-creation, then – or operationalizing it – means finding practical ways to work together, to deal with our different experiences, aspirations and expectations as well as the uncertainties of the future.

Co-creation sits within a learning paradigm that suggests engagement, social and mutual learning, adaptation and flexibility are key to enabling action in the face of uncertainty. But how do we think about learning?

Read more