Some useful tools and conceptual frameworks
| TEAMS & ROLES | ||
| Tuckman’s stages of group development | Describes how team effectiveness varies with time/performance impact. The stages are: forming, storming, norming, performing. | Tuckman (1965) |
| Typology of disciplinary brokerage roles | Described different roles of brokers in interdisciplinary research: disciplinary coordinators, interdisciplinary boundary spanners, interdisciplinary bridge. | Locatelli et al. (2021) |
| COMPETENCIES | ||
| The five dimensions of Futures Consciousness | Five different dimensions of Futures Consciousness: 1) time perspective, 2) agency beliefs, 3) openness to alternatives, 4) systems perception and 5) concern for others. | Ahvenharju et al. (2018) |
| Five competencies in sustainability | Five key competencies in sustainability linked to integrated research and problem-solving: 1) systems-thinking competence, 2) anticipatory competence, 3) normative competence, 4) strategic competence, and 5) interpersonal competence. | Wiek et al. (2011) |
| Nine interconnected competencies for enabling change | Nine competencies required by potential change agents or collectives for enabling change, grouped as:
• Good with people • Learning or mastery skills • Adaptation competencies. |
Meharg (2020) |
| UNDERSTANDING PROBLEM CONTEXT AND RESEARCH MODE | ||
| Snowden’s Cynefin framework | Cynefin offers five decision-making contexts or “domains” – simple/obvious, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder – that help managers to identify how they perceive situations and make sense of their own and other people’s behaviour. The framework draws on research into systems theory, complexity theory, network theory and learning theories. | Snowden and Boone (2007) |
| The TD wheel | The transdisciplinary (TD) wheel provides a framework for connecting the problem context and research context via research processes and outputs. | Carew and Wickson (2010) |
| Transdisciplinary research process model | Model for considering the connections between societal problems, discourse and practice, and scientific problems, discourse and results. | Bergmann and Jahn (2017) |
| UNDERSTANDING IMPACT OF TRANSDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH | ||
| Theory of Change (ToC) | ToC refers to a process where stakeholders develop, monitor and evaluate theories that underpin the design of an intervention and explain how and why impact will be achieved through the implementation of the intervention.
|
Many (see for example Davies, 2004) |
| Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) | Understanding what is working well, what isn’t working, and why | Many (see for example Stone-Jovicich et al. 2019) |
| Transformational change: ten essentials | Ten essentials for contributing more directly to transformational change through transdisciplinary research. The ten essentials include focussing on specific processes and approaches, as well as ways of working. | Fazey (2019) |
| Values-Rules-Knowledge | Framework to explore the interconnections between values, rules and knowledge in decision-making, to identify assumptions and gaps in decision-making systems and processes. | Gorddard et al. (2016) |
| ‘Hierarchy of needs’ | ‘Hierarchy of needs’ for achieving impact in international Research for Development.
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Butler et al. (2017) |