18 – The Trans Disciplinary Principle

[00:00:00] Santiago: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS Principle. I am Santiago Borio, an Impact Activation Fellow, and I’m here with David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS.

Hi David.

[00:00:15] David: Hi Santiago. We’re doing Principles again. Which principle are we on today?

[00:00:20] Santiago: Today we’re on Transdisciplinary. I must say I heard about transdisciplinarity compared to multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary working methodologies, I would say. You probably have better wording for it. But before we get into the discussion, let’s see what the IDEMS website says about this.

So this principle defines a role of subject experts in company activities. “It forces subject experts out of their comfort zone by engaging beyond their expertise and discipline.” So as I was saying, I get confused between multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and there is a choice of transdisciplinary in here. Can you tell me what the difference between…

[00:01:15] David: So the easiest explanations I’ve ever heard for these are multidisciplinary broadly means that you have people from different disciplines working within their discipline as part of something which is bigger than their individual work. And so the multidisciplinarity comes out, everybody does their component, and together this is more than the sum of its parts. This is a multidisciplinary process. It brings together multiple disciplines.

Interdisciplinary, you would actually have disciplinary experts working together on the same problem, the same component. So they’d be working as disciplinary experts together on the same component. Whereas in your multidisciplinary, everybody’s working on their own component, something which is bigger. So interdisciplinary is in some sense more collaborative, you can’t do the disciplinary component separately. They have to be working together.

[00:02:17] Santiago: You can’t break down the problem into smaller problems that are specific to an individual discipline.

[00:02:22] David: Exactly, yeah. And transdisciplinary, really, it’s different from the other two in the sense that it’s really an approach. So it would mean that you would expect people to work and to contribute outside of their discipline. You would have maybe different discipline experts not just working together on a project, but actually having views about things which are outside of their disciplinary expertise.

And this is something I’ve been exposed to over the years, particularly because of my roles in low resource environments, where people with the sort of mathematical expertise have been in short supply, and I’ve been brought in and been able to work and contribute across, where maybe otherwise my particular subject expertise would not have been what was important. Whereas actually I was able to contribute to people in their disciplines in a different way, and we were working in very transdisciplinary ways.

[00:03:31] Santiago: But you said disciplinary experts have views outside their discipline. It’s more than having views.

[00:03:37] David: Yes, absolutely. It is. So, I have worked on projects as knowing very little about soil sciences, I have influenced and had been part of a process around soil science, which is where that’s really the focus.

[00:03:58] Santiago: Surely you should let the soils science experts…

[00:04:03] David: What’s really interesting, which I found over the years, is that actually working in transdisciplinary ways is one of the best ways to innovate and to actually go beyond, because I’ve been able to bring in ideas from other disciplines and from other things which the soil scientists wouldn’t necessarily have thought of. It requires a very different mindset.

I still remember sitting in a room of agricultural experts and listening to different experts talk and they were arguing at each other saying, they have very different perspectives. Whereas when I listened to it, they were really saying the same thing from different angles. And so I voiced this opinion and suddenly they were able to reframe what they were actually saying and how they were seeing that they weren’t disagreeing with one another. They were saying the same thing from different angles because they were so in their discipline that they didn’t see the links in the same way, whereas somebody who’s outside the discipline sometimes can play that mediator role.

Now that’s a slightly different process, that’s not quite the nature of transdisciplinary, but transdisciplinary teams can be extremely effective at thinking outside the box of a discipline, actually going beyond.

[00:05:17] Santiago: Sorry, can you explain that a bit more?

[00:05:19] David: There was a Nobel Prize in economics, Esther Duflo, who broadly is applying medical research methods to development processes, bringing the randomised control trial into international development, and actually bringing some of the rigour that came with it. That’s a whole different podcast, I don’t want to delve into that. It’s a very interesting topic area. It has its positives and negatives in different ways, but it’s a fantastic example, which is very well understood and very well documented, of where methods from one discipline can add value to another.

And actually most of the big innovations that I’ve observed over the years have had a component of this. If somebody, from another discipline, have been exposed to how people do things in that area, seeing the relevance of what they’re doing to another area. And this is the real value I find of Transdisciplinary.

[00:06:25] Santiago: Yeah, and that’s why you’re saying that you’re forcing subject experts to engage in other areas.

[00:06:33] David: Exactly. So very simply, if I work in an interdisciplinary project, there is no expectation for me to learn about the other disciplines. The expectation is I trust the experts from those disciplines. Whereas with transdisciplinary, the expectation is for me to learn enough to ask awkward questions, to put my nose in to what they’re doing. And they should be doing the same to me. They should be learning enough to ask awkward questions and put their nose in, so to speak. And so this leads to debate.

[00:07:06] Santiago: What we’re doing now is an example of that transdisciplinarity, because I’m not an expert on the IDEMS principles. My expertise is elsewhere. I need to contribute to the explanation and storytelling of the principles. So I’m getting outside of my comfort zone by engaging in dialogue with you.

[00:07:25] David: I can see how that would be a nice way of framing it, but I don’t feel that this is a disciplinary box. I don’t know a disciplinary box of principles in that sense.

[00:07:34] Santiago: It’s an oversimplification, let’s say.

[00:07:36] David: It’s a slight oversimplification, but yes, it is about this element of, particularly for people from the mathematical sciences who are engaging with other experts, I believe when we are not transdisciplinary, we’re not very useful. Because actually, a big part of the value we bring comes from understanding the domain. And if we don’t engage in the domains, if we try to just stay in our discipline, just say, I just work with the numbers, then we very often…

[00:08:13] Santiago: This is quite related to discussions we had in other episodes about academia in general, and how narrow the research is at the moment, and we’re building loads of experts in very specific areas that try not to go out of that.

[00:08:33] David: Exactly. And there was a report which is really old now. It’s actually a report called the Roberts Reports, where there’s also other more famous Roberts Reports, but never mind. This was the Roberts Report into sort of basically PhDs in the mathematical sciences. And was it? PhDs in general in the UK which found that they were too narrow and that found that the need for soft skills or for other skills to be part of the sort of doctoral training was central about how we build the scientists of the future. What I find so ironic, the value of transdisciplinary science, of people who cut across boundaries, who provide this fertilisation, is really well recognised in many circles.

[00:09:17] Santiago: And we’ll probably do another episode at some point on the IDEMS PhD model.

[00:09:23] David: Well, it’s not yet the IDEMS PhD model because we’ve not yet got anyone to really implement it.

[00:09:29] Santiago: It’s a model.

[00:09:29] David: It’s a model, but it’s not yet, I haven’t got a…

[00:09:34] Santiago: It hasn’t been applied.

[00:09:35] David: I haven’t got the mechanisms to apply it but it is thinking about a PhD process, a doctoral process as being transdisciplinary.

[00:09:44] Santiago: Sorry isn’t, in some ways, Danny, the other founding director…

[00:09:48] David: An instance. Well, and I have other PhD students who have done this before. It’s come out of one of the first PhDs I was involved in supervising, who is now an Impact Activation Fellow with IDEMS. And during his PhD, he was not just doing research, he was doing education initiatives, he was managing grants and actually doing impact oriented work. And so that model of how much more a transdisciplinary PhD, includes disciplinary research, but does not have that as the primary focus, even.

And we’re not the first people to suggest this. In education, it’s really well recognised, so rather than your academic PhD, you can have a professional PhD. And in engineering, there are similar things as well. And in some cases, these are really highly respected. And that’s what we believe is needed.

That’s come from a whole long different discussion, as you say. Don’t want to get caught up in that. But it is related to this idea that our academic institutions, I believe, are too disciplinary focused. I’m not saying specialisation is bad. I’m saying our academic institutions are too specialised, and that’s one of the reasons we as an institution prioritise transdisciplinary.

[00:11:15] Santiago: And they’re not helping develop the soft skills that you mentioned that are needed.

[00:11:19] David: Some are, and some put an emphasis on that. That’s a separate discussion. Transdisciplinary and soft skills it’s a different thing. But transdisciplinary, I do not know many academic institutions that really walk the walk of transdisciplinary.

In Austria, there’s a PhD program which cuts across three departments. There’s a few groups around the world in Wageningen and a few other places where they try to do elements of this. But at their heart, really, most academic institutions put in place these disciplinary boundaries which make transdisciplinary hard. And yet its value is recognised.

We’re not saying that everything should be transdisciplinary, just like every other principle. It wouldn’t be a good principle if there wasn’t a sensible alternative, which is sensible in many other cases. But what we’re saying is that there’s a need, it’s maybe underrepresented in areas, and we believe that this is something where in what we do…

[00:12:26] Santiago: Sorry, before we get into the value of this principle in what we do, there’s a couple of words that I want to challenge you. And as we say, pretty much in every episode, every word matters. You, want to force subject expert out of their comfort zone.

[00:12:44] David: Yes.

[00:12:45] Santiago: Is that really a requirement for transdisciplinarity?

[00:12:49] David: Yes, I would argue it is. Again, there’s other people who might have other definitions, but in terms of the way we implement it, when we had Lucie, an anthropologist, join our team, one of the first tasks I gave her was related to databases. Way out of her comfort zone. But actually this has been really productive because it’s forced her to then engage with that and understand, and value the skills that she brings while also valuing other skills.

And so understanding how your expertise add value, a lot of this really comes to understanding how things where you’re not an expert are really valuable as well and how to get help and how to interact with the right people.

And so she’s worked really collaboratively now with other people. It comes back to our Collaborative by Nature. If you’re working outside of your comfort zone, you need to be collaborating with people who are more expert in that area. And so it forces that collaboration to be happening in really positive ways.

Often when people are doing tasks which they are expert at, they don’t ask for help because they’re the expert. They feel bad asking for help. Whereas good experts working outside of their comfort zone are really comfortable saying this isn’t my expertise and asking for help in the right ways.

[00:14:11] Santiago: Yeah, but there’s nothing about collaboration in this definition of transdisciplinarity.

[00:14:16] David: No, but you can’t be transdisciplinary on your own.

[00:14:22] Santiago: Sorry, but if I read this again, this principle defines the role of subject experts in company activities. It forces subject experts out of their comfort zone by engaging beyond their expertise and discipline. I can engage beyond my expertise and discipline. I can satisfy everything that says here.

[00:14:42] David: Except transdisciplinary. Transdisciplinary happens in teams.

[00:14:46] Santiago: Okay.

[00:14:46] David: Transdisciplinarity is implicit in the fact that this is a collaborative process, with experts from different areas contributing. That’s the nature of transdisciplinary. You can’t do transdisciplinary alone. You can’t do multidisciplinary alone. You can’t do interdisciplinary alone. It’s the same for any of these. These are things that happen across people and within teams.

You can work as an individual within multidisciplinarity. And that can be absolutely sensible, and there’s many cases where actually dividing tasks up into their disciplinary areas, it is the obvious thing to do, and it is very effective in certain cases, but it often doesn’t lead to innovation in the same way. Transdisciplinarity supports our innovation approaches.

[00:15:30] Santiago: And that is key to IDEMS itself, is how that approach can lead to better innovation. But it can be inefficient as well.

[00:15:40] David: Absolutely. If you want a box ticking exercise, probably IDEMS is not your best choice. In that context, we’re not necessarily the most efficient at just going through disciplinary procedures without putting thought in.

[00:15:53] Santiago: And again it comes back to not needing to maximise profit.

[00:15:58] David: Exactly. So it’s not just that we don’t need to maximise profit, we want to maximise impact. And if you want to maximise impact, this is part of the reason we want people always being challenged, being engaged. I am heavily criticised by certain people for pushing people outside their comfort zone, but it’s inherent to the way we work as an organisation.

[00:16:18] Santiago: I have felt quite uncomfortable by you pushing me out of my comfort zone multiple times.

[00:16:23] David: I know, as our first ever employee, you have borne the brunt of that on particular occasions.

[00:16:31] Santiago: I even questioned my place within the company several times. Going back to my personal experience, there is a high risk of imposter syndrome.

[00:16:42] David: Absolutely. And imposter syndrome is a whole another talk we should have. I’d love to do a podcast on this because, I find, if you’re not feeling imposter syndrome, then probably you should be. If you are feeling imposter syndrome, then that doesn’t mean you’re okay, but there’s a chance that you might be okay. You know, expertise in general, and this is one of the things that people forget about experts, the more expert I have become in any given area, the more I realise I don’t know, and so the more liable I am to feel imposter syndrome, because there’s so much I don’t know.

[00:17:27] Santiago: But how do you, as a company director, balance how much imposter syndrome affects your staff?

[00:17:36] David: Talking about these things, this is one of the reasons for the podcast. This is why that’s a whole other podcast. This isn’t directly related to transdisciplinarity, but transdisciplinarity as an approach does create elements of this because you are expected to work outside of your comfort zone in disciplines where you are not an expert. And so there are people who will be more knowledgeable than you, and that’s by design of transdisciplinarity that we want people to be able to have perspectives and have views on areas where they’re not an expert.

[00:18:11] Santiago: Okay.

[00:18:11] David: There is an element here, and I should say, this is one of our, this is maybe our most academic principle. I don’t believe, outside of academic circles, that transdisciplinarity is really a thing. I don’t believe it should be, because it’s only really a thing for experts. The whole point of transdisciplinarity within this sort of academic concept, it is about experts.

[00:18:38] Santiago: I’m not sure I agree with that.

[00:18:39] David: Okay.

[00:18:40] Santiago: There is as much expertise in the fifth generation farmer in a remote area who knows the soil, the climate, the context.

[00:18:51] David: Yeah, there’s expertise there, but there isn’t transdisciplinarity. I wouldn’t want to engage them in transdisciplinarity in the same way, because that would be disrespectful to them. I would love to support them in local innovation, that’s another one of our principles, and so on. The point is they’re not an academic, academia is where you have disciplines. I wouldn’t say they are disciplinary, because they are experts.

[00:19:14] Santiago: That person engaging in some of the agroecology concepts that we work with might be going outside of their comfort zone, but…

[00:19:24] David: So the context may be very simple, such a person, a transdisciplinary approach for such a person would be to ask them to go in the town and help set up a local business. That would be the equivalent of transdisciplinarity. But that would be extremely disrespectful to do that. Now it might be that they could add value and they could bring value into that. But would they be having the interest, the intellectual interest, the appetite to do that?

Maybe if they were, then this would be very interesting and very exciting to see how their perspectives could bring new light on that. But it’s something where, by and large, such a local expert needs to be supported, encouraged, nurtured in their environment, not taken out of their environment and asked to build opinions on something which has no relationship to them, which is exactly what transdisciplinarity is about.

[00:20:19] Santiago: But they could put themselves in that position out of interest or need or…

[00:20:26] David: But you’re asking…

[00:20:28] Santiago: All I’m doing here is questioning the fact that it solely applies to academia.

[00:20:32] David: But the point is, if they did that, let’s say, for whatever reasons, they were in a zone which then became a war zone and they had to then seek asylum somewhere else and they had to go and do something very different. It would still not be transdisciplinarity. I’m not putting them in a team where we’re considering them as an expert. They’re doing it by need. They’re doing it because this is their livelihood they’re trying to support. Academics are in a privileged position of being able to and being asked to use their intellectual insight on things which are not related to their direct needs.

That objectivity that comes from academia is what transdisciplinarity is built on. So if you had somebody who was in that privileged position, who happened to be a fifth generation farmer and was now teaching at the local university in local farming systems or whatever it is, because that’s where his expertise was there and it’s been recognised by everybody and so on, then that person who’s got that intellectual abstraction of their knowledge would be a perfect candidate to take out of that comfort zone and now say I’d be really interested to get your perspectives on this.

That would be a person for transdisciplinary project. But transdisciplinarity is not about solving local problems. It is about working across different disciplines. Systems Thinking is another principle which is relatively abstract. We’re talking about this in terms of understanding and thinking deeply about how we work, how we bring value in different ways, using knowledge. So I think it’s important that we recognise when something is academic and when it’s practical.

[00:22:20] Santiago: That’s fine. I’m not going to say that I’m convinced, but I think that…

[00:22:25] David: Well, let me say one thing quickly, because I think one of the reasons you’re not convinced is we value local knowledge. It’s central to a lot of our concepts, Local Innovation, it’s central to many things. And so we are not trying to undervalue or devalue in any shape the expertise of that fifth generation farmer.

But I do make the distinction about a principle like Transdisciplinarity, which in my mind is a purely academic term and only really applies to, in our words here, subject experts. I would argue your fifth generation farmer is an expert, but he’s not a subject expert because it doesn’t have a discipline.

[00:23:10] Santiago: Yeah. Okay. Let’s move on. And we can’t have a principle talk without going concrete into how it’s evident in IDEMS’ work or how it applies to IDEMS’ work.

[00:23:24] David: We’ve discussed that quite a bit already. It’s pushing people out of their comfort zone into areas where their disciplinary focus is non-existent, but they are expected to be able to contribute is central; any of the impact activations have an element of that, we always try and do.

[00:23:41] Santiago: Can you give me concrete examples of the value added?

[00:23:44] David: So Lucie, who we discussed, who’s an anthropologist, whose first task was related to databases, she now is thinking very deeply about the value of qualitative and quantitative data in different ways, because she has that exposure beyond her expertise. She still has her subject expertise, in anthropology. But she is able to now speak much more knowledgeably across disciplines and interact with people in different ways.

We have an Impact Activation Fellowship related to building biological models. And again, the fellow in that particular case has been put into a team where he is expected to now learn and understand the biology, which he knows nothing about. And that’s really important to understand and to build the models in the right way. And more than that, he’s also expected to bring the biologists and the collaborators on board with understanding enough about the mathematics behind what he’s doing to be able to get involved in the decision making. And that process has been really important, that he’s not making the decision about the mathematics for them. He is understanding enough about the biology to bring them into the decision making and be able to frame the deep questions that we have about how to build these models in a way where their opinion can be heard.

And we’ve already had a, we had a few day workshop just recently, a couple of days. And our models changed because of how we were able to bring the sort of subject experts from the domain into our concerns about how we were doing the maths and what the sort of choices were that we were making. And that was really central to the approach.

[00:25:30] Santiago: And their reaction was quite revealing as well. They were incredibly positive about the honesty and the…

[00:25:37] David: Let’s put this in context. A senior professor from Berkeley University, California, expert, worked with many good mathematicians over his career, said he had never had discussions around the modelling like this in his life. He’s in his 80s. Yeah? And I would argue that most of the previous encounters he’s had with mathematicians who were brilliant were interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary. And the difference of that interaction that we brought to the table was our transdisciplinary nature.

That, to me, is a very simple case of what we can try and bring. Now, will it pay off? I hope so. We’ll see. Time will tell. But certainly, to embed this in our working practices is unusual. And I believe this is part of our, part of the magic sauce, if you want, that comes out in our collaborations. It is only relevant, I believe, in academic collaborations. That’s where this comes out. But this is what means that we are able to collaborate with academics across many different disciplines in ways where we are valued because we bring this transdisciplinarity and are able to hold it together in ways which is different to how many others collaborate.

And I should just say, to finish on this. I left academia because I value transdisciplinarity and I could not find the place for it within our academic institutions and that made no sense to me because academics value transdisciplinary. But much of the academic institutional infrastructure prevents it.

This seems illogical to me, and that’s part of the reason for IDEMS. It’s fundamental to IDEMS, its conception to its birth has come from the need, I believe, or the value of transdisciplinarity.

[00:27:41] Santiago: Fascinating and very educational. Thank you.

[00:27:44] David: Thank you for digging into this. It’s not the easiest principle to engage with, so thank you.