Thought Leadership Can: Cross Disciplines

Magic is made when seemingly divergent knowledge bases intersect. 

TL;DR:

• Some of the best thought leadership of our time is interdisciplinary - because it is by nature innovative. 
• There are many methodologies for undertaking interdisciplinary inquiry, which I use as an umbrella term in this article. The problem you are solving necessitates the approach you choose. 
• To help interdisciplinary research take flight, clarify your purpose, find your narrative, and prepare to be prolific. 

Interdisciplinary Thought Leadership Creates Paradigms

Once upon a time, before paradigm-shifting ecologists like Rachel Carson and Robin Wall Kimmerer, there was a thought leader who saw a need for a new, interdisciplinary way of understanding nature: the little-known but entirely influential Sir Arthur Tansley, the founding father of ecological science as we know it today.

Tansley spent his half-century career (between 1890 and 1940) defining the landscape of this discipline, advocating for its position in the sciences, and shaping its pedagogical parameters in ways that are still impacting the field. He built relationships with scientists globally, taught countless courses, endured aggressive intellectual bullying, and wrote treatise after treatise defining and redefining the field, so that a new, interdisciplinary approach to understanding natural relationships could emerge. Tansley's prolific authorship in popular manuals, ladies' club brochures, nature center leaflets, academic publications, and formal presses alike helped secure ecology as a field worthy of study. Embracing the arts and social sciences helped him do it, by providing the images, words, metaphors, teaching practices, and personal relationships that could help this new science take root.  

With unerring vision, an enviable curiosity, and a good bit of sass, he lead us to a discipline that could help us account for the impact of modernization and modernity on our planet, just as this quaking began to be felt. 

The breadth and depth of Tansley's intellectual interests are fascinating. He was an avid reader of the psychology of his day and he even spent several months with Sigmund Freud in Vienna, delving into the ins and outs of psychoanalysis, then also a fledgling field of inquiry. Tansley's first academic text, The New Psychology and its Relation to Life (1920) was an extremely popular review of psychoanalytical concepts and approaches - and was not, in fact, overtly about ecology whatsoever. Scholars have since found echoes of eventual field work methods in this text, interpreting Tansley's understanding of human cognition and emotion as a proving ground of the systems-level research methodology he and other early ecologists would develop.

And it does clearly describe how scientists should think. 

For Tansley, the best scientific inquiry and "all artistic creation" emerge from the simple practice of  exploring and allowing seemingly disparate ideas to influence each other (152). Flashes of brilliance are “arrived at by allowing the mind to wander freely around the points of the problem to be solved,” and then “relating [that observation] to all the relevant knowledge available to consciousness” (152). He imagined great science happening at the intersection of branching relationships, diverse perspectives, and varied stimuli. And I love that he didn't confine this work - which is at heart experimentation - to disciplinary boundaries. Artistic practice is very often experimental too. 

Tansley's work echoes that of contemporary thought leaders like Tara Swart and Dan Harris in bringing together the methods and language hard science with esoteric approaches and cool pragmatism. It utterly captivated the imaginations of the scientists of his era, and remains embedded in how we train ecologists now. It didn't just shift a paradigm in plant science - it created a new era of life science.  

I'm a sucker for this kind of thought leadership. Smart human beings, thinking creatively and curiously, around and about a problem from all the angles that matter to them: isn't that how we find ourselves at our intellectual best? Isn't that how we think when we are our most creative, innovative, and productive?

I wish this kind of thinking for us all. 

In this article, I'll share my best practices for becoming the kind a thought leader who can deftly navigate interdisciplinary conversations to find new answers to the problems in front of us. Read on to learn:

• Some basic terms and conditions for interdisciplinary inquiry
• How to choose the right interdisciplinary approach for your problem
• How thought leadership can maximize the impact of interdisciplinary inquiry. Hint: you're gonna need to be prolific. 

Interdisciplinary Inquiry: The Terms and Conditions

I have been using "interdisciplinary" as an umbrella term to describe a variety of methodological approaches for bringing different field-specific points of view to bear on a research problem. But there are many ways to do this kind of work. Many readers are likely already aware of this fact, as well as the variations that are commonly described among the academy and by funding organizations. If you are aspiring towards interdisciplinary research, or just starting to craft your research approach, it's helpful to know precise terms. And anyone pursuing funding should be sure to check that the methodology described by the funding body in the call for proposals is, in fact, aligned with your method. 

Quite of lot of ink has been spilled on these definitions, as you can see upon a quick search: these are my interpretations. 

Multidisciplinary inquiry makes use of specific knowledge from two or more disciplines, but conducts research from within traditional disciplinary boundaries. In practice, it can look like different research teams working on the same problem, from within their own silos. It's good for handling complexity, because different disciplines have different analytical superpowers - ecology started as a multidisciplinary field of study for precisely this reason. 

Interdisciplinary inquiry integrates knowledge, methodologies, tools, or theories from two or more disciplines when a problem warrants it. It is defined by collaboration - and over time, can prompt the emergence of new fields of study: biotechnology, for example, or neuroscience or media studies. Ecology became interdisciplinary as more and more scientists became invested in its point of view and started to collaborate methodologically with each other to understand the systemic observations they were mapping.  

A convergence approach is often even more synthetic, and is good for solving scientific or societal problems that require an exceptional level of cooperation and resource sharing. In fact, convergence research is defined by many funding bodies as necessarily invested in making a social impact. The field of conservation is a good example of convergence research, which synthesizes the methods, knowledge, data, and resources of variety of scientific and humanistic approaches to preserve habitats and solve climate change. 

Transdisciplinary research is exactly what it sounds like: seeking knowledge from beyond the walls of the academy from the all the stakeholders who are invested in a problem. This can look like reaching out to local indigenous communities to understand their traditional approaches to food system sustainability, for example, and then garnering their input in designing innovations for their communities. I would argue that there is some level of transdisciplinary research happening in most businesses, where teams are constantly listening to what their customers need and want, if not outrightly co-designing solutions with them.

Some scholars frame these methodologies as progressive building blocks: multidisciplinary grows into interdisciplinary, into convergence (transdisciplinary research tends to stand somewhat apart in this conversation). In my view, however, the observed problem necessitates the approach to understanding and solving it. Humans created these varied means of inquiry because our problems do not, as Tansley stated, "follow a main line of thought," but instead often require many more intersecting means of knowing (152). That's why you need to keep the problem at the forefront of your approach. 

How Do You Do Interdisciplinary Inquiry? 

You do need to know what kind of interdisciplinary approach you take to get funding and win belief - stakeholders need to know why this method is the right for this problem, now. To orient yourself and/or your team to the problem, ask the following questions: 

• Do the methodologies of these fields reveal complimentary avenues to solving this specific problem? Why do we need to consider the insights of virology, for example, in solving food insecurity in Honduras? It can be helpful to think about the limits of each discipline here: what can virology tell us about food insecurity in Honduras – and what must it leave to social science approaches to figure out (and vice versa)? 
  
• Then, think about the method: How will these research teams need to interact, if at all, to understand or solve this problem? What are the opportunities for collaboration? When will collaboration be most important?  When would it be more fruitful to stay siloed?
• Next, picture the opportunity. What outcome do you observe or imagine observing arising from this partnership of knowledge and methods? I like to describe this thought process like twisting a kaleidoscope: if you tweak the layering of knowledge and method this way or that way, can your problem or solution come into focus a little better? A little faster? At this point, you can identify your approach: is the fastest, best approach to solving the problem multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, convergence, or transdisciplinary? Or some combination of the above? 

In reality, this process is recursive - you will take in new information and see new data, and that will require returning to these questions. Eventually, though, the lines and angles will align, and you'll know how to identify what you do on this heuristic. 

Or, you may hit upon an entirely new way of researching across disciplinary boundaries. You can argue for that too. That's how all of these epistemologies were initially created and codified - researchers kept finding these approaches to be useful to the problems they solved, and wrote them into existence. Other researchers found value in these approaches, and iterated on them. In some instances, like ecology itself, an entirely new discipline or approach, gets named and formed. And knowledge keeps growing, changing, evolving. 

Best Practices for Communicating Interdisciplinary Knowledge 

Communicating interdisciplinary knowledge can be difficult, and not just because it is hard enough to clearly and accessibly explain one technical field, let alone more than one. Scientific and technical  communication best practices apply here: narrate your approach and findings, rather than simply describing, strive for clarity by defining terms and simplifying data presentation, and be sure to communicate your impact. 

Interdisciplinary approaches often also require a little extra legwork beyond these basics. Depending on the intellectual landscape you are participating in, there can often be loud and frequent push back to your approach. Tansley learned this lesson the hard way.

Here's why Tansley palled around with Freud for a year in Vienna: he had been effectively ostracized by the Oxbridge plant science establishment, and Sir Issac Bayley Balfour in particular, as he began arguing for an ecological research approach. Balfour called him a "botanical Bolshevist" - an insult worth unpacking in far more detail than I can do here (read Peder Anker's account if you need to know more) - and repeatedly blocked his promotion and tenure. In 1921, however, Tansley came back to Oxford, took the reins, and created a field.

Here's the three strategic moves he used to do it: 

1. Communicate with clarity why the approach is the right one for the problem. 

Tansley spilled a few pounds of ink articulating the problem that ecology was intended to solve, over and over again: understanding environmental change, over time. 

At the time, no discipline on its own could account for the complexity of changes happening within a particular environment. Tansley could see that a variety of specialists would need to work together to do that work, if they were all agreed that the problem itself was worth solving. Not everyone did agree - and so much of his writing was intended to win those hearts and minds. 

If you can answer the questions in the prior section, you're well on your way towards building this argument. If you can communicate that impact with the best practices of scientific and technical comms in place, you'll do even better. If you can do that for specialist and non-specialist audiences alike, you'll be prepared to start building a movement. Why? Because you can ...

2. Create leverage by building a diverse group of stakeholders. 

When I was researching in Tansley's archives, I found speeches, texts, pamphlets and manuals for first-year students, ladies' gardening clubs, primary school teachers, government officials, Field Studies Council stations, and other luminary intellectuals of the moment (including the mathematician Bertrand Russell and members of the Magdalen Philosophy Club, who included folks like J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis). He knew that getting the British populace on board with an ecological point of view was critical to changing the course of botany, and saw Brits' hardwired love of natural science and gardening as a cultural opportunity for ecology. Essentially, he created demand for this new field of study by socializing it with audiences who would socialize it in turn - and more importantly, wanted to study it too.  

You don't always have to crack the hardest nuts first. In fact, you can build a nutcracker by bringing together allies who can believe in the impact of your work, and who don't carry disciplinary baggage. To do so, though, you need to...

3. Be prolific.

I spent a week digging through the Tansley archives, and that was just his unpublished writings, letters, and out of print, non-digitized pieces. The man wrote for every stakeholder, often. And he was incessantly on-message. 

Tansley's first definition of ecology was published in the mid-1910s, just before WWI tore Europe apart. Every one of his manuals, pedagogical texts, speeches, and popular pamphlets included this definition - ecology is the study of natural systems, over time. In 1951, he published the essay "What is Ecology?" as a pamphlet for Britain's Field Studies Council. It was reprinted in 1989, by The Journal of the Linnean Society (in which Tansley was once a member). For the better part of 70 years, Tansley reiterated this definition, and built a network of believers who would do so after him. It was his professional work - at a certain point, the majority of his career was not about doing science, but communicating it. Leading it. 

Interdisciplinary approaches often require this kind of courage on the part of thought leaders, and I've been privileged to guide some incredible leaders through that reorientation of purpose. It takes time and effort to be this prolific, and it thus can be a sacrifice to turn from doing to communicating.

But the outcome can be world-changing. Forever. 

I'm here to help you do it. 

-K 

Whether you research on a team, as an individual author, or within a business, there's a good chance you're researching in ways that can be described as interdisciplinary - it is a defining feature of modern thought. When you're ready to write it up, Fledgling can help you craft prolific, field-defining thought leadership that moves the readers who matter most. Schedule a free consultation today.