Convergence Leadership Series #1
Facilitating Team Science: Holding Space for Co-Creation
Liberating Structures
Building on the success of last year’s Conversation Cafe series, we are going to host monthly seminars on Convergence Leadership during the spring semester this year. We are going to learn and practice practical tools for team science, ranging from facilitation methods to complex ways of seeing, sensemaking, collaborating, and creating. In addition to introducing these tools to our team members, this seminar series also holds the space for us to make sense of team experience together. Unlike research-focused spaces, this space provides a level playing field for our diverse team members to relate to each other in each other’s shared humanity.
The first seminar on Feb. 1 was dedicated to the first set of Liberating Structures/LS. The specific string of LS includes chatter fall, 1–2–4-all, Conversation Cafe, and Impromptu Networking.
Facilitation is selected as a topic because we recognize that every interaction if designed and facilitated properly, will be an opportunity for convergence. These seminars generate awareness for facilitation and create an experience for the team members. To accompany these seminars, I have also launched an “Apprentice Facilitator” program to build facilitation capacity for the team. The first cohort of five apprentices gets additional time with me to learn how to create these experiences. I will detail this program in another blog post.
Setting the Context
We started the seminar by setting the context for team science: why is it needed, what is the role of leadership, and what are the challenges facing team science. All materials are primarily from the seminar report from National Research Council in 2015, Enhancing the effectiveness of team science.
Why
Today’s ambitious societal and scientific goals, such as eliminating health inequities, understanding nanostructures, arresting climate change, and exploring distant planets have led to increasingly large, complex, and ambitious scientific initiatives.
Furthermore, our scientific goals and approaches have been influenced, altered, and enabled by advances in technological and computational capabilities; these include dramatic advances in our ability to capture, store, and analyze data.
To capitalize on these opportunities requires cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Leadership
Leadership researchers, universities, and leaders of team science projects should partner to translate and extend the leadership literature to create and evaluate science leadership development opportunities for team science leaders and funding agency program officers.
Complex adaptive systems theory offers a route to understand how behaviors, actions, and reactions at one level of a team science system (e.g., the individual level) affect actions at other system levels (e.g., the team level) and the emergent behavior of the system as a whole.
Complexity leadership and convergence research seem to be a match made in heaven. I have a sense of mission to continue to build the bridge between the two.
Challenges
- High diversity of membership
2. Deep knowledge integration
3. Large size
4. Goal misalignment among team members
5. Permeable boundaries
6. Geographic dispersion
7. High task interdependence
Liberating Structures
Definitions
The design challenge that animates the LS community is: How might we make the principles of complex adaptive systems practical, useful, and operational?
Two key principles of complex adaptive systems guide all the designs:
- Interaction leads to change. So facilitaiton is about generating interactive dynamics conducive to team effectiveness.
- Interdependence is inherent. So facilitation is about making the invisible visible.
Liberating structures is a collection of social technologies that generate interactive group dynamics. I love LS because it has a vibrant community of practice that continue to evolve, adapt and innovate, and I continue to draw energy and inspiration from it.
Our Flow
Step 1. We used chatter fall to check in with this prompt: In the next 80 minutes, I am looking forward to…
Step 2. We used 1–2–4-all to competatively bid for one challenge to focus on with this prompt: Of the seven challenges listed by the National Research Council, which do you believe is the toughest and why?
Step 3. We used Conversation Cafe to talk about the one challenge the team deicded on: How might we, as a convergence research team, tackle this toughest challenge of deep knowledge integration in the context of high diversity membership and goal misalignments facing team science?
Step 4. We used Impromptu Networking to harvest the learning with this prompt: Is there anything that will stick with you out of your Conversation Cafe? Maybe an idea, a sensation, or a connection. Team members are invited to share in quartets by creating a collage of words, images, gifs, sharing what’s sticking with you at the end of the session today.
Our Insights
Group 1:
Goal misalignment could be a source for creativity, if facilitated correctly. In this case, academia usually has more space than industry because industry has much tighter schedules.
Misalignment could exist between sub-project goals and team goals. Constant alignment bewteen these two through settting priorities and listening is important.
Group 2:
The research questions and goals for the entire team could be large and vague. We need to narrrow them down to smaller actionable goals. We cover a large map of knowledge, and we have great problem solving when posed with the right questions.
Team members have different talents, as generalists, specialists, or integrationist. Insteading giving presentations, we could invite everybody’s perspectives as related to CE.
Group 3:
We all have similar concerns regarding convergence; the most personal is the most general. We should speak up when we have difficulties, as the answers might emerge in the convergence process.
We need to develop ecosystem awareness to generate creativity from goal misalignment.
Three Cs:
- Connections (map awareness): time, student, relationship; being connected to other people’s work
2. Container: One example was working on the Nature paper was really successful because things were broken down into these smaller containers and then taken back up again.
3. Communication: universal language (layman’s terms)
Further Reading
Facilitating Interdisciplinary Meetings: A Practical Guide
Six ways facilitation skills can improve cross-disciplinary team leadership
National Research Council (2015). Enhancing the effectiveness of team science.
