Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Failures

Lessons Learned from Cautionary Tales

Dena Fam, Michael O'Rourke, Dena Fam, Michael O'Rourke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367207038
• eBook ISBN: 9780429556883
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Unlike other volumes in the current literature, this book provides insight for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary researchers and practitioners on what doesn't work. Documenting detailed case studies of project failure matters, not only as an illustration of experienced challenges but also as projects do not always follow step-by-step protocols of preconceived and theorised processes.

Bookended by a framing introduction by the editors and a conclusion written by Julie Thompson Klein, each chapter ends with a reflexive section that synthesizes lessons learned and key take-away points for the reader. Drawing on a wide range of international case studies and with a strong environmental thread throughout, the book reveals a range of failure scenarios for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects, including:

• Projects that did not get off the ground;

• Projects that did not have the correct personnel for specified objectives;

• Projects that did not reach their original objectives but met other objectives;

• Projects that failed to anticipate important differences among collaborators.

Illustrating causal links in real life projects, this volume will be of significant relevance to scholars and practitioners looking to overcome the challenges of conducting interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.

1 Theoretical and empirical perspectives on failure

An introduction

Michael O’Rourke and Dena Fam

Introduction

Consider the following example. A two-day meeting of highly motivated university researchers in a large metropolitan area was convened by city managers, planners and engineers to address concerns about the resilience of downtown infrastructure in the context of a changing climate. Specifically, it wasn’t clear whether the city had the ability to manage stormwater drainage in a new climate regime that included higher-than-normal precipitation. A recent close call with flooding had raised concerns, and the city leadership was now convinced that they needed a research-based plan to address these concerns. The group of researchers was multi-disciplinary, ranging over disciplines such as hydrology, civil engineering, urban planning and even philosophy. The goal of the meeting was to find common interests among the different disciplines and then use that as a staging ground for a research project that would both document existing infrastructural inadequacies and identify promising directions for sustainable improvement.

It began with promise, first with presentations by city officials and then disciplinary, research-focused presentations from the academics. But as the meeting unfolded, it began to dawn on both city officials and university researchers that the priorities which motivated them were different and, perhaps, incommensurable. To provide funding for the work through their budgets, city officials needed quick responses to their concerns and a set of findings that they could use to write policy and initiate change. The academics, on the other hand, needed peer-reviewed research products to justify their time to administrators back at the university. By the time the group got to the “next steps” part of the meeting at the end of day two, it was clear that there was no way this particular collection of experts could take any further steps together.

This transdisciplinary effort failed before it could get started, but its failure is instructive. Efforts like this one are complex, involving a variety of different perspectives, values and priorities. Even the enthusiastic embrace of a common objective, like planning for a city’s resilient future, is insufficient to ensure project success. What could have been done differently? Recognition in this case of the different cultures would have been a good start, since that might have revealed the differences among the incentives and rewards that motivated the different participants to attend the meeting. Initiating the meeting with a conversation about the deliverables required by the city officials and the academics would have helped, as such a conversation would likely have highlighted differences and perhaps motivated early compromises and the pursuit of common ground.

In general, the published research literature exhibits a bias towards positive outcomes because, for the most part, only what works gets published. Research failures such as the one described above less commonly contribute to the literature, since many projects are dropped before they come to fruition. Much can be learned, however, from what doesn’t work. For example, cautionary tales about what to avoid could help researchers save valuable time and resources, especially in research projects that are intrinsically complex. In this volume, we assemble the first set of original essays that concern failure in intrinsically complex projects, focusing on those that are interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary in character.

Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary modes of research involve the integration of different perspectives, and for this reason they are notoriously challenging. Interdisciplinary research combines insights from different academic disciplines, and so it is not uncommon that it requires the integration of different types of data collected using different methods in the service of different explanations. Transdisciplinary research involves the integration of knowledge and expertise from academic and other sectors of society, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), policymakers and community members. In addition to any challenges that derive from the presence of different disciplinary experts, transdisciplinary projects confront large differences in the values, priorities and cultures of participants. These challenges manifest at all stages in the lifecycles of these projects, creating the potential for failure at all points along the way.

Documenting details of failure in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects matters, not only as an illustration of how challenges are experienced in these complex contexts, but also since projects do not always follow step-by-step protocols that generate preconceived and theorized processes. While clearly defined processes can be invaluable for guiding the development of complex projects, in reality practice may diverge from theory. Case studies that illustrate failure illuminate causal links in real-life projects that can help researchers and practitioners avoid pitfalls in their own work.

In this introduction, we set the stage for the case studies to follow in subsequent chapters. We begin by reflecting on failure in general before considering the results of a preliminary survey we have conducted on the incidence of failure in cross-disciplinary projects. The survey results position us to describe how we conceive of failure in this volume, a conception that we then use to introduce each chapter in turn.

What is failure?

One goal of this introduction is to provide a systematic and informed way of thinking about what counts as failure in the context of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects. As we noted above, these are typically complex projects designed to do justice to the manifold challenges of complex problems. They involve many moving parts, and so there are many potential sites of failure. In this section, we provide a review of the literature on failure, which draws on a number of different disciplinary perspectives, ranging from engineering to philosophy to organizational behavior. After discussing a number of different ways that one might think about failure, we highlight why failure is often identified by educators as a powerful instructional tool.

Ways of thinking about failure

Why spend time developing a conceptual understanding of failure? After all, surely we all know what failure is – we’ve experienced it personally and we’ve observed that others experience it, and we typically work hard to minimize it in our lives. While it is certainly true that we are all personally acquainted with failure, it is precisely with respect to quotidian concepts like this that a systematic, theoretical understanding can help. It allows us to be consistent and reliable in reflecting on past experience and planning future experience, and it also supports the interpersonal exchange of information about failure. Without theoretical coordination, we lack firm ground to compare our experiences and learn from one another.

A good place to start is with a definition of the term “failure.” One might think pursuing a definition is a fool’s errand, given that the term “can take on different meanings in different contexts” (Petroski 2012, p. 134) and given the very broad “class of things it represents” (Firestein 2016, p. 7). But we can grant that no compact definition is going to provide individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions encompassing all and only those things that count as failure while nevertheless recognizing that efforts to delimit the application of the concept by defining it can be very informative. Because so many things count, the attempts at defining failure are often quite general:

1. 1. “a state where reality is inferior to the goal”; “reality is worse than expectations” (Lee and Miesing 2017, p. 159)
2. 2. “deviation from expected and desired results” (Cannon and Edmondson 2005, p. 300)
3. 3. “an unacceptable difference between expected and observed performance” (Carper 1996, p. 57, as quoted in Petroski 2018, p. 50)

More specific definitions are also available that focus on failure in particular contexts:

1. 4. Education: “students will typically not be able to generate or discover the correct solution(s) by themselves” (Kapur 2016, p. 289)
2. 5. Academia: “the authoring faculty members’ inability to collaboratively create our intended, idealized manuscript product in a timely fashion” (Vanasupa et al. 2011, p. 173)

In each of these definitions, failure is understood relative to a norm or ideal, for example, a “goal,” an “expected … performance,” or the “correct solution(s).” Furthermore, each definition highlights falling short of meeting the norm or realizing the ideal. Falling short by itself is not necessarily a problem – it is not just failure by another term; what constitutes an outcome as a failure is that meeting the norm is “desired,” “intended,” or “expected,” which means that the effort has led to disappointment. Of course, what it means to fall short is going to depend heavily on the nature of the norm and the associated expectations, which will vary significantly by context.

Definitions help us distinguish failure from non-failure, but once we have identified failure as a category, there is still analytic work to be done before we fully understand it. Failures differ along several dimensions, such as how avoidable a failure was, its size, whether it is a failure in product or process, and how objective it is. We might think that we should avoid failure if we can, and only accept it if it is unavoidable; however, whether or not the failure is avoidable will turn on many factors, and it is important to recognize that avoidable failures can be laudable – for example, if they reflect experiments aimed at innovation (Cannon and Edmondson 2005) – and unavoidable failures can be criticizable – for example, if they reflect broader systemic problems that need to be addressed (Baumard and Starbuck 2005).

The size of a failure is one of its more obvious characteristics, since the catastrophic failures we notice tend to be large ones, for example the Hyatt Regency Hotel Disaster of 1981 or the Tacoma Narrows Bridge failure (Petroski 1992). Failure doesn’t need to be catastrophic, though, as there are also “small losses” (Sitkin 1992) and even “micro-failures” (Tawfik et al. 2015; Lam 2019).

Failure can also be analyzed in terms of product and process. The concept failure is typically used to highlight the product of falling short, as is evinced in the general definitions (1) to (3) above which emphasize the outcome’s “state,” “deviation,” or “difference.” It is also possible, however, to highlight the process of falling short, as is clear from the more specific definitions (4) and (5) above that focus on the inability of people to produce a successful product.

A final dimension that can help us understand failure concerns whether or not we are thinking of it objectively or subjectively. The larger the failure, the more likely it will strike people as an objective failure, that is, one that is a failure no matter how you look at it. But failure can be in the “eyes of the beholder” (Lee and Miesing 2017, p. 158) – what seems a failure to one person might not strike another in those terms. For example, if you conceive of a project as one that embeds principles of adaptation, the events that force project adjustment may be regarded as felicitous parts of the natural development of the project towards your objectives rather than instances of failure.

Disciplinary perspectives on failure

The observation that failures come in different shapes and sizes is further reinforced by looking at how failure is treated in disciplines that explicitly thematize it. Failures are found in all disciplines, of course, but only a few disciplines explicitly identify failure as part of their process. Pausing to consider how failure is understood and harnessed by these disciplines can foreground strategies for dealing with failure that are applicable in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary contexts. We will briefly consider six disciplines: engineering, logic, the philosophy of science, empirical science, education and learning and organizational behavior.

• Engineering: Because the failure of bridges or structures can lead to injury and death, it is incumbent on engineers to design with failure in mind. Engineering is in fact home to forensic engineering, or the investigation of engineering failures, and failure analys...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Theoretical and empirical perspectives on failure: An introduction
• 2 Re-thinking failure: Using design science theory and methods, including design-thinking, for successful transdisciplinary health and social interventions
• PART I Institutional environments associated with failure
• PART II Failures and responses associated with collaboration and stakeholder engagement
• PART III Personal reflection on failed initiatives through an autoethnographic lens
• PART IV Failure in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary educational programs
• Coda
• Index