Everyone Is Solving the Same Problem
Today, I watched several people trying to solve different parts of the same research problem become frustrated with one another because they disagreed about the “right” way to do it.
The strange thing was that nobody was necessarily wrong.
One person could see the governance risks. Another could see the capability gap. Someone else was concerned with education, operational delivery or the immediate needs of researchers. Each person was responding to a real problem. But instead of recognising these as interconnected parts of the research journey, we treated them as competing territories.
This is what happens when a system fragments responsibility but still expects an integrated outcome.
We tell researchers that the journey should be seamless. Yet behind the scenes, different teams are solving isolated sections of it, often without a shared view of the whole. Each develops its own language, processes and definition of success. When another group approaches the problem differently, that difference can be interpreted as interference, duplication or evidence that somebody is doing it incorrectly.
This is precisely the kind of problem that transdisciplinary research is intended to address.
What is transdisciplinary research?
Most conventional research begins within a discipline.
A microbiologist might study the organisms associated with a disease. A clinician might study its symptoms or treatment. A health economist might examine its cost to the health system. Each researcher asks a question using the theories, methods and standards of their own field.
There is nothing inherently wrong with disciplinary research. Deep disciplinary expertise is essential. The difficulty arises when a complex problem cannot be understood, let alone solved, from one disciplinary perspective.
This is where multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research enter the picture. The terms are often used interchangeably, but they describe different ways of working.
In multidisciplinary research, people from several disciplines contribute to the same project. They may share an overall topic, dataset or population, but each discipline largely retains its own questions and methods. Their findings are brought together at the end.
It is a bit like several specialists examining different parts of the same machine. Each produces a report about their part, but nobody necessarily redesigns the machine.
Interdisciplinary research goes further. Researchers actively integrate concepts, methods or analytical approaches from different disciplines. The microbiologist, clinician and health economist do not simply work alongside one another. Their perspectives influence the research questions, methods and interpretation.
Transdisciplinary research goes further again.
It brings disciplinary knowledge together with knowledge from outside academia. Researchers work with the people who experience, deliver, manage or are affected by the system being studied. Depending on the problem, this may include patients, community members, clinicians, service managers, policymakers, industry partners, governance professionals or operational staff.
These people are not merely consulted after the research has been designed. They help define the problem itself.
That distinction matters.
A multidisciplinary project might ask several experts to investigate why a research study was delayed. An interdisciplinary project might integrate their methods to analyse the delay. A transdisciplinary project would also involve the investigators, governance staff, research support teams, clinical departments and perhaps participants who experienced the process.
Together, they would determine what the actual problem was, where it occurred and what a workable solution would need to look like.
The aim is not simply to collect more opinions. It is to produce knowledge that could not have been created from within any single discipline or organisational unit.
More people do not automatically make research transdisciplinary
Putting different people in the same meeting does not create transdisciplinary research.
Neither does adding a consumer representative to a committee after the important decisions have already been made.
Genuine transdisciplinary work requires participants to influence:
- how the problem is framed;
- which questions are considered important;
- what knowledge and evidence are valued;
- how the research is conducted;
- how the findings are interpreted; and
- how the resulting knowledge is applied.
Foundational work by Choi and Pak distinguishes multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary health research by the degree to which knowledge, methods and perspectives are integrated. Multidisciplinary work may be additive. Interdisciplinary work is more interactive. Transdisciplinary work moves towards shared conceptual approaches that extend beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries.
Hall and colleagues describe transdisciplinary team-based research as developing through four phases: development, conceptualisation, implementation and translation. Teams must build relationships, learn one another’s language, develop shared ways of understanding the problem and create structures that allow integration to occur.
This means transdisciplinary research is not simply collaborative research with a fashionable label.
It changes who has authority to define the problem and what counts as relevant expertise.
Why is it so difficult?
Our institutions are not generally designed for this way of working.
Universities are organised into disciplines. Health services are organised into departments, professional groups and operational functions. Funding schemes ask who will lead. Governance systems allocate responsibility. Performance measures reward identifiable outputs and individual ownership.
These structures are necessary in many circumstances. But they also encourage people to protect their particular section of the research journey.
The result is that people who are fundamentally trying to solve the same problem can begin to treat one another as competitors.
One team develops education because researchers are submitting poor applications. Another develops governance guidance because those applications cannot be approved. Another offers individual support because researchers cannot navigate the guidance. Each intervention may be reasonable.
Without a shared understanding of the system, however, those interventions can overlap, contradict one another or address symptoms rather than causes.
Then the conversation becomes about who owns the training, who has authority to speak, whose approach is correct, or whether somebody else is doing it the “right” way.
The research problem remains.
The science of team science literature tells us that collaboration does not run on goodwill alone. It requires time, leadership, shared language, coordination, appropriate resources and deliberate structures for integrating knowledge.
Putting the correct people in a room is only the beginning.
Two logos do not make an integrated system
Transdisciplinary research should not be confused with multi-institutional research.
Adding a university to a healthcare project does not automatically make the work transdisciplinary. It simply makes it multi-institutional. A hospital and university can collaborate while remaining firmly inside their own silos, with separate priorities, processes, incentives and definitions of success.
The health service may provide patients, clinicians, data and access to the clinical environment. The university may provide methodological expertise, students, analysis and pathways to publication. Both institutional logos appear on the presentation. The partnership is described as integrated.
Meanwhile, the researcher is left carrying the project between incompatible systems, trying to personally manufacture the integration that the partnership claims already exists.
They move between university and health-service ethics requirements, governance processes, contracts, data systems, financial structures, clinical departments and academic expectations.
Each part of the system may be functioning according to its own internal logic. Yet nobody necessarily holds responsibility for designing the research journey across the boundaries between them.
Institutional proximity is not the same as intellectual or operational integration.
It is possible for a university and health service to occupy the same campus, share staff and promote a joint research strategy while still knowing remarkably little about how research actually moves through the other institution.
Information travels through gatekeepers. Decisions made in one part of the system appear in another without their history or rationale. Each group sees its own section of the research journey and may have little visibility of what is happening elsewhere.
Genuine transdisciplinary research requires more than an agreement between institutions. The partners must jointly define the problem, integrate their scientific, clinical, operational and lived knowledge, and allow that integration to change how the work is designed, governed, conducted and translated into practice.
Without that, we have collaboration on paper, proximity in buildings and two logos on a slide.
We do not necessarily have an integrated research system.
Many flavours. One freezer. Strong internal boundaries. Integration sold separately. Everyone is making gelato. Nobody agrees who owns the scoop.
Seeing the whole journey
Transdisciplinary thinking does not mean that everybody does everything.
It does not erase professional expertise, accountability or operational boundaries. It does not mean that every decision must be made by a committee or that responsibility becomes so dispersed that nobody can act.
It asks us to build those boundaries around a shared understanding of the whole problem.
Scientific, clinical, operational, governance and lived expertise are not competing versions of the truth. They are different views of the same system. Each perspective reveals something that the others may not be able to see.
Perhaps, before deciding who owns the solution, we need to ask better questions:
What part of the problem can you see? What part can I see?
Where do our responsibilities intersect? What are researchers experiencing as they move between us?
What knowledge are we excluding because it does not fit neatly within our professional or institutional boundaries? And what would we design if we began with the whole research journey rather than our individual section of it?
The problem is not that too many people care about improving research. The problem is that our systems encourage each of them to protect their piece rather than collectively design the whole.
Also, who else is watching Season 3 of Silo?
I appear to be living the healthcare research adaptation.
Further reading
- Choi BCK, Pak AWP. Multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in health research, services, education and policy: definitions, objectives and evidence of effectiveness. Clinical and Investigative Medicine. 2006;29(6):351–364.
- Stokols D. Toward a science of transdisciplinary action research. American Journal of Community Psychology. 2006;38:79–93.
- Stokols D, Hall KL, Taylor BK, Moser RP. The science of team science: overview of the field and introduction to the supplement. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 2008;35(2 Suppl)–S89.
- Hall KL, Vogel AL, Stipelman BA, et al. A four-phase model of transdisciplinary team-based research: goals, team processes and strategies. Translational Behavioral Medicine. 2012;2(4):415–430.
- Schmitz KH, Bavendam T, Brady SS, et al. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Transdisciplinary team science in bladder health. Neurourology and Urodynamics. 2020;39(5):1601–1611.