Reflexivity

Science of Team Science
1st annual conference
Chicago

Bill Trochim spent some time at the poster on “Bringing the Social to Team Science,” wondering out loud if it is possible for some kind of “social concerted action” to come out of this conference. I posed the question to the folks I had dinner with: “If we were to actually come up with something to do together – collaboratively – out of this conference, what could it be?”

Intellectual Liberation

One of the cool features of this conference is the permission to say, “I don’t understand.” A Trekkie clued me in to this emergent feature of the social interactions here, and I checked it out with my dinner companions. They explained that because people attending this conference are from such disparate fields the usual assumptions that one is ‘supposed to already understand’ are suspended. It is rare to be with a whole bunch of highly educated people who are asking all kinds of questions that you hadn’t yet thought to ask.

We’re all on the continuum somewhere

The process of panel presentations has provided an impressive amount of information, but it isn’t clear what we can actually do with this knowledge. If we were to consciously build a network that gets beyond sizzle to move an agenda and challenge implicit norms (such as the division between practitioners and researchers, or that team science occurs only inter-disciplinarily), we have to do something more/different than what has occurred so far. Are we here just learning or are we in a process to generate new knowledge?

Tackling Team Science’s Wicked Problem

Because everyone has their own thing that they’re into, whether its research or administration or whatever, we would have to come up with “a meta-thing” as a goal or aim that everyone – or at least a solid cadre of us – could get behind. What if we decided to answer the process question? Instead of focusing on, “What is ‘the what’ of team science?” which takes as its mission connecting the science; we propose an examination of self-reflective case studies in order to identify “what works” and thus be able to explain and train people in the skills and techniques of effective team science.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Science of Team Science
1st annual conference
Chicago

“Choose your adventure!”

I pitched our project to twenty people, learning also about their interests – some are attending the conference to learn, others are presenting posters or are part of the official program. I was shy to tweet anything except to record who I met, partly because I wanted to have the real-time conversation and partly because I wasn’t sure how far to go with attributions in this social setting (even though no one objected to being either tweeted or blogged by first name).  A few things caught my attention, though, such as Michael’s tease about where I had hidden the clues concerning James and my action research project. Was it a kind of “choose your own adventure” story? Michael and Cameron bantered their expertise, got me thinking more about secondary networks, wondering about team “formation stories” and unconferences.

Everyone was in a good mood, smiles and friendly chatter filled the room, definitely characterizing all the conversations that I had. Some “issues” did surface, such as

• the challenge of researchers or scientists “being recognized as a team,”
• the opinion that “scientists are divas,” and that there might be
• something to explore concerning presenters who are “organized and boring” compared with those who are “chaotic and creative.”

“Opening the net for serendipity”

Cameron mentioned some of the hazards of backchanneling, which is not what we’re doing with the #teamsci10 twitter hashtag but definitely something to keep in mind. Rather, we’re building an archive with as many views as possible on the knowledge being shared during this conference. A few people thought they should not participate because they are too blunt or provocative. I think this is all part of the mix of real groups; what’s interesting will be what we all, together, make of this journey together over the next three days.

Maria said followers need to have the same characteristics as leaders. I think this fits with what I wrote in the previous post about cooperation, and might jive with Michael’s emphasis on creating conditions for spontaneous connections. We’ve all got roles that contribute in various ways to a group’s functionality, the trick is shifting and switching among team members according to the skills, talents, techniques, experience or situated knowledge called for by the problem or task at hand.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Science of Team Science
1st annual conference
Chicago

The Cooperative Nature of Communication

As I showered this morning, I considered the incredibly cooperative nature of communication. If there is a center to the object of study that James Cumming and I have made of the Science of Team Science conference, it has to do with the types of cooperation and degrees of understanding demonstrated by participants in figuring out how better to achieve scientific breakthroughs, particularly when working in interdisciplinary teams.

Cooperation takes a wide range of forms. The word usually has a positive connotation, e.g., cooperation is a good thing. Plenty of theory, however, suggests ‘cooperation’ in misunderstanding each other – an outcome generally presumed to be negative. The strife of conflict accompanies constructive conversations; how to interpret disciplinary disagreements, paradigmatic differences, and individual ambitions is the grist of group dynamics.

These typical features of knowledge production can be a source of tremendous insight, provided participants are able to engage them as opportunities rather than barriers or breakdowns.  James theorizes about a special kind of opportunity that arises in groups that he calls problematic moments. Think of “problem” in the way mathematicians do, or in the sense of a core puzzle of existence. Such moments are usually glossed over (an act of cooperation), and are difficult to act into unless several members of the group muster the attention and will to do so.

Getting into Role

A challenge for us in entering the conference with such an ambitious goal of reflecting “live” has been how to negotiate the task, gain authorization to conduct it, delimit our dual role as conference participants and action researchers/participant-observers, and identify appropriate boundaries. As far as we can determine from the outset, we are entering the conference with “all systems go.”

What will begin to happen, indeed, has already been occurring, is a phenomenon called parallel process.  What this concept builds from is the simultaneous happening of events for different people and sub-groups that are somehow related to each other. For instance, today, many conference participants boarded planes to fly to Chicago. We were acting ‘in parallel’ even if not in conscious coordination.

Some of us may be engaged in a flurry of last-minute preparation, while others have been fully prepared for weeks. Our behaviors, attitudes, and perceptions will cohere us into invisible sub-groups. These aggregated groupings may or may not contribute significantly to the conference dynamics, but – supposing for some reason they did – then this would have relevance for the achievements of the conference as a whole.

The main aim of this action research project is to try and identify parallel processes and problematic moments (and other features of emergent group dynamics evidenced by patterns in group discourses) as they occur in the real-time unfolding of this conference event.  We’ve created some mechanisms by which other conference participants can contribute their data (observations, ideas, and feelings as they occur), and we hope they will.

Popularity: 2% [?]