How to communicate in an interdisciplinary team

Researchers increasingly find themselves working with disciplines other than their own specialism to solve complex issues where science and society intersect. For example, understanding and adapting toclimate change需要专业知识，从生态学到社会学。

Interdisciplinary research aims to get different fields to jointly find something new, usually a solution to a problem that requires broader expertise than that of researchers from a single field.

But solutions don’t appear simply because different disciplines meet in the same room. Experts are trained in their field’s specific language, theories and research practices, and these create barriers in three groups: language, perspective and knowledge.

Communicationis key — from making yourself understood to trusting people you don’t know to do work you don’t easily understand. This guide outlines challenges you might meet and provides some practical tips.

Sharing language

Each discipline uses its own terms, definitions and jargon, and this often leads to miscommunication. Interdisciplinary colleagues may have different meanings for the same words, or not even recognise some terms used by team members with different expertise.

For example, ‘desertification’, which describes a major climate change impact, has more than a dozen definitions. Ecologists use it to describe loss of productiveagricultural土地 - 从肥沃的土壤到类似沙漠的景观的过渡 - 但所有自然科学家并非共享这个定义。经济学家使用“荒漠化”来描述发展中国家的贫困螺旋，而农业科学家则用它表示过度放牧行为。

“Communication is key — from making yourself understood to trusting people you don’t know to do work you don’t easily understand.”

Jessica Thompson

Don’t be tempted to gloss over such differences: acknowledge them from the beginning. Team managers should deliberately supplement talk about tasks with explicit discussions about language differences, framing them as learning opportunities for the entire team.

I have spent the past few years working with an interdisciplinary study of climate change in Mongolia. Surprisingly, our differences in native languages (English and Mongolian) are less problematic than the differences in our specialised, disciplinary language.

接受不同的观点

Different fields also have different concepts of what research and knowledge is. Some fields see science as objective, while others believe objectivity is impossible. Some researchers work with qualitative information while others will trust nothing but ‘hard’ empirical data.

But these differences might not be easily apparent — researchers might assume they are thinking along the same lines when they aren’t.

For example, in our Mongolian project, we struggled for several months to develop a shared fieldwork schedule, partly because we didn’t explain the reasoning for ourdatacollection preferences, and partly because of different views on what data was ‘important’. Researchers investigating rangeland andecosystem healthneed to work when vegetation is blooming;18beplay官网 数据需要以多个季节性间隔收集；收集家庭数据的团队需要围绕放牧和社区时间表进行工作。

We resolved our differences using a surprisingly simple process. By jointly listing all the data that we needed on a chalkboard, we could map out the best times for the team to travel together through five rural regions of Mongolia.

Differences in perspective also stem from culture and nationality. In the early stages of the project, our Mongolian partners expected formal communication, and responded only to emails from the highest-ranking US researcher. However, the lead US researcher is not fluent in Mongolian and often needs lower-ranking Mongolian team members to translate, if not write, her team correspondence. This was seen as disrespectful in Mongolia. It took us several conversations to figure out the cultural protocols and adjust accordingly.

我必须调和的另一个文化挑战是性别。与一个在墨西哥学习生态系统服务的团队合作，我的一所墨西哥大学的同龄人将直接与我的男性研究生交谈，同时几乎与我进行了眼神交流。

承认你不知道的

In most interdisciplinary research projects, there isn’t time to understand one another’s work intimately. And that’s also the point — you need to trust your colleagues and their expertise. After all, the intention is to combine people’s knowledge to serve the project.

但是，研究培训有时会灌输一种根深蒂固的权威感，使团队成员通过无辜的探索性问题被误解为挑战，或者将自我视为“专家”，以诱使团队成员来辩论彼此专业知识的优点。

For example, during a group discussion on modellingair qualityin Salt Lake City, United States, two lead researchers, one an urban planner and the other a plant ecologist, had a heated debate. An innocent question from the plant ecologist was belittled by the urban planner. The ecologist’s response was to genuinely challenge the planner on a point, in turn embarrassing him.

Clearly, it is unacceptable to debate each others’ work combatively. Ground rules should be set before nasty habits become group norms.

Here, research teams can benefit from using a professional facilitator. Facilitators can help the team to manage unhelpful communication habits, actively regulating ‘unsportsmanlike’ conduct. Increasingly, funding agencies, nongovernmental organisations and universities are training professional facilitators to specialise in team management and research collaboration.

The US Office of Science and Technology Policy manages theScience of Team Sciencelistserv, which connects facilitators with interdisciplinary research teams across the globe.

Put the time in

Successful interdisciplinary teams make time for each other. Colleagues who enjoy spending time together are more open and willing to learn from each other. In numerous projects I've been involved in, team members have expressed the feeling that they did not have enough time together to discuss, connect and explore ideas.

Making time is difficult because researchers often do interdisciplinary projects in addition to their own specialist work. But project proposals and team agendas should include time that is explicitly for building trust, talking around potential communications issues and interacting socially. Don’t be tempted to think of this as a ‘waste’ of time — your working relationships will benefit.

You should be aware of how you’re behaving when spending time together too — make sure that you listen attentively and are open to new thinking and viewpoints. You might not always have a professional facilitator, so it’s vital that everyone is aware of their behaviour and its effects on team communication and collaboration.

Humour can relieve stress, support common values and group goals, and integrate ideas. More importantly, it can diffuse problems before they grow. Joking and laughing can build cohesiveness within a team.

团队应考虑安排社交时间进行交往，建立关系和笑。如果社会利益伴随专业的回报，研究人员可能会更有动力参加协作工作。

My favourite example is from the Salt Lake City team. After a formal meeting, several researchers went out for pizza. Inspired by a group of high school cheerleaders, they ended up discussing high school athletics and their different experiences of secondary education.

This conversation provided an unplanned bonding opportunity that helped team members begin to trust each other, look forward to spending more time together, and even find additional opportunities to collaborate — six of us still meet to discuss the nuances of the research, and we have written more than a dozen further collaborative research proposals.

但请记住,并不是每个人都能提交ing extra time with colleagues, perhaps due to family commitments. Try to make sure that this kind of informal time doesn’t exclude people — think how to build it into a normal day. Team members often just need ‘space’ to talk socially, and this can be during coffee and lunch breaks as much as evenings.

做出工作

Once the research is completed, you must get your results to those who need them. There can be tensions around deciding where research should bepublished。Each field has its own ‘top’ journals, and people may be reluctant to plump for journals they see as inferior.

许多期刊没有发表跨学科研究，这一事实加剧了这一事实，并且与更专业的出版物相比，专注于跨学科研究的期刊可以看作是低质量。

当你必须确保你reflec“写”t work done by the entire group, and that everyone feeds into it. But you should also appoint someone as the overall editor, ensuring the paper is coherent and reads ‘with one voice’.

您还应该讨论谁将成为研究的“面孔”，如果它获得媒体报道，或者您是否希望有一个以上的人被特色。这些是适用于所有研究的问题 - 您可以从Scidev.net的其他方面获得进一步的建议practical guides to science communication, including how to communicate research viablogging和社交媒体。

尽管挑战可能令人沮丧，但跨学科研究提供了丰富的学习机会。完成研究项目后，请尽量避免回到传统的筒仓。现在，您已经打开了它们，可以关闭沟通路线真是可惜。根据您的领域，您可能会发现您经常有机会参与跨学科项目 - 尝试分享您所学的知识并传播这个词。

杰西卡·汤普森是一样的助理教授ronmental and organisational communication at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan.