Hidden order: how adaptation builds complexity
Hidden order: how adaptation builds complexity
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This chapter discusses the process of Knowledge Exchange and the challenges associated with Knowledge Transfer both within a multi-disciplinary academic research team and across the research team to the customer stakeholders. Specifically addressing socio-technical complex adaptive systems, Knowledge Exchange provides a vital cornerstone to both successful integration of research findings and communication to the customer in a continuous process. This takes place on three primary levels: 1 among the members of the multidisciplinary research team, 2 between researchers and identified user counterparts with the customer, and 3 across the research team and the user customer stakeholders. Challenges include creating and sustaining active collaboration at all three of these levels, beginning with engagement within the research team itself. Modeling and analysis of complex adaptive systems, especially those with a high degree of socio-technical complexity, requires various, often highly separate, disciplines within an academic team. These may include change management, operations management, behavioral science, marketing, policy, computer science, systems engineering, and complexity analysis, as well as involving researchers across multiple academic institutions. Active Knowledge Exchange serves both to facilitate researcher-to-researcher interactions and to integrate the research findings into a synthesized whole. It is this whole that must then represent the socio-technical complexity of the system in a manner that illustrates the findings in a clear, tangible, and especially actionable manner to the customer stakeholders. Specifically, this chapter discusses our starting challenges and expectations, the process and continuing, new challenges we discovered, gaps that remained between realities of these challenges and realization of our vision, and offers suggestions for future research.