Transdisciplinary research faces challenges both at the meta-level such as institutional barriers and difficulty aligning diverse stakeholders, and at the meso-level in terms of team dynamics, communication, and interpersonal factors. The combination of these meta- and meso- level conditions cause researchers to get stuck in cycles of indecision and struggle to integrate their approaches and findings. These obstacles hinder progress, limiting the ability to generate impactful solutions for complex social or technological challenges.

The research on transdisciplinarity as a system tends to fall in one of two places – the first being meso-level, such as toolkits, and the second being meta-level structural conditions. Moreover, there has been little focus on how effort is experienced to overcome "stuck-ness" in different collaborative research stages that precede transdisciplinarity, such as monodisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and interdisciplinarity. Our research uses a case study approach to investigate the dynamics between the meta- and meso- level conditions by focusing on how shifts, or “pivots” in these conditions impact how effort is experienced to overcome “stuck-ness” and catalyze movement into different collaborative research stages.

This unique case study draws on five years of data from the Human Fusions Institute (HFI), a highly scientific, multi-university transdisciplinary team tasked with exploring the direct connection between the human nervous system and remotely operated robotic systems. Over the course of this case study, HFI’s team dynamics and its level of institutionalization and funding have shifted significantly. Through observations, ethnography and participatory research, we developed a theoretical model to visualize the dynamics of meta- and meso-level effort, outside of and within transdisciplinary research teams, by framing effort metaphorically as a system of energy flows. At the meso-level within our model, effort increases as teams move from monodisciplinarity to transdisciplinarity, assuming meta-conditions remain constant. These meso-conditions are fluid and impact stuck-ness and the amount of effort it takes to get un-stuck. For example, meso-conditions can perform more favorably with enhanced interpersonal relationships, team resources, and elements of creative decision-making.

After establishing and modeling the phenomenon of effort on a single meso-level plane, we then examined how our model might be leveraged by shifting a pivot point from which the plane is altered by meta-level conditions. Subsequent interviews, observations and ethnographic explorations with HFI researchers explored how shifts in meta-level conditions influence how the phenomenon of meso-level effort is experienced by teams. We arrived at a new systems model that considers how meta- and meso-level conditions dynamically influence experiential effort within transdisciplinary teams. Our findings can help teams move past stuck-ness by understanding the meta- and meso-level conditions they are currently at, so they can know where to focus their efforts to get “un-stuck.”