Research across disciplinary boundaries has been integral to scientific achievement for centuries. Yet, within academia, disciplinary knowledge continues to be organized into departments within an institutional framework. In an increasingly complex world, research problems cannot be understood or addressed solely from a disciplinary perspective. Our expanded need for highly innovative solutions requires a different energy, and a revised academic vocabulary that works across and among disciplines.

The early 2000s saw a surge of interest and investment by public agencies and private organizations in research that was explicitly multi- and interdisciplinary, with the goal of solving complex problems. This gave rise to a lot of academic discussion: exploring, defining, and characterizing research collaboration. As research leaders, we noticed a clear discrepancy between the ideally described research collaborations and the realities on the ground.

Trained in different disciplines ourselves, we had different perspectives about this discrepancy yet were aligned about what we could do about it. Here was an opportunity to intervene to reduce the gap between excitement about engaging in collaboration, on the one hand, and the distress of spending valuable time disentangling disagreements on the other. Over the years we have encountered many teams with good intentions, most of whom were doing good work trying to solve complex research problems but tied up with internal conflicts. Some of these conflicts required outside mediation before the research team could continue to advance the research, submit a paper, or expand the team.