London Interdisciplinary School has geared its courses around tackling real-world challenges, but some students seem reluctant to step outside the traditional higher education sector
June 28, 2024
Source: Grant Rooney / Alamy
Three years after the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) opened its doors to students, its dean, Carl Gombrich, describes its curriculum as “radical but simple”.
The institution offers only a single course – Interdisciplinary Problems and Methods, which draws on skills from such diverse fields as English literature, mathematics, neuroscience and political science to study “real-world challenges”, including sustainability and the ethics of artificial intelligence, holding that a cross-disciplinary approach is needed to prepare students to tackle multifaceted global issues.
In 2021, LIS became the first higher education institution in the UK since the University of Warwick in 1965 to be given degree-awarding powers at inception, but it did not come without its challenges. While there was “a lot of goodwill” from regulators as LIS worked to establish itself, Professor Gombrich, alongside founders Ed Fidoe and Chris Persson, discovered that current regulation was geared towards single-discipline approaches.
According to Professor Gombrich, who set up UCL’s first interdisciplinary arts and sciences degree course before joining LIS: “Interdisciplinarity as a theme doesn’t really exist as a learning outcome in education,” which makes “innovation naturally quite difficult” for any institution that wants to challenge traditional degree structures.
While the Conservative government may have tried to make it easier for new institutions to establish themselves through the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, Professor Gombrich said he “did not appreciate” the challenge that LIS would still face after three years in terms of winning recognition and status in the conservative and hierarchical UK higher education system.
“The prestige thing is huge,” he said. Potential students can be “suspicious that we can be, or are, as intellectually demanding, fulfilling and, ultimately, as useful to them as a traditional intellectual degree or a Russell Group university”.
A cost-of-living crisis in which students are focused on getting value for their investment could certainly make this hurdle harder to overcome, Professor Gombrich conceded. While renown and recognition can come with time, “the question for us internally is, do we want to wait that long? Definitely years, if not decades?”
The students LIS does attract “are not from privileged backgrounds – they’re just brave”, he said. Of its 151 students, 82 per cent attended state schools. Meanwhile, its master’s course has “taken off like a house on fire”. Having started with just nine MA students in 2022, the university counted 42 in its most recent cohort.
“They just get the need for interdisciplinarity much more,” Professor Gombrich said. “They’ve been out in the world. They’ve worked. They see that studying one thing at university was nice in many cases, but really not that helpful or important for their careers.”
And LIS has had some notable successes. With its first undergraduate cohort graduating this summer, its students have lined up some impressive positions. The first job offer received by any of the class was for Goldman Sachs’ competitive graduate scheme, with other students gaining sustainability advisory roles and software engineer positions.
Professor Gombrich made clear that the LIS approach “isn’t for every university”. But there should be the choice, he said, and LIS should form part of a healthy ecosystem of higher education providers.
“With 600,000 people a year at university at least, there has to be a big space for students who go just because they want to get a job out of uni. And there has to be a big space for students to go just because they want to study medieval poetry. Both are possible. And there’s a third space, which should be big too, for extremely bright, talented, purpose-driven students who want both.”
Ultimately, this tension goes to the heart of the purpose of higher education: as graduates increasingly complain about feeling ill-equipped to enter the workforce, are universities there to prepare young people for their first job, or to provide a quality education that will set them up for their working lives and their place in wider society? Professor Gombrich said it did not have to be “black or white”.
Problems surrounding AI and sustainability are not “going to be solved by shouting in the streets or some technical solution”, he said. “[They are] going to be solved by some very smart person who gets the concept, who gets the history, who gets the data and is able to organise or set up a business which tackles this problem. So I don’t like the dichotomy between education either as instrumentalist for work or ivory towers. It’s clearly not [that simple].”
People will need a variety of complex skills and a range of knowledge to compete in a changing jobs landscape, he continued. “The jobs of now are already hyphenated,” he said, underlining the need for an interdisciplinary approach. Citing digital health, cybersecurity and sustainable fashion as examples, he said: “Hyphenation and hybridisation is inherently interdisciplinary.” Encouraging students to engage in a multidimensional approach prepares them for the lateral thinking needed in the workplace, he said.
What the country needed instead, Professor Gombrich continued, was a “national conversation” about the role of higher education, and whether traditional degrees are inculcating the diversity of thought required of students and wider society.
Putting endless growth above our wellbeing and the environment is no longer tenable-from a Guardian Culture article by Kate Raworth
Here’s a question for our times: how should we imagine the shape of progress? In the twentieth century the answer may have seemed to be very clear. It was growth, measured in terms of national income, or gross domestic product (GDP). And that growth was to be endless, an ever-rising curve. No matter how rich a nation already was, its politicians and economists would consistently claim that the solutions to its problems depended on yet more growth. As this article powerfully sets out, this last-century promises that economic growth will enable high-income countries to overcome their problems – whether problems of poverty or pollution – has not delivered. It is clearly time to reimagine the shape of progress and, with it, the policies that could bring about a twenty-first-century prosperity for a fractured humanity on a destabilized planet.
Stepping back, it’s useful first to recognize the appeal of growth. It is, after all, a wonderful, healthy phase of life, which is why people the world over love to see children, gardens and trees grow. No wonder the Western mind so readily accepted it as the shape of economic progress too, and simultaneously adopted the very twentieth-century mantra that ‘more is better’, both personally and nationally.
Yet if we look to nature, it’s clear that nothing in the living world succeeds by growing forever: anything that seeks to do so will, in the process, destroy itself or the system on which it depends. In nature things that succeed grow until they are grown up, at which point they mature, enabling them to thrive, sometimes for hundreds of years. As the Biomimicry pioneer
Janine Benyus reminds us, a tree keeps on growing only up to the point that it is still able to send nutrients to the leaves at the outermost tips of its branches, at which point it stops. Its pursuit of growth is bounded by a greater goal of distributing and circulating the resources that nurture and sustain the health of its whole being. Although we can appreciate the nuanced role, value and limits of growth in the living world, when it comes to the design of our economies, we have been acculturated to perceive growth as a constant aspiration and necessity. Thanks to the availability of cheap fossil-based energy in the twentieth century, the rapid and persistent economic growth that this enabled in industrialized countries soon came to be seen as normal and natural, indeed as essential. Its continuation over many decades led to the creation of institutional designs and policies – from credit creation to shareholder dividends to pension funds – that are structurally dependent on growth without end. In other words, we have inherited economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive.
This requirement for endless growth has become so locked into economic theories, political narratives, and public expectations that, over recent decades, governments have made clear the desperate and often destructive measures they are willing to go to into order to reboot growth when it becomes elusive. They deregulate – or rather re-regulate – finance in the hope of unleashing new productive investment, but often end up unleashing speculative bubbles, house price hikes and debt crises instead. They promise corporations that they will ‘cut red tape’ but end up dismantling legislation that was put in place to protect workers’ rights, community residents and the living world. They privatize public services – from hospitals to railways – turning public wealth into private revenue streams that so often undermine the very services they claim to provide. They add the living world into the national accounts as ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘natural capital’, assigning it a value that looks dangerously like a price. And, despite committing to keep global heating ‘well below 2 degrees C’, they open new licensing for fossil fuel exploration, while failing to make the scale of transformational public investments needed for a renewable energy revolution. These policy choices are akin to throwing precious cargo off a plane that is running out of fuel, rather than admitting it is time to touch down and instead create post-growth economies that focus on delivering social and ecological health and integrity.
The insistent pursuit of growth in high-income countries is not only preventing carbon emissions and material consumption from being reduced at the speed and scale that these times urgently demand. It is also failing to tackle poverty and endemic social inequalities – the very problems for which growth is so often offered as the remedy. Indeed, the key message is that the pursuit of growth has become ‘counter-productive’ to the mission of tackling poverty. The policy tools that are so commonly used to stimulate growth – creating ‘business-friendly’ environments through privatization, commodification, and trade liberalization – in fact have all too often widened inequalities and created the very social exclusion that growth was promised to address.
Instead of pursuing endless growth it is time to pursue a thriving well-being for all people as part of a thriving living world, with policymaking that is designed to be in service to this goal. And this means putting human well-being and ecological integrity at the heart of our vision for economic success.
Starting with the goal of human well-being within planetary boundaries results in a very different shape of progress: in the place of endless growth we find a dynamic balance, one that aims to meet the essential needs of every person while protecting the life-supporting systems of our planetary home. And since we are the inheritors of economies that need to grow, whether they make us thrive, a critical economic challenge in high-income countries is to create economies that enable us to thrive, whether they grow.
Tackling and reversing inequalities needs to be at the heart of a new eco-social contract because doing so can deliver major impacts, both in terms of improving well-being – including self-expressed life satisfaction– and in terms of reducing nations’ ecological footprints, due to the well-documented links between social inequalities and consumption impacts. Tackling inequalities is also critical for reasons of political economy. One of the most damaging consequences of growth that exacerbates economic inequalities is the concentration of wealth and economic power in few hands. This can all too easily be converted into political power to influence elections and policymaking processes, to ensure that policies are retracted, enacted, or recrafted to preserve the systemic advantages of the already wealthy. There is, in other words, a tacit market for political influence, and it is used to ensure that inequalities of wealth, power and voice are perpetuated.
When we turn away from growth as the goal, we can focus directly on asking what it will take to deliver social and ecological well-being. And while many of the policies that this brings to the fore were, only a decade ago, considered too radical to be realistic, they are now gaining public interest, leading to animated discussion and serious policy consideration.
After nearly 5.5 years the Wolds Planning application for 430 new homes on the hillside above Matlock came to a full planning meeting of Derbyshire Dales District Council on Thursday 28 March-The application faced bitter opposition on many fronts not least the fear of surface water flooding in the town itself. I was involved in the discussions of this site for most of those years and invited to offer my thoughts on the impact of Climate Change on the flood risk-this is my evidence I presented to the Planning Committee and to a packed audience:
Good Evening-my name is Dr Steve Martin – for almost 40 years I have been an Agricultural Scientist and Environmental Consultant – advising various parts of government and many businesses and universities.
My comments are a summary of why this site should never have been put in the local plan. It was a serious misjudgement of the devastating impacts of surface water flooding on Matlock- its residents and the businesses it supports – examples of which we have routinely experienced because of recent housing developments.
Climate change impacts on the water cycle by influencing when, where, and how much rain falls. It also leads to more severe weather events over time.
We are now repeatedly experiencing the serious impacts of global warming. The more heavy and intense rain we are seeing in recent years are only the beginning. As warming beyond 1.5 degrees- takes place we can expect and experience more of this –much more rain and much more flooding. Enhanced warming is predicted soon to be anything from 3 to 4 degrees.
This is because levels of greenhouse gases are not falling, they are increasing- Carbon Dioxide, Methane and the warming impacts from evaporating water vapor and transpiration from vegetation.
In preparing for this meeting, I read the most recent weekly Environment Agency’s bulletin on rainfall and river flow from March 2024 – this is what it said-
It has been another wet week across England, although slightly less so in the east and south-east. River flows increased at more than 85% of the sites we report on. Seemly hardly anything to worry about?
But tell that to the residents of Old Hackney Lane where I live and where 3 to 4 new springs have surfaced in homeowners’ gardens and now pour gallons of water onto the lane and have caused the removal of a huge chunk of tarmac off the lane – lifted by surface run off and increased the depth of numerous potholes.
In summary surface water flooding is the most widespread flood risk in England, affecting 3.2 million properties.
It is caused by a combination of factors including intense rainfall, soil permeability, topography, drainage system capacity(and the capacity of aquifers) and maintenance, and physical barriers such as buildings.
But the assessment of risk is very difficult-even impossible at a local level– because all the factors mentioned above have not been adequately researched and in anyway quantified by the Environment Agency- which makes risk assessment hugely problematic and, in my view, impossible.
This is why I object to this development and any future attempts to build on this site.
Will is a 23-year old sustainability advocate and recent graduate from the University of Bristol. With a critical perspective on Higher Education, he is keen on exploring the more-than-necessary radical and disruptive ideas about how universities can lead the transition to a more just, equitable and environmentally sound future.
The cycle continues its familiar pattern. A reliable month of March I can count on—though days grow shorter and starker, soon enough longer, warmer days will return. Just as surely new growth will replace fallen leaves and still branches. There is reassurance in these cycles, in nature’s inherent regeneration. But as the seasons reliably shift, our world now seems full of uncertainty—will current hardships pass or persist as new normal, will balances regain or chaos grow? On wet, dull days doubts creep in.
It’s on days like this when I do silly things like ask ChatGPT to create the image you see.
I have long been keen on confronting questions of the role of Higher Education for sustainability. And this gave to me the metaphors of sandboxes and hourglasses. At first, I chuckled at the whimsical image. However, as a young person wading through dizzying prospects of global change, the metaphors of the sandbox and the hourglass soon took on a different meaning. Speaking to my own learning process for sustainability. Acknowledging the two seemed key when grounding myself and living well.
The sandbox invites me to take risks, build and remake, to think without worrying about immediate answers. Exploration and process take precedence over definitive truths. And like shifting sands that reshape to fill spaces, insights and truths can self-organize amidst complexity if I relax into uncertainty. To a child, sandbox play holds significance, entire worlds created and destroyed in an afternoon. And present moments mirror this sandbox, where change feels dramatic and immediate. Where I may forget small sandcastles – taking risks, being creative and unbound – when the tide of adulthood sweeps me toward real world demands.
The hourglass, however, flows according to its own timeline – I see it as the epochs turning long before we arrived and continuing long after we depart. New equilibriums form, like grains in a tipping glass. Where this goes beyond humans to acknowledge the myriad more-than-human species, entities, and systems that shape and are shaped by deep time. And so, we speak of mystery and uncertainty, of humility in the face of vast and dynamic systems.
Of late there has been an increasing awareness that ideas and connections are old. This relates to the erosion of stone into sand, and how the grains are windswept and fall in different places. Which is a nice way of describing how integrating new perspectives is natural when engaging with subjects like sustainability. Or other subjects that get to the root of what it means to live a good life.
Sand speaks to how I navigate ideas and construct knowledge. Bits of information and insight reversibly filling asymmetries, reconfiguring perspectives over and over. Which is an exhausting process. Increasingly Sisyphean. Yet this thing about sand reconnects to the ancient coupled with the adaptive new. Acknowledging what came before, while cultivating capacities for shifting worldviews as the ground itself shifts underfoot.
It makes sense to me at least. And although, again, it’s exhausting. I’ve made peace. With simple priorities enacted here and now. Showing up reliably. Listening often. Sharing time. And continuing to tell the truth as I understand it to be.
By Sharon Stein, originally published by Resilience.org
January 30, 2024
I’m a millennial faculty member. The millennial generation – also known as Generation Y – came of age with 9/11, followed by the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then the 2007/8 financial crisis. While we were growing up, promises of perpetual progress and prosperity abounded. However, as we entered adulthood, we confronted the harmful realities and precarious nature of the prevailing social and economic system. It became clear to many of us that these were not only false promises but they also came at a high cost. Yet when we expressed our disillusionment, some from previous generations suggested our generation was the problem, not the system itself.
I have been able to connect with many of my students over this shared experience. My home academic department exclusively offers graduate programs, so for the first part of my career, most of my students were fairly close to me in age. For these students, my invitation to engage critically and self-reflexively with existing systems has been generally well-received. But last year, I taught my first undergraduate course, made up primarily of the generation that followed mine, Generation Z (“Gen Z”).
Most undergraduate students today are from Gen Z, and they will soon make up an increasing number of graduate students, too. Teaching Gen Z, just one generation removed from mine, was a learning curve. Issues of social and ecological justice that were important to me have an even deeper urgency for them. Initially, I did not fully appreciate the differences between their experiences and those of my generation, and because of this, it took me a while to gain their trust. I realized how easy it was to do to Gen Z students what others had done to my generation: minimize their concerns and fail to recognize the underlying reasons for their frustration, fear, and grief.
Facing difficult truths
After centuries of people borrowing (some might say, stealing) from the future to pay for comforts in the present, the bill is coming due, and it is younger generations who will have to pick up the tab. In brief, this is because our finite Earth cannot sustain an economic system premised on infinite growth and consumption. Young people are acutely aware of this. In a recent survey of youth from 10 countries, 75% said they think the future is frightening and 83% said people have failed to take care of the planet.
As a result, many young people are asking us to see what we would rather not see, to turn toward things as they are, rather than as we would like them to be. They are asking us to admit to ourselves what they cannot deny: that escalating wars, economic inequality, extreme weather, biodiversity loss, food insecurity, and mental health crises are a product of our existing system; that the problems created by this system cannot be addressed using only the tools created by the system itself; and that there is a very real possibility of social and ecological collapse within their lifetimes, if not ours.
This is not something most faculty are generally interested in hearing. While some parts of us may be aware that things cannot continue as they are, our other, less mature parts tend to deny the potential for collapse because we fear being overwhelmed and immobilized by the depth and magnitude of the problem. That is an understandable fear, but it is not a legitimate justification for denial. To ignore these concerns is not only a mistake but also a refusal of our responsibilities as educators, and as human beings.
Accepting the stark realities of our collective predicament is not just about confronting the unsustainability of our current system. It is also about un-numbing to the pain that comes with possible systemic collapse, as well as to the pain that has already been created by this system. This includes the pain we ourselves have caused, given that centuries of economic growth in the Global North have been directly enabled by exploitation, extraction, and expropriation in the Global South, and in Indigenous communities around the world. In this way, at the same time as we accept the possibility of systemic collapse, we would need to also accept responsibility for many collapses that have already happened – the ecocides, genocides, and epistemicides – so that the beneficiaries of the current system could enjoy ever-expanding comforts and securities.
The education of older generations, including my own, has not prepared most faculty to hold these harsh truths and process these heavy emotions in generative ways, and thus, the education we offer our students is not preparing them to do so either. However, many students are seeking this kind of support. Thus, it is no surprise when they question the relevance of the education they are currently receiving. Effectively, we are educating people to “refine a system that operates by undermining the conditions of possibility for our biophysical survival.” As one student put it,
“Should we even be wasting these last fleeting years of our youth in a classroom when our elected leaders are leading us down a path toward total climate collapse?”
This is not just about the content we include in our courses, but also whether we make space in classrooms and campuses for students to pose challenging and uncomfortable questions. Recently, we have seen a rise in the suppression of students’ academic freedom. In response, a student in one of my courses observed,
“While education should be a realm of openness and exploration, the current situation suggests the opposite, creating uncertainty about where I stand in this educational equation.”
Holding space for unanswerable questions
We do not have to agree with everything our students say or believe in order to create educational spaces in which they can ask difficult questions of us, themselves, and the world around them. In my experience, the most important thing for many students is not that we agree with them, but that we be brave enough to walk alongside them as they meet the many unknowns and unknowables of the current moment. However, this request is not necessarily welcomed by those of us who were socialized to expect comfort, security, certainty, and the affirmation of our intelligence and relevance.
Thus, to collectively navigate current and coming challenges with our students, faculty would need to deepen our capacity to hold what is complex, heavy, uncertain, and uncomfortable. We would also need to develop the stamina to continue this work when it feels easier to just enjoy the excesses of the current system for as long as they last. And we would need to accept responsibility for unpaid intergenerational debts, but also the debts that are owed by the Global North to the Global South, and by settlers to Indigenous Peoples. When discussions about these responsibilities arise, many of us focus on what we stand to lose. But what might we gain if instead, we accepted young people’s invitation for us to grow up and face our complicity in harm?
Last fall, I attended a conference and was asked to present on a panel with fellow Gen Y scholars. The discussant, a professor from Gen W (the generation born in the years following World War II), noted with gratitude that they felt genuinely challenged by our papers. In their closing remarks, they encouraged us to respond with the same level of compassion and humility when the next generation of scholars inevitably challenges us: to welcome not just new ideas, but also the general spirit that it is possible, and often necessary, to do things differently than we have done.
This professor’s example of academic “eldership” gave me a glimpse of how intergenerational relationships in the academy could be otherwise – more generous, self-reflexive, and accountable. It would not be easy, but it is possible to create the conditions in which we can have difficult conversations without relationships falling apart. If we can learn to do this, we will likely be better prepared to coordinate responses to complex challenges in ways that prioritize the well-being of current and coming generations of human and other-than-human beings. Systemic violence and ecological catastrophe did not begin with my generation, nor with any of the generations that are alive today. But we have a responsibility to make different choices than those that came before us, rather than continuing to pursue the same perceived entitlements.
Stepping back and showing up
I do not romanticize younger generations, believe they have “the answers”, or place all hope for the future in their hands. Doing so would be naive of me, and unfair to them – a deflection of my own and other generations’ responsibility for engaging in the tough work ahead. We are all part of the problem, and we are all still learning.
None of us know exactly what to do in this liminal space between a system in decline and whatever comes next. But we each have a small role to play as we figure it out and we have much to learn from each other in the process. This may be uncomfortable for professors who have crafted not only our professional identities but also in many cases our self-images around being the ones with “the answers.” Thus, we would need to lose our academic arrogance by stepping back from familiar patterns and showing up instead with humility as the full, flawed people that we are if we want to do the intergenerational relationship-building that is needed in this transitional moment.
This includes holding space for young people to process their fears, grief, insecurities, and traumas. Older generations would need to process our own as well and to share the insights from that processing with younger generations. Together, we might collectively learn from the mistakes of the existing system so that we do not repeat them, discern what from that system should be preserved and what needs to be “composted,” and develop a practice of ongoing collective experimentation with emerging possibilities that will inevitably lead to new mistakes but also new learning.
If all generations could commit to this work, together we might have a chance of interrupting the cycle of irresponsibility and immaturity that led us to this crisis point in the first place, and enabling something different and possibly wiser to emerge. Although faculty are not required to do this work as part of our formal job responsibilities, current and future generations will pay the price if we don’t. We owe each other more than that.
Sharon Stein is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is a co-founder of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective and author of Unsettling the University. She is grateful to the people from four different generations who reviewed drafts of this text.
Rebecca Solnit: Slow Change Can Be Radical Change
“Describing the slowness of change is often confused with acceptance of the status quo. It’s really the opposite.”
“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” –Georgia O’Keeffe *
Someone at the dinner table wanted to know what everyone’s turning point on climate was, which is to say she wanted us to tell a story with a pivotal moment. She wanted sudden; all I had was slow, the story of a journey with many steps, gradual shifts, accumulating knowledge, concern, and commitment. A lot had happened but it had happened in many increments over a few decades, not via one transformative anything.
People love stories of turning points, wake-up calls, sudden conversions, breakthroughs, the stuff about changes that happen in a flash. Movies love them as love at first sight, dramatic speeches that change everything, trouble that can be terminated by shooting one bad guy, and other easy fixes and definitive victories. Old-school radicals love them as the kind of revolution that they imagine will change everything suddenly, even though a change of regime isn’t a change of culture and consciousness.
Maybe religion loves them too, as conversion, revelation, and sudden awakening.
Saul falls off his horse with the strength of his revelation and gets up as St. Paul, the Buddha gets enlightened in one intense session under the Bo Tree, Muhammed gets a visit from the Angel Gabriel—but at least with the latter two, the story has to include the long journey of intention and exploration leading to the sudden event. I love dramatic stories too, but I think they tend to mislead us about how change happens.
I’ve found in my twenty-something years of messing about with Buddhism is that what it has to teach is pretty simple; you could read up on the essentials in a day, probably in an hour, possibly in a quarter of an hour. But the point is to somehow so deeply embed those values, perspectives, and insights in yourself that they become reflexive, your operating equipment, how you assess and react to the world around you. That’s the work of a lifetime—or of many, if you’re inclined to believe in reincarnation.
Most truths are like that, easy to hear or recite, hard to live in the sense that slowness is hard for most of us, requiring commitment, perseverance, and return after you stray. Because the job is not to know; it’s to become. A sociopath knows what kindness is and how to weaponize it; a saint becomes it.We are impatient creatures, impatient for the future to arrive and prone to forgetting the past in our urgency to have it all now.
We need stories in which getting where you’re going—individually or as a society—mostly happens step by step with maybe some backsliding, muddle, and stalling, not via one great leap. Maybe this is the task at which novels and biographies excel.
In the scope of a substantial novel is room for someone to grow up, to change, to learn, for Pip to come to understand how his love for Estella was all tied up in other people’s suffering and his own upward-mobility ambitions and class shame, for Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy to see that their own first impressions were mistakes born of hubris and fall in love with each other, for the nun at the beginning of Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse to undergo extraordinary transformations, heal others, find and lose love, and grow old, for the formation of characters, the building and tearing down of relationships, the arrival of those revelations that can only arrive slowly.
Anyone who’s gotten over a heartbreak or a bereavement knows that there aren’t five stages of grief you pass through like they were five whistlestop towns on the train route. You are more this way one day and more that way the other, looping and regressing, and maybe building reconciliation or acceptance like a log cabin while living in sorrow, rather than sliding into it like you were stealing third base.
You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby. A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient.
And we are impatient creatures, impatient for the future to arrive and prone to forgetting the past in our urgency to have it all now, and sometimes too impatient to learn the stories of how what is best in our era was made by long, slow campaigns of change. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” but whichever way it bends you have to be able to see the arc (and I’m pretty sure by arc he meant a gradual curve, not an acute angle as if history suddenly took a sharp left). Sometimes seeing it is sudden, because change has been going on all along but you finally recognize it.The expectation that change will be swift and the failure to perceive it when it’s not impacts politics for the worse.
Maybe you’ve had those moments when you suddenly see that someone you love has changed in condition or character, and your picture of them is out of date, or those moments when someone absent for months or years reappears and points out a change to a person or place or system unseen by those who adjusted to without perceiving tiny increments of change that added up. But the change itself wasn’t sudden.
The expectation that change will be swift and the failure to perceive it when it’s not impacts politics for the worse. A common source of uninformed despair is when a too-brief effort doesn’t bring a desired result—one round of campaigning, one protest. Or when one loss becomes the basis for someone to decide winning is impossible and quitting—as if you tossed a coin once and decided it always comes up tails.
Another immense impact of this impatience and attention-span deficit comes when a political process reaches its end, but too many don’t remember its beginning. At the end of most positive political changes, a powerful person or group seems to hand down a decision. But at the beginning of most were grassroots campaigns to make it happen. The change got handed up before it got handed down, and only the slow perspective, the long view, lets you see the power that lies in ordinary people, in movements, in campaigns that often are seen as unrealistic, extreme, aiming for the impossible at their inception.
The best movie I’ve ever seen about this is a 2022 documentary called To the End. It traces the creation of the Sunrise Movement—the US climate organization for people under 30, started in 2018—and their launch of the Green New Deal, showing how it influenced the Biden campaign’s climate platform, deserves credit for Build Back Better, and finally—yes, in reduced and compromised form, but still—crossed the finish line in 2022.“People who do nothing, people who have not even canvassed or anything, they start critiquing your strategy to win.”
That is, by taking a five-year time frame it shows how what ended up as a piece of legislation began as young idealists dreaming of change, and by tracing that trajectory shows that young people, grassroots campaigns, and radical new ideas can have power. The short-term version gives you politicians giving us nice things. The long-term version shows you movements shifting what’s considered possible, reasonable, and necessary, setting the stage and creating the pressure for these events, offering a truer analysis of power.
*
There’s a wonderful scene in To the End in which Alex O’Keefe, then creative director of the Sunrise Movement, declares as he unloads a station wagon, “People who do nothing, people who have not even canvassed or anything, they start critiquing your strategy to win. ‘But how are you gonna win, what’s your strategy, is it realistic, can we win?’ Who cares if we can win, man? We’re just unpacking boxes. You do things step by step.”
His patient commitment reminds me of Greta Thunberg’s famous 2019 declaration “Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.” It’s an analysis that says, as I understand it, two important things. One is that addressing the climate crisis is a longterm project calling for many kinds of labor. The other is that we must work toward a post-fossil-fuel world knowing that the solutions continue to evolve—for example solar and wind were expensive, wholly inadequate technologies early in the millennium and are now cheap, effective, and being implemented at a dizzying rate while battery storage and materials are evolving at dazzling speed.
In this lies the secret of why, if you crave suddenness or can’t keep your eye on the slow, destruction seems exciting, construction boring. Of course there’s slow destruction and what the environmental historian Rob Nixon called “slow violence”—the decline of wildlife populations, the destabilization of the seasons, the dismantling of the progressive economies of the mid-twentieth century. These catastrophes are often too gradual for those with no clear baseline or long attention span or strong news summary to perceive—literally they’re not new enough for news.
For climate this means that the metabolic tendencies of news is often ideally suited to tell you that something sudden and maybe unanticipated happened last night—a flood, a fire—and it was bad. A lot of climate good news is both wonky—a technology breakthrough or a regulation passed that will eventually have positive consequences—or incremental.
Describing the slowness of change is often confused with acceptance of the status quo. It’s really the opposite: an argument that the status quo must be changed, and it will take steadfast commitment to see the job through. It’s not accepting defeat; it’s accepting the terms of possible victory. Distance runners pace themselves; activists and movements often need to do the same, and to learn from the timelines of earlier campaigns to change the world that have succeeded.
To be able to see change is to be able to make change. I’m an advocate for slowness, not in the sense of dragging your feet or delaying your reaction but in the sense of scaling your perception to to perceive the events unfolding, because I’m an advocate for making change.
Featured image: “Deauville, Low Tide,” Eugene Louis Boudin (1860-1865)
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty-five books on feminism, environmental and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe. She co-edited the 2023 anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. Her other books include Orwell’s Roses; Recollections of My Nonexistence; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she writes regularly for the Guardian, serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and in 2022 launched the climate project Not Too Late (nottoolateclimate.com).
At the Community Energy England Award Ceremony at the Lowry Theatre in Salford yesterday we are proud to announce that Derbyshire Dales Community Energy (DDCE Ltd) was given the Small/Medium organisation of the year accolade. Steve Martin and Dave Locke received the award on our behalf, along with a decorative plaque in recognition of DDCE’s wide-ranging and excellent achievements. The Community Energy England Awards scheme is an annual event that recognises and celebrates outstanding achievements in community energy. This ceremony brings together individuals, organisations, and initiatives that are making significant contributions to the advancement of sustainable and locally driven energy solutions. This year’s ceremony, supported by Electricity Northwest, and took place at the Lowry Theatre in Manchester on Friday 17 November 2023.
This award recognizes one community energy organisation that has demonstrated excellence across their operations, delivery, impact, engagement, innovation, and contribution to the broader sector.
The citation read out by one of the judges stated:
“Derbyshire Dales Community Energy Ltd (DDCE) stands at the forefront of the renewable energy movement in Derbyshire. Established in 2022 as a Community Benefit Society, DDCE has been working relentlessly to combat climate change by fostering rural community-based renewable energy initiatives across Derbyshire.
DDCE collaborates with 17 community energy groups, pioneering the installation of solar panels, hydro schemes, and electric vehicle charging points. Their partnership with the Big Solar Co-op, a nationwide carbon-first non-profit, has opened avenues for large-scale solar projects in Derbyshire Dales, with potential sites boasting up to 1.5MWp of solar electricity capacity.
DDCE’s impact goes beyond clean energy generation. Their work has become a catalyst for community engagement and empowerment. By supporting volunteers and community energy groups, DDCE has provided avenues for individuals to actively contribute to the fight against climate change.”https://communityenergyengland.org
In Search of the Unity of Knowledge by E. O. Wilson
I have recently returned to reading the biologist and polymath’s 1998 book in search of some answers to why there is an absence of political leadership capable of addressing our current ecological and environmental crises. I have adapted and summarised some of the early chapters of his book, by way of explanation.
Wilson’s book is an attempt to demonstrate the potential of unified learning via the unifying influence of natural science, particularly of modern biology. He argues that as a general paradigm this applies to all of science, on the grounds that all living activities are governed by information derived from DNA. When he wrote this book by proposing a unifying conception of science, to counteract the prevailing mainstream fragmentation and specialization of disciplines, he gained widespread appreciation. And, for me even more so now- in a highly complex and dystopian world. Moreover, it is a beautifully written book. Besides offering an overview of the validity of Wilson’s vision for the unification of sciences, emphasizing methodological issues it also offers economists a way of linking this discipline with biology and other sciences.
He argues that the Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries got it mostly right the first time. The assumptions they made of a lawful material world, the intrinsic unity of knowledge, and the potential of indefinite human progress are the ones we still take most readily into our hearts. The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship. The propositions of the original Enlightenment are increasingly favoured by objective evidence, especially from the natural sciences.
Consilience is the key to unification. Wilson preferred this word over “coherence “because its rarity has preserved its precision, whereas coherence has several possible meanings, only one of which is consilience. William Whewell, in his 1840 synthesis The Philosophy of the InductiveSciences was the first to speak of consilience, literally a “jumping together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork for our understanding of knowledge and its application.
In his 1941 classic Man on His Nature, the British neurobiologist Charles Sherrington spoke of the brain as an enchanted loom, perpetually weaving a picture of the external world, tearing down and reweaving, inventing other worlds, creating a miniature universe. The communal mind of literate societies—world culture—is an immensely larger loom.
Through science it has gained the power to map external reality far beyond the reach of a single mind, and through the arts the means to construct narratives, images, and rhythms immeasurably more diverse than the products of any solitary genius. The loom( or paradigm?) is the same for both enterprises, for science and for the arts, and there is a general explanation of its origin and nature and thence of the human condition, proceeding from the deep history of genetic evolution to modem culture.
Consilience of causal explanation(or systems thinking and practice?) is how the single mind can travel most swiftly and surely from one part of the communal mind to the other. In education the search for consilience is the way to renew the crumbling structure of the liberal arts. During the past thirty years the ideal of the unity of learning, which the Renaissance and Enlightenment bequeathed us, has been largely abandoned. With rare exceptions , particularly American and European universities and colleges have dissolved their curriculum into a slurry of minor disciplines and specialized courses. While the average number of undergraduate courses per institution doubled, the percentage of mandatory courses in general education dropped by more than half. The trend cannot be reversed by force-feeding students with some-of this and some-of-that across the branches of learning. Win or lose, true reform should aim at the consilience of science with the social sciences and humanities in scholarship and teaching. Every university or college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare?
Every public intellectual and political leader should be able to answer that question as well. Already half the legislation coming before the United States Congress contains important scientific and technological components. Most of the issues that vex humanity daily—ethnic conflict, arms escalation, overpopulation, abortion, environment, endemic poverty, to cite several most persistently before us—cannot be solved without integrating knowledge from the natural sciences with that of the social sciences and humanities. Only fluency across the boundaries will provide a clear view of the world as it really is, not as seen through the lens of ideologies and religious dogmas or commanded by myopic response to immediate need. Yet most of our political leaders are trained exclusively in the social sciences and humanities and have little or no knowledge of the natural sciences. The same is true of the public intellectuals, the columnists, the media interrogators, and think-tank gurus. The best of their analyses are careful and responsible, and sometimes correct, but the substantive base of their wisdom is fragmented and lopsided. A balanced perspective cannot be acquired by studying disciplines in pieces but through pursuit of the consilience among them.
Negotiations with MP supporters of the Local Electricity Bill amendments, deleted by government from the Energy Bill, have resulted in the government creating the Community Energy Fund of £10m over 2 years to help identify and develop projects in England. Once admin and running costs are deducted the fund will be £9m. At the conference last week, Olivia Blunn, Head of Local Energy Policy and Finance, gave some key updates, supported by staff from 3 of the Net Zero Hubs. The fund will open soon, probably mid-October, so watch out for emails and social media announcements and start getting your fundable projects together. It will provide grant funding of £40,000 per project for feasibility work to test ideas and grants of up to £130,000 for developing the project up to investment readiness. Crucially, unlike the late RCEF, community organisation will be able to undertake the feasibility studies themselves, at market rate, rather than having to bring in consultants. This enables the organisation to build and retain capacity and skills – though there is still the challenge of the first stage of acquiring the necessary skills, which Community Energy England(CEE) is looking at how we can support. CEE is planning to organise a webinar with the Hubs in October – details to be announced soon.
The Tory government has promised an annual report to parliament on progress on community energy and to consult on the barriers to community energy delivering projects. Meanwhile the Labour party are ramping up their support for community energy. Their Local Energy plan is ambitiously predicting that they can scale up our abysmally low level of generation capacity from community energy to 8 Giga Watts of capacity! Watch Ed Miliband speak about it at the Cooperative Party Conference a few week ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ULte0yxFTI&t=5294s He argues that there is a massive appetite for community energy -people asking -what can I do? Community energy is a compelling way to address this repetitive and anxious question. It offers everyone a part to play in this energy revolution.
Being open to the limitations of their knowledge can help researchers to foster interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaborations.
When Ike de la Peña encountered a lack of energy, even an air of disinterest, on a Zoom meeting, he did the opposite of taking control. He exercised humility.
De la Peña, a research pharmacologist at Loma Linda University in California, was visiting his home country, the Philippines, as part of its Balik (‘returning’) Scientist Program, and meeting with local researchers to explore potential areas for collaboration. On the video call that day in October 2022 were specialists in addiction and neurological disorders as well as educators from the University of the Philippines Manila. Maybe they were simply busy or their focus was elsewhere, de la Peña says. Undeterred, he explained he was there not to impose his ideas or create change, but to learn from the experts in his native country.
“Immediately the atmosphere in the meeting changed,” says de la Peña. “Everybody began just smiling and freely sharing their ideas.”
On the basis of that call, the dean of the university invited de la Peña to become a visiting professor this year, and he’s been able to connect with other researchers in the health sciences and participate in virtual research symposiums as a panellist. The experience has cemented how de la Peña plans to explore future research partnerships: by explaining that he is there to learn. “I start by saying that you know more about this disease than I do because you have been working with it,” de la Peña says. “Tell me more about it. Let’s work together.”
De la Peña’s approach embodies the concept of intellectual humility. According to the University of Connecticut’s Humility & Conviction in Public Life research project, which ran from 2015 to 2020, it involves “the owning of one’s cognitive limitations, a healthy recognition of one’s intellectual debts to others, and low concern for intellectual domination and certain kinds of social status”.
That translates to recognizing the limitations of one’s beliefs and being open to the perspectives of others, says Michael Lynch, a philosopher at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. “Somebody who has intellectual humility understands that they aren’t going to simply climb on top of a mountain of knowledge themselves,” Lynch says. “They recognize it is going to take some help.”
In the past decade, studies have shown that intellectual humility is linked to learning1, educational achievement2 and critical thinking3. It can also boost open-mindedness and receptivity to differing perspectives4 — both of which are essential in successful collaborations.
In research, it is all too easy to get stuck in an echo chamber in which uniform thinking hampers progress, says Tenelle Porter, a psychologist at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. “Intellectual humility can really help us listen to those who don’t have the same ways of knowing as we do,” or those with a different expertise, she says.
An antidote to academic arrogance
Although intellectual humility’s role in successful collaborations is easy to recognize, the academic environment can make it hard to put it into practice, researchers say. “It is a very Darwinist world,” says Tero Mustonen, a geographer at Snowchange, a cooperative based in Selkie, Finland, that works with local and Indigenous communities in the Arctic.
In academia, survival of the fittest is all about publishing papers, doing so faster than your peers and showing unshakeable confidence in your own beliefs. It’s a culture that favours humility’s opposite: arrogance, a sense of rightness by virtue of position and a stubbornness about not entertaining competing viewpoints, Lynch says. “I’m a professor, so my job is Arrogance, capitalized,” he says.
On less-senior rungs of the academic ladder, in which many researchers are competing for scarce resources, it can be doubly difficult to display any uncertainty or openness, Porter says. Doing so can translate into failure to publish, missed funding and loss of advancement opportunities for early-career researchers.
Learning to collaborate with humility is, however, crucial to solving global challenges, such as building resilience to climate change, says Elena Naumova, an epidemiologist at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts. “Marginalized and hard-to-reach communities face the greatest threats from climate change,” she says. “And we don’t want to push the old missionary idea that we [outsiders] know what is best, and what works.”
Yet many scientists still take that approach, says Maria Corazon De Ungria, a population and molecular geneticist at the University of the Philippines Diliman in Quezon City. To study population genetics and provide relevant medical treatments, she works with and explains her research to local and Indigenous communities with varied educational backgrounds. She’s seen researchers acting as paternalistic saviours and telling people scientific facts as though they represent the one and only truth. “Whereas, in my experience, it is particularly important to stop talking and listen,” to place research and recommendations in the proper community context, De Ungria says.
In the past, De Ungria might have started off by explaining the benefits of medicines that took into account a group’s genomic make-up. But when she stopped to listen, she heard that such treatments were impractical because there wasn’t a health centre nearby. Consequently, in one instance, she was able to contract a local pharmaceutical company to donate medicines through family physicians. “It is only when we listen that we get to understand how the science could be relevant to the people who are affected the most,” De Ungria says.
Embracing fallibility
Listening is a skill, De Ungria says, one fuelled by the recognition that one’s knowledge might be flawed or, at least, limited. But it’s hard to admit our own fallibility, Leary says. So, researchers should cultivate a mindset and create an environment in which it is OK — even applauded — to make mistakes.
To this end, Leary gives a talk entitled ‘Tales from the trash can — 40 years of failed research’. In it, he outlines his own history of bad ideas, suboptimal decisions and mistakes, such as the time when he sloppily offered research participants a response scale that ran from “strongly disagree” to “strongly disagree”. His objectives are to reassure junior researchers that not every study succeeds and to emphasize that principal investigators should be open to feedback from everyone in their group — a process that could lead to fewer mistakes.
It helps to remember that it is impossible to know everything, Porter says. This understanding can then spur individuals to hunt out the gaps in their knowledge and be open to fresh ideas. Ultimately, exercising intellectual humility requires approaching assumptions, beliefs and opinions with curiosity and no small degree of courage. But the pay-offs are there, Porter says. “You have to be willing to wade into the unknown to make new discoveries.”
Intellectual humility isn’t merely an inward-looking endeavour of rooting out limitations, however, Lynch says. “It also has an outward-looking aspect — the idea that what others bring to the table can teach you something.”
For instance, when it comes to discerning why populations evolve the way they do, genomics is simply one part of the puzzle, De Ungria says. History, culture and language all play a part. So arriving at understanding relies on collaborating across disciplines and cultures, she says.
In recent years, scientists and policymakers have also recognized the crucial role that traditional and Indigenous ecological knowledge have in conservation and climate-adaptation strategies. Such knowledge represents the accumulated experience and understandings of societies with long histories of interacting with their natural surroundings. Bradley Moggridge, a hydrogeologist at the University of Canberra and a Murri from the Kamilaroi nation on the eastern coast of Australia, says his nation’s songs and dances contain observations and understandings from more than 60,000 years of connection with the land.
Such knowledge can provide accurate and useful climate information and can point to solutions, says Mustonen, who is also head of the traditional village of Selkie and a lead author of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The mission of Snowchange, which Mustonen co-founded, is to give local and Indigenous communities a voice and agency in the stewardship of their environments. Snowchange workers employ intellectual humility in their collaborations simply by not assuming anything. It’s an approach that builds trust in collaborations and results in information being shared more freely, Mustonen says.
Such humility also has a role in the work of the IPCC, Mustonen says. “We should be trying to work in an honourable and consented way with Indigenous peoples and their knowledge, because we need all the evidence now to make the best possible decisions to maintain humanity’s existence on the planet,” he says.
When exercising intellectual humility, it helps to confront knowledge gaps and “wade into the unknown”, says psychologist Tenelle Porter .
To help such efforts, Moggridge says that scientists need to see traditional ecological knowledge as equal in value to other scientific knowledge. In Australia, doing so could help to resolve natural-resource issues such as how water is managed or preparing lands for a hot, dry summer with ‘cultural burning’, the use of controlled fires to reduce wildfire risks. However, non-Indigenous scientists there don’t typically see Aboriginal Dreamings — oral-tradition stories that capture thousands of years of observations — as providing useful evidence. The stories “are put in the realm of fiction and make-believe”, he says.
Humility training could help scientists to recognize that different forms of knowledge exist, have value and require different methods of data collection, Moggridge says. The Indigenous perspective on natural-resource management is one of knowing, being and doing, all in the context of the local environment, so if you want to understand Aboriginal knowledge, it is essential to go to where that knowledge is held, he says.
Collaboration built on trust
Consequently, establishing research partnerships with Indigenous knowledge holders can prove invaluable. But, too often, scientists define their research questions with little to no consultation with communities. “It is too late to start a project and then go to the people and ask their opinions because the train is already on its path,” Moggridge says. “We are so tired of being an afterthought or add-on.”
Moggridge says the solution is to collaborate with intellectual humility from start to finish. Scientists should start the conversation early with a community, build trust over time and then start talking about the research priorities of that community. The result is a co-designed project that can also be co-delivered — feeding the results not just into scientific publications but back into the community in a way that is useful, he says.
Hydrogeologist Bradley Moggridge says that traditional knowledge, such as songs and oral histories based on deep connections to land, can point to climate solutions.Credit: Bradley Moggridge
In Western Australia, projects run by an organization called Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa embody such an approach. Its rangers draw on ancient knowledge of species habitat and behaviour, and use bush skills of the Martu people to monitor and protect species including the warru, or black-flanked rock wallaby (Petrogale lateralis), and the mankarr, or greater bilby (Macrotis lagotis).
Universities and funding agencies can provide cultural-sensitivity training to help raise scientists’ awareness of different perspectives and world views. IPCC panel members receive such training. Online resources for collaborating with Indigenous communities also exist: the Native Movement, a Native Alaskan organization rooted in an Indigenized world view, provides an online course called Untangling Colonialism, and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation has compiled ‘Our Knowledge, Our Way’ guidelines for scientists who work with Indigenous peoples. In New Zealand, guidelines for researchers working with Maori communities are outlined in the Kaupapa Māori ethical framework. One principle it emphasizes, mahaki, is that of showing humility when sharing knowledge.
Perhaps the biggest act of humility for non-Indigenous researchers is developing the awareness that their beliefs and values are often simply a product of the Western scientific paradigm, rather than being neutral and objective descriptions of reality. Recognizing that can allow them to question their world views and biases, and clear the way for entering collaborations with fresh and open minds. Then respect, deep listening and a willingness to learn can help to foster trust. “Really, as scientists, our currency is not just knowledge, but also trust,” De Ungria says.
Intellectual humility is a skill or habit that can be learnt (see ‘How to apply intellectual humility in your science’), and scientists are well positioned to embrace the concept, Leary says. “A big part of science is being wrong and acknowledging and understanding when you’re wrong,” he says.
How to apply intellectual humility in your science
Interrogate your own ideas, assumptions, and beliefs:
• Take the perspective of an outsider and try to poke holes in your own ideas.
• List any doubts about your work.
• Identify gaps in your knowledge and seek out ways to fill them.
Look for the warning signs of insecurity or arrogance:
• Snap judgements.
• Reacting on autopilot.
• A strong feeling that your view of an issue is correct.
• Being closed off to different interpretations of your data.
Listen actively and deeply:
• Be fully present in conversations and limit distractions.
• Focus on what the other person is saying rather than on your response, and strive to understand their meaning.
Respond mindfully:
• Repeat back some of what you’ve heard to check you have understood correctly.
• Ask follow-up questions to understand more deeply.
Respond to critics with humility:
• Take a long pause to avoid reacting defensively.
• Cool off and reflect.
• Ask your critics: “What do I need to consider or read to understand the point you are making?” or “I want to hear your explanation of your criticism — I really want to dive deeper into this.”
Expand your humility skill set:
• Consider an online course, such as one on intellectual humility from the University of Edinburgh, UK (see go.nature.com/3pyhwr2), or those on giving and receive feedback offered by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (see go.nature.com/3zx8vge).
• Practise effective listening with courses such as those on the professional networking site LinkedIn (see go.nature.com/3es5fsb).
Recognizing that there’s more to learn, together with the humility to listen, lie at the heart of effective collaboration. And intellectual humility can serve as a tool to unite disciplines and cultures in the quest for solutions to complex challenges. Moreover, it doesn’t necessarily require extensive training or hard-to-implement strategies, Leary says. It can be as simple as getting into the habit of asking yourself one question whenever you are tempted to assert your position: “Could I be wrong about this?”
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