We have never known more about the world than we do today. Yet our expert knowledge increasingly rests in narrowing disciplinary silos. The questions we have to address emerge from complex social and political contexts that cut across all of these. Further, we have privileged the kind of knowledge that comes from fragmented, abstract, ‘objective’ specialisation over the wealth of subjective lived experience.
Today’s challenges need both ways of knowing. Without an experiential sense of societal reality, thinking gets stuck in small expertise corners. Yet equally, without deep disciplinary knowledge there is no progress in generating insight into important systemic questions.
IFF design and facilitate conversational processes that allow a dialogue between these two ways of knowing to generate fresh insight. Above all this is a human process: we cannot gain the advantages of ‘inter-disciplinarity’ without paying attention to the fact that different views of the world have a habit of showing up as individuals.
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