Benefits, Risks, & Research Aims

Complex challenges (or Wicked Problems) are a mix of uncertainty, contradictions, varied/varying requirements, and diverse stakeholder needs. Complex challenges do not have obvious solution paths and cannot be resolved using standard operating procedures.

Potential Benefits

To your business:

• Apply an evidence-based Framework, with facilitation, to assist your team in creating a tailored, innovative response.
• Add the consultant-researcher's real-world experience and expertise to your team's capabilities.
• Improve your team's ability to respond to complex situations.
• Gain rich insights and perspectives into your situation.
• Develop a practical action plan.
• Note: due to the nature of complex challenges (also called Wicked Problems), these benefits cannot be guaranteed.

To individual participants:

• Receive guidance to gain greater awareness of individual capacity when facing uncertainty and complex challenges.
• Learn a new creative thinking Framework
• Experience a range of interdisciplinary techniques to explore situations, generate ideas, and prototype change.

Potential Risks

Individuals working to respond to a complex challenge may experience some situational/momentary anxiety in the following circumstances:

• Sharing ideas during brainstorming, offering gut reactions and opinions, experiencing disagreements and criticisms, and practising assertive communication.
• Reflecting on past experiences of failures and rejections.

The consultant-researcher is a trained counsellor with experience in helping individuals manage strong emotions. Participants who experience unusual levels of distress may approach the consultant-researcher for confidential debriefing. Where relevant, the consultant-researcher will support the distressed participant to access ongoing support, such as from your EAP provider or Lifeline. (The researcher will not provide counselling.)

Research Aims

This original Australian research is exploratory in nature. It aims to:

• Discover how using the Hybrid Framework may affect individual self-beliefs of creative confidence, self-efficacy, resilience, hope, and optimism. These characteristics affect how individuals respond to uncertainty and complex challenges. They are malleable and will vary across individuals. They are not used to judge whether an individual is good/bad, right/wrong, or better/worse.
• Understand each participant’s subjective experience of using the Hybrid Framework and how they perceive their capacity to respond to complex challenges.
• Improve the ability of individuals in businesses to respond creatively and effectively to complex challenges.
• Contribute new knowledge that addresses gaps in Organisational Problem-solving, Design Thinking, and Pluralistic Counselling research.

Research Findings

At the end of the PhD project, the consultant-researcher will share a summary of the final findings with participants. Findings will be general and not contain material specific to an individual or your business.