We live in a time when the complexity of the problems we face can feel overwhelming. The ways we’ve been trained to work—where research, policy, and community efforts often happen in isolation—are no longer generating the kinds of high-impact solutions people need.
Transdisciplinary design approaches offer something urgently needed: a way to think, learn, and act together differently. This kind of approach shifts the question from “What’s my role?” to “What can we build together?”
A Model Born from Practice
Over the last seven years, we at Evaluation Plus, in partnership with the Community and Cancer Science Network, piloted a transdisciplinary approach to addressing cancer disparities in Wisconsin. What began as three discrete projects focused on breast and lung cancer has evolved into a thriving network of researchers, practitioners, and community leaders working together to reduce disparities, strengthen trust, and co-create solutions that work in real life.
What Is a Transdisciplinary Approach?
Transdisciplinary (TD) work is more than teamwork. It’s about bringing together people from science, medicine, community, advocacy, policy, and lived experience—not just to share ideas, but to build entirely new ones. It’s a way of working that honors every kind of knowledge, from lab research to lived experience.
Take, for example, our current work on prostate cancer awareness and screening among Black men. The team includes not just clinicians and researchers, but also marketing professionals, educators, caregivers, and, most importantly, Black men from the community. This breadth isn’t for show. It’s foundational. When the right mix of people comes together, the solutions become smarter, more grounded, and more likely to stick.
What This Approach Makes Possible
This way of working is creative, human, and real. It begins with listening, reframing, and even unlearning. But it leads to something powerful: relationships built on trust, insights that no one person could have generated alone, and ideas that challenge the conditions keeping disparities in place.
We live in a time when the complexity of the problems we face can feel overwhelming. The ways we’ve been trained to work—where research, policy, and community efforts often happen in isolation—are no longer generating the kinds of high-impact solutions people need.
Transdisciplinary design approaches offer something urgently needed: a way to think, learn, and act together differently. This kind of approach shifts the question from “What’s my role?” to “What can we build together?”
A Model Born from Practice
Over the last seven years, we at Evaluation Plus, in partnership with the Community and Cancer Science Network, piloted a transdisciplinary approach to addressing cancer disparities in Wisconsin. What began as three discrete projects focused on breast and lung cancer has evolved into a thriving network of researchers, practitioners, and community leaders working together to reduce disparities, strengthen trust, and co-create solutions that work in real life.
What Is a Transdisciplinary Approach?
Transdisciplinary (TD) work is more than teamwork. It’s about bringing together people from science, medicine, community, advocacy, policy, and lived experience—not just to share ideas, but to build entirely new ones. It’s a way of working that honors every kind of knowledge, from lab research to lived experience.
Take, for example, our current work on prostate cancer awareness and screening among Black men. The team includes not just clinicians and researchers, but also marketing professionals, educators, caregivers, and, most importantly, Black men from the community. This breadth isn’t for show. It’s foundational. When the right mix of people comes together, the solutions become smarter, more grounded, and more likely to stick.
What This Approach Makes Possible
This way of working is creative, human, and real. It begins with listening, reframing, and even unlearning. But it leads to something powerful: relationships built on trust, insights that no one person could have generated alone, and ideas that challenge the conditions keeping disparities in place.
We’ve seen transformation at every level:
- Individually, participants report the process changes how they think; expanding how they understand their own field and deepening their appreciation for others.
- Interpersonally, it creates new connections and shared language across divides of profession, identity, and power.
- Systemically, it opens the door to entirely new ways of solving problems, like building shared measurement systems that integrate radiology, implementation science, and justice frameworks.
It’s not just the outcome that’s innovative. It’s the way we get there.
How It’s Different from Other Collaborations
At first glance, transdisciplinary collaboration might sound like coalition-building or cross-sector teamwork. But it asks for something deeper.
In most collaborations, expertise is shared—but everyone stays in their lanes. In a transdisciplinary approach, those perspectives interact, reshape each other, and lead to something no single field could create alone.
- In a coalition, a doctor might talk about cancer screening, an advocate about transportation barriers, and a policymaker about funding gaps. In a transdisciplinary team, those same players co-design a solution that integrates the best of their knowledge into something new and far more effective.
- It’s not about compromise. It’s about creative synthesis.
- And, it requires a different kind of process: more time to build trust, tools to support reflection, and a commitment to reshape how power, voice, and expertise are shared.
Put simply: transdisciplinary collaboration isn’t just about who’s at the table. It’s about changing the conversation, and what becomes possible because of it.
How to Get Started
If you’re ready to move beyond business-as-usual collaboration, a developmental evaluator can help you design the process, build the habits of shared learning, and keep trust at the center even when the work gets messy.
Keep an eye out for the upcoming release of our transdisciplinary toolkit designed to help teams like yours work across boundaries, build authentic partnerships, and design solutions that last.
