interdisciplinary and interinstitutional, with the aim of providing an open access 

 planning and information system for the lower mainland of British Columbia. That 

 was UPS, the inter-Institutional Policy Simulation Study— not as entertaining an 

 acronym as GIRLS, perhaps suggesting that we were taking ourselves too seriously. 

 Both experiments experienced failures, as experiments should. Failures provide the 

 opportunity for learning. But the first set was highly forgiving of error because the 

 experiments were small in scale, were replicated, and had a stated experimental 

 purpose. In contrast, the second was large in scale, was of necessity unreplicated, and 

 had an operational purpose. Those are precisely the ingredients that are unforgiving 

 of error. 



That experience led to a particular kind of organization that was neither the 

 traditional interdisciplinary team nor the "contracting-out" device. It led also to a 

 refinement of procedures and methods that accelerated the process. The following 

 specific lessons were learned. 



Big is Not Beautiful 



The experiments showed that a large, centralized interdisciplinary team effort was 

 unnecessary. The UPS project showed, moreover, that such efforts were excessively 

 costly in organizational, financial and emotional overhead. That project was 

 organized with initial formal commitment of several departments of the city, a 

 regional planning department, and the university. Fear of the unknown and fear of 

 unexpected political consequences was. however, clearly present at the beginning. 

 Nevertheless, the first year proceeded admirably through a series of workshops, the 

 conceptualization of the problem, the identification of component parts and initial 

 analysis and modeling of those parts and of the interconnections between them. The 

 regional planning department in particular made public the benefit it received. The 

 fundamental pitfalls that emerged were typical of many of the early large-scale efforts 

 of systems analysis, and these have been well reviewed elsewhere. ^■*<-'* There was 

 inevitable drifting of the component analysis from the initial policy purposes to more 

 diffuse scientific or philosophical purposes. There was the endless debate that process 

 was everything versus the product was everything, when both process and product 

 have to be inextricably linked. 



But the basic lesson is that large-scale interdisciplinary projects are unnecessarily 

 costly and require excessive organization and control. 



Moderately Small is Necessary 



At the other end of the scale, small efforts involving experts of single disciplines 

 can be equally ineffective, even when the purpose is narrow. A number of workshops 

 were held focusing on aquatic ecosystem studies sponsored by the International 

 Biological Program. Those were largely descriptive field programs and we 

 experienced little success in introducing the notion, for example, of dynamic 

 causation and systems behavior, or of the use of models to direct and be directed by 

 data collection and analysis. The parochial aspect of single disciplines too often 

 reinforces dogma, buries hidden assumptions deeper and smothers the analysis in 

 irrelevant detail. Counteracting forces are needed to emphasize the need to respond 

 to specific questions, not to all questions, the need to identify gaps in understanding 

 or data, and the need to assess the significance of those gaps. 



Mixes of disciplines can help provide the balance as the narrowness of one 

 discipline encounters that of another. Moreover, the significance of interactions 

 between parts of a system is forced into the open. But we found the optimum balance 

 was provided by a mix including experts from several relevant disciplines, resource 

 managers and policy people. The former keep the latter two honest. The latter keep 

 the former relevant. 



The prime lesson is that single disciplines can be blindly parochial and incestuous 

 and that a blend of expert, manager, and policy people can lead to a balanced 



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