The stakes could hardly be higher. The authors situate their work within what the Club of Rome has called the Polycrisis, an interconnected web of global challenges in which accelerated climate change intersects with soil degradation at massive scale. In Australia, these pressures take a particularly volatile form: periods of drought and catastrophic fire have swung rapidly into sustained heavy rainfall, at times so persistent that crops have been deprived of sufficient sunlight for months. Layer on top of this the rising input costs linked to broken supply chains following the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical instability, alongside shifting consumer demands for ethically and environmentally responsible production, and the environment in which farmers make decisions becomes extraordinarily turbulent.

Yet, as the researchers point out, conventional agricultural research and development still rests on assumptions of continuity and linearity that rarely hold in practice. The dominant extension model, descended from Everett Rogers’ 1962 Diffusion of Innovations theory, imagines knowledge flowing one way: scientists generate it, and farmers adopt it at varying rates depending on their receptivity. This linear framing places the scientist at the centre of power and casts farmers as passive receivers, which the authors note has bred distrust in farming circles. For nearly a century, the mechanistic worldview that powered the Green Revolution, treating soil as merely a structural medium to which fertiliser and pest control are added, has reinforced the illusion of control and permanence. The authors argue that a paradigm shift is needed, one that recognises causality as multidirectional, systems as self-organising, and change as often sudden and unpredictable.

To test how such a shift might work in practice, the team reflected on two projects run through the Cooperative Research Centre for High Performance Soils, a ten-year national program uniting universities, industry groups, government departments and twenty rural farming groups across Australia. The first was a national Rural Landholder Social Benchmarking Study, a mail-out and online survey conducted across six farming regions, from the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia to the Wimmera of Victoria, designed to capture the complex social, economic and environmental factors driving farmer decisions about innovation. The second was a Knowledge-Sharing Project, bringing together researchers from four universities and four regional farming groups over two years to improve how farmers are engaged with new technologies and soil stewardship practices.

The Social Benchmarking Study demonstrates how scale and local relevance can coexist when boundaries are set from within the context of the activity. Local partnerships between universities, farming groups and natural resource management agencies determined the spatial scope of each survey, and key topics were co-designed in regional workshops to ensure maximum local relevance, while core questions fed a national dataset. Each region saw one to two thousand surveys mailed out, achieving response rates of 24 to 35 percent, with contact addresses linked to cadastral data enabling cross-referencing against soil type and rainfall layers. Crucially, the survey design itself evolved: open questions about challenges and profitability, and an analysis by generation first requested in South Australian workshops, became standard features of subsequent iterations. The findings flowed back quickly through four-page summaries and detailed reports, and in several regions the data was woven directly into strategic planning documents and used to attract substantial additional investment.

Complexity thinking also paid off in how the data was analysed. The team found that having family working on the farm was linked not only to improved succession planning, which is the expected linear relationship, but also to collective decision-making, which was in turn associated with feeling better supported, coping better, and having greater capacity for managing data and farm planning. Having a succession plan was also linked to longer timeframes for strategic planning, which connected to higher rates of sustainable farming practices. These tangled, non-linear associations, the authors suggest, have significant implications for farming families wrestling with succession and for the organisations that support them, and they only emerge when researchers are willing to explore complex relationships rather than hunt for single causes.

The Knowledge-Sharing Project, by contrast, illustrates complexity enacted through how a project is organised and governed. The funding application outlined objectives and broad stages but was deliberately not prescriptive, granting each farming group budget and freedom to identify engagement activities to trial. An empowerment evaluation process shaped the project’s Big Picture Plan, and each partner developed regional knowledge-sharing plans drawing on existing local priorities. Monitoring combined co-designed Process Diaries, event evaluation forms, monthly semi-structured online meetings and digital engagement metrics. When engagement slowed mid-project, a leader of one partner organisation proposed and facilitated a re-focus session, an act of distributed, self-organising leadership that the authors highlight as evidence of the humility and trust underpinning the whole enterprise.

Adaptability was tested hard. Three of the partner regions experienced catastrophic floods halfway through the project, and the Central West Farming Systems group seized the crisis as a moment to deepen connections between affected farmers, actively building resilience in extremely challenging times. In another region, heavy rains enabled an opportunistic field day that drew hundreds of farmers to learn how to deal with bogged machinery in waterlogged soils, an unplanned event that sparked wider discussion about how to reach the generally unengaged. Failures were discussed as openly as successes, including webinars with low attendance and Twitter feeds with poor uptake, and insights flowed in what the authors call fractal learning: a successful activity trialled by one sub-group was rapidly adopted by another, which then fed its experience back to the team.

From these two case studies, distilled through six principles of complexity, defining boundaries, self-organisation, adaptability, feedback loops, non-linearity, and emergence, the researchers identify a set of attributes for deliberative project design. Boundaries work best when set from within the context. Humility and trust are not abstract values but operational conditions that let partners’ strengths surface and alliances deepen. Willingness to identify improvements must be matched by institutional arrangements, such as funder evaluation criteria, that permit flexibility. Genuine feedback processes need to be built in from the start, because treating reflection too informally limits its usefulness. And teams must be willing to explore data and seek complex relationships even when these are not simple to address. The authors concede lessons from their own missteps, noting that initially underestimating how strongly externally imposed boundaries constrained collaboration was a significant error.

The study’s broader message is that deliberative approaches to complex socio-agri-ecosystems require more than bolting on participatory methods; they demand deliberate attention to how boundaries, relationships and learning processes are designed and maintained. The legacy of the projects suggests the payoff: Process Diaries have been embedded in the standard procedures of at least two farming groups and carried into two subsequent farmer-led research projects, while the benchmarking data continues to inform regional strategy years on. As agricultural industries face mounting and sometimes conflicting expectations to produce food and fibre while regenerating ecosystems and rural communities, the authors argue that supporting organisations have a responsibility to help farmers build adaptive capacity through complexity thinking, transforming research projects from rigid pipelines into living, self-organising systems capable of learning their way through an uncertain future.

Subject of Research: Deliberative project design applying complexity principles to collaborative agricultural research in Australia

Article Title: Deliberative project design for understanding and working within complexity in agricultural systems

Article References: Deliberative project design for understanding and working within complexity in agricultural systems. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fcpxs.2026.1749741

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcpxs.2026.1749741

Keywords: agricultural systems, complexity thinking, deliberative project design, co-learning, soil health, farmer engagement, resilience, social benchmarking, knowledge sharing, self-organisation, adaptive capacity, agri-food systems

The research was motivated by a gap the authors identified in the occupational therapy literature. Although teaching and learning have long been recognised as core components of practice, learning is typically framed as hierarchical and unidirectional, with the expert therapist educating the learner client. Where theory does underpin practice, it is usually borrowed from other disciplines. Bandura’s social cognitive theory has informed health education programmes for older adults and motivation-driven stroke rehabilitation interventions, while the Four-quadrant Model of Facilitated Learning, an occupational therapy specific paediatric teaching process, draws on Vygotsky’s social development theory. Prochaska’s transtheoretical model of behaviour change has underpinned coaching approaches, and adult and transformative learning theories have been invoked in studies of client education. What was missing, the researchers argue, was a discipline-specific theory of how learning actually unfolds between therapists and clients in naturalistic practice.

To build that theory, the team used constructivist grounded theory methodology, informed primarily by Charmaz’s approach and supplemented by Birks and Mills’ coding framework and Bryant’s pragmatist-constructivist perspective. The study was conducted in the context of therapy provision to pre-school children requiring long-term intervention. Participants were recruited from two large regional paediatric services and a community service offering home and clinic-based therapy in two New Zealand cities. Eleven parents of children aged up to six years took part, alongside eight female occupational therapists with an average of 20.5 years of practice experience. Parents had been working with a therapist for an average of eleven months, most receiving weekly to monthly home visits. Three parents identified as Māori and eight as New Zealand European.

Data generation was deliberately multi-source. Twenty-three intensive semi-structured interviews were conducted, averaging 65 minutes, with two parents and two therapists returning for second interviews to check that the emerging theory resonated with their experiences. Five routine therapy sessions were filmed, capturing not only dialogue but gestures, body movements, use of objects and the environment, and the responses of those involved. Nine photographs of learning resources, such as tailored written instructions given to parents, were taken during interviews and analysed as documents. The observational data proved invaluable: analysis revealed multiple layers of learning happening simultaneously, with rapid shifts between learning and tending the relationship, and therapists and parents continually responding to each other’s needs and to what was happening in the moment.

Analysis followed the constant comparative method, in which data generation, coding and analysis proceed simultaneously from the first interview until the theory is fully integrated. Three stages of coding were used: initial line-by-line coding, including in vivo codes that preserved participants’ own words such as ‘hooking’; intermediate focused coding and categorising; and advanced coding using storyline and theoretical coding to integrate the theory at a high conceptual level. Reflexivity strategies, including a presuppositions interview, a reflective journal, memoing and regular research meetings, were used to keep the theory grounded in the data rather than in researchers’ assumptions. The study received ethical approval from the Auckland University of Technology Ethics Committee and cultural endorsement from the locality District Health Board, with cultural guidance sought throughout to ensure the research was acceptable and safe for Māori participants.

The resulting theory comprises three main categories that can also be viewed as phases. The first, Establishing relationship, involves connecting and crossing what the authors call the relational threshold. Both parents and therapists invested time in showing friendly interest and learning about each other. Parents often gauged trust through how their child responded to the therapist, and both parties used ‘hooking’ strategies to draw each other into a therapeutic partnership, from both a relating perspective of feeling comfortable and a doing perspective of projecting and instilling confidence. One therapist explained that modelling a technique that works well is like a hook: you have to make sure you get the right one. Crossing the threshold was experienced as feeling more comfortable, losing a defensive wall, and trusting the therapist unreservedly. Notably, parents were unanimously reluctant to connect with a new therapist afterwards, with some describing a forced restart as feeling like abandonment or a setback, and on rare occasions a failure to connect became a make-or-break situation in which therapy did not proceed at all.

The second phase, Partnering in learning, is where doing therapy together happens, through a responsive recursive cycle of getting on the same page, tailoring learning, and getting on the same page again. Getting on the same page involves finding common ground and building mutual working knowledge: parents learn what to expect from therapy and how to navigate the health system, while therapists learn how each family functions, what they already know and what they want to know. One therapist framed it plainly: we are learning together; you know your child, I know some things, let’s put it together. Tailoring learning involves working side by side, often mirroring each other’s body movements, using strategies such as explaining, demonstrating, observing, embodied experience and practising. Some parents initially found hands-on participation daunting, even invoking performance anxiety, but confidence grew with shared experience. Written home programmes and session summaries reinforced learning between visits and allowed it to be shared with other family members.

Getting on the same page again is described as the crux of the theory, revealing its recursive, responsive nature. Parents and therapists oscillate between a relating focus, reconnecting and tending the relationship through encouragement, positive feedback and small acts of welcome such as vacuuming before a home visit, and a doing focus, responding to each other’s needs, questions and cues by clarifying understanding, reframing instructions or using analogies when understanding faltered. At times both parties moderated what they revealed, with therapists gently preparing parents for difficult information and parents sometimes biting their tongue to preserve the relationship. The third phase, Integrating learning, marks the crossing of an independence threshold, where knowledge or skills are mastered and woven into everyday life. Parents began adapting what they had learned to suit their child and taking the lead in setting therapy goals, while therapists integrated lessons from families into their own practice, building what one described as a book of knowledge to help the next family. Moving on often meant re-entering the partnering cycle to address new issues, or ending well through gradual withdrawal or joint visits to ease transitions.

The authors situate their theory within a broader literature on therapeutic relationships, tipping points and co-learning, noting that while individual components align with prior work, no existing account captures the entire process. They acknowledge limitations: the doctoral research spanned seven years, participants came from four services in two New Zealand cities, only three Māori parents and no Māori therapists took part, and the study examined the parent-therapist dyad within what is actually a parent-child-therapist triad. Future research on the triad and with different client groups would test the theory’s generalisability. The practical implications, however, are immediate. Although therapists often feel pressure to work quickly toward therapy goals, the theory supports prioritising time to establish and sustain collaborative relationships, and it urges clinicians to become knowing, intentional co-learners rather than unknowing ones, since most therapists in the study struggled to articulate what they had learned from parents. Incorporating responsive learning into clinician training and professional education, the authors suggest, could support more efficient, equitable and effective engagement with service users across a range of health settings.

Subject of Research: The process of learning between occupational therapists and parents of children receiving long-term therapy

Article Title: Responsive learning in practice: A grounded theory

Article References: Harvey, C., Hocking, C., & Jones, M. (2025). Responsive learning in practice: A grounded theory. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 32(1), Article 2578329. https://doi.org/10.1080/11038128.2025.2578329

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1080/11038128.2025.2578329

Keywords: occupational therapy, grounded theory, responsive learning, therapeutic relationship, parent education, paediatric therapy, constructivist methodology, co-learning, family-centred care, therapist-client collaboration, New Zealand, qualitative research