Exploring brokers at the intersection of professions

Students from the new boundary crossing elective for the Master Nutrition and Health (See also: Boundary Crossing in and after the Bio-Tech-Med-Nutrition Interdisciplinary Team Training (BITT Challenge) explored the role and characteristics of the broker at the intersection of professions.

Starting from a selection of boundaries between professional domains to be explored, students made network analyses to identify typical brokers in both academia, medical organisations, business and government, and contacted them for an interview. The interview design was based on the game ‘Wanted: Brokers’ (WUR Education and Learning Sciences, 2019). This game supports the discovery of tasks, competencies and personal qualities of a broker.

Despite working in different organisations, brokers appeared to share similar tasks and behaviours. They all mentioned establishing good collaborations as their main task and also as the main driver in their work.

Another remarkable finding was the felt importance and effort put into the learning mechanism ‘Identification’ in initial stages of a collaborative challenge. Learning to know the own and others’ expertise at the start of a project is supposed to enhance good collaboration. Finally there is no one-size-fits-all manual for becoming a good broker. Brokers typically adapt flexibly to differing circumstances, switching gears and tailoring their working manner to what is needed for a team and the collaboration.

In light of this finding, the next step on our BC@WUR agenda is to appoint a thesis student interested in exploring brokering capacities of students.

The image above showcases the 'Wanted: Brokers' game that is mentioned in the news item. This game is available in both Dutch and English.

This news item is contributed by Carla Oonk. For more information about this news item or the 'Wanted: Brokers' game, please contact carla.oonk@wur.nl.