How can academicians who desire a sustainable future successfully participate in transdisciplinary projects? Transcending our hidden thought patterns is required. Paradoxically, the disciplinary specialization that enabled the industrial era and its metaphors now function to undermine our ability to recognize and participate in the transformational learning that is needed. In this paper, we offer a post-industrial era metaphor for transdisciplinarity-that of complex dynamic system-that has helped us to work through the unexpected experiences encountered in the process of transformative learning. These insights are based on an ongoing transdisciplinary research collaboration (2008-present) using action research methods; we focus on the faculty experience. Accepting the metaphors of complex systems, we describe the systemic conditions that OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2014, 6 2894 seem to repeatedly reproduce the emergence of transformative learning for participants, as well as what one might expect to experience in the process. These experiences include: conflict, existential crisis, transformation and renewed vitality within the necessary context of a safe and caring community. Without the adoption of complexity metaphors, these elements would have been overlooked or interpreted as a hindrance to the work. These insights are intended to serve as socially robust knowledge to support the effective participation of faculty members in sustainability projects of a transdisciplinary nature.

The New Zealand pastoral industry has many simultaneous drivers, including market and policy compliance, that operate from the local to the global scale. The ability to adapt to these multiple drivers against a background of constrained natural resources and climate change is vital to the continued success of New Zealand's pastoral industry. Here we describe a case study based in the Horizons Region where we worked with pastoral sector stakeholders to apply a process in which an integrated systems perspective was used to identify and explore the impact of drivers on dairy and sheep/beef systems. Drawing from this process we have designed a generic framework, including tools and processes, to enable policy, farmers, and agribusiness to collectively explore the influence of multiple drivers on the future behaviour of farm systems and associated value chains. Keywords: Rural futures, collective learning, socioecological systems, strategic planning

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