The Transformative Adaptation Research Alliance (TARA; https://research.csiro.au/tara/) has developed an operational framework to study and support the implementation of transformative adaptation, linking three powerful, novel concepts of ‘adaptation services’, the ‘values-rules-knowledge (vrk) perspective’ and ‘adaptation pathways’. Adaptation services describes future options provided to people by ecosystems, recognising changing societal perspectives on ecosystem management and use. The vrk perspective focusses on the societal system and how we can free up constraints on the decision context for implementation. The adaptation pathways concept provides a means for planning and sequencing the actions required for transformative adaptation. Uniting these concepts allows the exploration of interactions between changing biophysical systems and co-evolving societal systems in order to enable deliberation, choice and decision-making. Taken together, these concepts address the need for underpinning research on transformative adaptation to be integrative and trans-disciplinary in nature. This task requires researchers and practitioners with backgrounds in the biophysical and social sciences who are able and willing to work across discipline boundaries and synthesise complex ideas into readily understandable concepts that can then be put into practice by decision-makers.