Transdisciplinary research has increasingly been emphasised as desirable, particularly for managing complex issues that exist within socio‐political environmental systems. However, achieving true transdisciplinarity, both in academia and practice, has proved challenging. In the case of natural disasters, the risk of not acknowledging the inherent complexity has the potential to increase the risk of fatalities, damage to property and perpetuate poor disaster management. The example of flooding in Atlasville, Ekurhuleni (South Africa) is used to make a case for the usefulness of transdisciplinary approaches. Understanding and responding to local flooding episodes is explored through comparing two hypothetical methodological frameworks – a divided and a united approach. The divided (disciplinary) approach, based on typical disaster response patterns, separated investigations into environmental, government and social factors. In contrast, the united approach, based on a transdisciplinary model, investigated the flooding context along non‐traditional lines including: drivers; absorptive and adaptive capacity; and mitigation and preparation. The research highlights that reframing the flooding problem along transdisciplinary lines forces researchers to analyse the context more comprehensively as isolated analyses are unable to determine or consider the cumulative impacts of individual phenomena. The transformative potential of the transdisciplinary findings indicates that means of translating this hypothetical analysis into reality are urgently required because of the important implications transdisciplinary approaches have for disaster risk reduction, and for managing other complex issues.