Tag: research-community

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The personal and the institutional

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A number of things recently have lead me to reflect on the nature of interactions between social media, research organisations and the wider community. There has been an awful lot written about the effective use of social media by organisations, the risks involved in trusting staff and members of an organisation to engage productively and positively with a wider audience. Above all there seems a real focus on the potential for people to embarrass the organisation. Relatively little focus is applied to the ability of the organisation to embarrass its staff but that is perhaps a subject for another post.

In the area of academic research this takes on a whole new hue due to the presence of a strong principle and community expectation of free speech, the principle of “academic freedom”. No-one really knows what academic freedom is. It’s one of those things that people can’t define but will be very clear about when it has been taken away. In general terms it is the expectation that a tenured academic has earnt the right to be able to speak their opinion, regardless of how controversial. We can accept there are some bounds on this, of ethics, taste, and legality – racism would generally be regarded as unacceptable – while noting that the boundary between what is socially unacceptable and what is a validly held and supported academic opinion is both elastic and almost impossible to define. Try expressing the opinion, for example, that their might be a biological basis to the difference between men and women on average scores on a specific maths test. These grey areas, looking at how the academy ( or academies) censor themselves are interesting but aren’t directly relevant to this post. Here I am more interested in how institutions censor their staff.

Organisations always seek to control the messages they release to the wider community. The first priority of any organisation or institution is its own survival. This is not necessarily a bad thing – presumably the institution exists because it is  (or at least was) the most effective way of delivering a specific mission. If it ceases to exist, that mission can’t be delivered. Controlling the message is a means of controlling others reactions and hence the future. Research institutions have always struggled with this – the corporate centre sending once message of clear vision, high standards, continuous positive development, while the academics privately mutter in the privacy of their own coffee room about creeping beauracracy, lack of resources, and falling standards.

There is fault on both sides here. Research administration and support only very rarely puts the needs and resources of academics at its centre. Time and time again the layers of beauracracy mean that what may or may not have been a good idea gets buried in a new set of unconnected paperwork, that more administration is required taking resources away from frontline activities, and that target setting results in target meeting but at the cost of what was important in the first place. There is usually a fundamental lack of understanding of what researchers do and what motivates them.

On the other side academics are arrogant and self absorbed, rarely interested in contributing to the solution of larger problems. They fail to understand, or take any interest in the corporate obligations of the organisations that support them and will only rarely cooperate and compromise to find solutions to problems. Worse than this, academics build social and reward structures that encourage this kind of behaviour, promoting individual achievement rather than that of teams, penalising people for accepting compromises, and rarely rewarding the key positive contribution of effective communication and problem solving between the academic side and administration.

What the first decade of the social web has taught us is that organisations that effectively harness the goodwill of their staff or members using social media tools do well. Organisations that effectively use Twitter or Facebook enable and encourage their staff to take the shared organisational values out to the wider public. Enable your staff to take responsibility and respond rapidly to issues, make it easy to identify the right person to engage with a specific issue, and admit (and fix) mistakes early and often, is the advice you can get from any social media consultant. Bring the right expert attention to bear on a problem and solve it collaboratively, whether its internal or with a customer. This is simply another variation on Michael Nielsen’s writing on markets in expert attention – the organisations that build effective internal markets and apply the added value to improving their offering will win.

This approach is antithetical to traditional command and control management structures. It implies a fluidity and a lack of direct control over people’s time. It is also requires that there be slack in the system, something that doesn’t sit well with efficiency drives. In its extreme form it removes the need for the organisation to formally exist, allowing a fluid interaction of free agents to interact in a market for their time. What it does do though is map very well onto a rather traditional view of how the academy is “managed”. Academics provide a limited resource, their time, and apply it to a large extent in a way determined by what they think is important. Management structures are in practice fairly flat (and used to be much more so) and interactions are driven more by interests and personal whim than by widely accepted corporate objectives. Research organisations, and perhaps by extension those commercial interests that interact most directly with them, should be ideally suited to harness the power of the social web to first solve their internal problems and secondly interact more effectively with their customers and stakeholders.

Why doesn’t this happen? A variety of reasons, some of them the usual suspects, a lack of adoption of new tools by academics, appalling IT procurement procedures and poor standards of software development, and a simple lack of time to develop new approaches, and a real lack of appreciation of the value that diversity of contributions can bring to a successful department and organisation. The biggest one though I suspect is a lack of good will between administrations and academics. Academics will not adopt any tools en masse across a department, let alone an organisation because they are naturally suspicious of the agenda and competence of those choosing the tools. And the diversity of tools they choose on their own means that none have critical mass within the organisation – few academic institutions had a useful global calendar system until very recently. Administration don’t trust the herd of cats that make up their academic staff to engage productively with the problems they have and see the need to have a technical solution that has critical mass of users, and therefore involves a central decision.

The problems of both diversity and lack of critical mass are a solid indication that the social web has some way to mature – these conversations should occur effectively across different tools and frameworks – and the uptake at research institutions should (although it may seem paradoxical) be expected to much slower than in more top down, managed organisation, or at least organisations with a shared focus. But it strikes me that the institutions that get this right, and they won’t be the traditional top institutions, will very rapidly accrue a serious advantage, both in terms of freeing up staff time to focus on core activities and releasing real monetary resource to support those activities. If the social side works, then the resource will also go to the right place. Watch for academic institutions trying to bring in strong social media experience into senior management. It will be a very interesting story to follow.

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Creating a research community monoculture – just when we need diversity

This post is a follow on from a random tweet that I sent a few weeks back in response to a query on twitter from Lord Drayson, the UK’s Minister of State for Science and Innovation. I thought it might be an idea to expand from the 140 characters that I had to play with at the time but its taken me a while to get to it. It builds on the ideas of a post from last year but is given a degree of urgency by the current changes in policy proposed by EPSRC.

Government money for research is limited, and comes from the pockets of taxpayers. It is incumbent on those of us who spend it to ensure that this investment generates maximum impact. Impact, for me comes in two forms. Firstly there is straightforward (although not straightforward to measure) economic impact; increases in competitivenes, standard of living, development of business opportunities, social mobility, reductions in the burden of ill health and hopefully in environmental burden at some point in the future. The problem with economic impact is that it is almost impossible to measure in any meaningful way. The second area of impact is, at least on the surface, a little easier to track, that is research outputs delivere. How efficiently do we turn money into science? Scratch beneath the surface and you realise rapidly that measurement is a nightmare, but we can at least look at where there are inefficiencies, where money is being wasted, and being lost from the pipelines before it can be spent on research effort.

The approach that is being explicitly adopted in the UK is to concentrate research in “centres of excellence” and to “focus research on areas where the UK leads” and where “they are relevant to the UK’s needs”. At one level this sounds like motherhood and apple pie. It makes sense in terms of infrastructure investment to focus research funding both geographically and in specific subject areas. But at another level it has the potential to completely undermine the UK’s history of research excellence.

There is a fundamental problem with trying to maximise the economic impact of research. And it is one that any commercial expert, or indeed politician should find obvious. Markets are good at picking winners, commitees are very bad at it. Using committees of scientists, with little or no experience of commercialising research outputs is likely to be an unmitigated disaster. There is no question that some research leds to commercial outcomes but to the best of my knowledge there is no evidence that anyone has ever had any success in picking the right projects in advance. The simple fact is that the biggest form of economic impact from research is in providing and supporting the diverse and skilled workforce that support a commercially responsive, high technology economy. To a very large extent it doesn’t actually matter what specific research you support as long as it is diverse. And you will probably generate just exactly the same amount of commercial outcomes by picking at random as you will by trying to pick winners.

The world, and the UK in particular, is facing severe challenges both economic and environmental for which there may be technological solutions. Indeed there is a real opportunity in the current economic climate to reboot the economy with low carbon technologies and at the same time take the opportunity to really rebuild the information economy in a way that takes advantage of the tools the web provides, and in turn to use this to improve outcomes in health, social welfare, to develop new environmentally friendly processes and materials. The UK has great potential to lead these developments precisely because it has a diverse research community and a diverse highly trained research and technology workforce. We are well placed to solve todays problems with tomorrow’s technology.

Now let us return to the current UK policy proposals. These are to concentrate research, to reduce diversity, and to focus on areas of UK strength. How will those strengths be identified? No doubt by committee. Will they be forward looking strengths? No, they will be what a bunch of old men, already selected by their conformance to a particular stereotype, i.e. the ones doing fundable research i fundable places, identify in a closed room. It is easy to identify the big challenges. It is not easy, perhaps not even possible, to identify the technological solutions that will eventually solve them. Not the currently most promising solutions, the ones that will solve the problem five or ten years down the track.

As a thought experiment think back to what the UK’s research strengths and challenges were 20 years ago and imagine a world in which they were exclusively funded. It would be easy to argue that many of the UK’s current strengths simply wouldn’t even exist (web technology? biotechnology? polymer materials?). And that disciplines that have subsequently reduced in size or entirely disappeared would have been maintained at the cost of new innovation. Concentrating research in a few places, on a few subjects, will reduce diversity, leading to the loss of skills, and probably the loss of skilled people as researchers realise there is no future career for them in the UK. It will not provide the diverse and skilled workforce required to solve the problems we face today. Concentrating on current strengths, no matter how worthy, will lead to ossification and conservatism making UK research ultimately irrelevant on a world stage.

What we need more than ever now, is a diverse and vibrant research community working on a wide range of problems, and to find better communication tools so as to efficiently connect unexpected solutions to problems in different areas. This is not the usual argument for “blue skies research”, whatever that may be. It is an argument for using market forces to do what they are best at (pick the winners from a range of possible technologies) and to use the smart people currently employed in research positions at government expense to actually do what they are good at; do research and train new researchers. It is an argument for critically looking at the expenditure of government money in a wholistic way and to seriously consider radical change where money is being wasted. I have estimated in the past that the annual cost of failed grant proposals to the UK government is somewhere between £100M – £500M, a large sum of money in anybody’s books. More rigorous economic analysis of a Canadian government funding scheme has shown that the cost of preparing and refeering the proposals ($CAN40k) is more than the cost of giving every eligible applicant a support grantof $CAN30k. This is not just farcical, it is an offensive waste of taxpayer’s money.

The funding and distribution of research money requires radicaly overhaul. I do not beleive that simply providing more money is the solution. Frankly we’ve had a lot more money, it makes life a little more comfortable if you are in the right places, but it has reduced the pressure to solve the underlying problems. We need responsive funding at a wide range of levels that enables both bursts of research, the kind of instant collaboration that we know can work, with little or no review, and large scale data gathering projects of strategic importance that need extensive and careful critical review before being approved.  And we need mechanisms to tension these against each other. We need baseline funding to just let people get on with research and we need access to larger sums where appropriate.

We need less buearacracy, less direction from the top, and more direction from the sides, from the community, and not just necessarily the community of researchers. What we have at the moment are strategic initiatives announced by research councils that are around five years behind the leading edge, which distort and constrain real innovation. Now we have ministers proposing to identify the UK’s research strengths. No doubt these will be five to ten years out of date and they will almost certainly stifle those pockets of excellence that will grow in strengths over the next decade. No-one will ever agree what tomorrow’s strengths will be. Much better would be to get on and find out.