Two or Three Steps from Disaster

I've caught up with a large number of senior research leaders recently, and have had a particularly interesting experience repeat itself a lot: I will congratulate them on some amazing achievements or successes that they, or their group / centre / cluster / institute have recently had, they will thank me, and then immediately launch into a discussion of one, or more, major, or even existential challenges they are currently grappling with.

It reminded me of two key points, covered in today's #HackingAcademia video:

👉 That what you see in public / social media is almost always positivity-biased: much more "good news" makes it to public airings, than bad stuff (bad stuff does make it, but not in the way that "every positive thing that happens gets posted" does).

👉 That most initiatives, groups, centres, institutes and other activities are only two or three major negative outcomes away from a very drastic change, or even ceasing to exist. Disaster is perhaps a little melodramatic: "significant emotional event or outcome" might be a more apt description.

Now, resilience and robustness is a thing to try and work towards, and if your "thing" collapses at the first sign of adversity, then you probably need to work on that resilience. That said, most things I know are not bulletproof and in the unlikely, but not impossible situation, where multiple very bad things happen simultaneously, many will not be able to weather the storm.

So what sort of negative events am I talking about? There are lots, but things like:

➖ a major and thought-to-be-reliable source of resourcing / funding unexpectedly reducing, or removing, that support

➖ one or more key people can unexpected leave - this could be job opps, it could be health or personal circumstances - this happens all the time

➖ major screw ups: a reputational disaster, not meeting your obligations and so on.

Most healthy or healthyish initiatives I know can, and do, regularly weather *one* of these, perhaps even two at the same time. But they're not indestructible foundations: pile enough major negative things on at the same time, and those foundations will usually, and very understandably, crumble.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/GAMjRywFOrE

#marketing #branding #success #failure #challenges #adversity #resilience #research #academia

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Recently I've been catching up with a lot of senior researchers. So these are researchers who are, for example, center directors or leaders of very large research groups or research clusters. And often I've seen some fantastic news online about the achievements of themselves or their center or big news. And so usually the conversation starts off with a congratulations, I heard the news, that sounds fantastic, that must be really exciting. Now, usually there's a thank you, an acknowledgement of the congratulations, but in a surprising number of cases, what then follows is a bunch of really frank and open comments that things are not as nice and exciting as they might seem, and that they're actually grappling with a bunch of really, really challenging situations, often more than one at the same time. And then you get into an interesting uh discussion with some commiseration and support going through some of the challenges that they're working through, and often slopping notes because usually it's a mutual experience. I think a lot of people are facing a lot of challenges at the moment. And of course, when people are complaining or about these things or venting, uh, it isn't that the world is necessarily just about to end, but that they are facing down uh the distinct possibility of some pretty major possible negative changes to their their research group or uh what their big initiative is at the moment. And I wanted to cover how this is more of the norm than the exception, I would say, in most academic and research ecosystems today. I've titled the video uh two or three steps from disaster. Obviously, disaster uh is perhaps being a bit over-melodramatic, but the key idea of the video is that most big things that are going on in research ecosystems are only two or three significant changes away from a radical downgrade in their circumstances or even a closure or cessation of the very thing that they're doing. Now, people will say or bring up that if you are so sensitive to something that uh a single big change will mean that everything stops and all legacy will stop and you'll you'll stop having impact. That's probably a reasonably valid criticism. Uh, if you are so brittle that one significantly bad thing will just uh torpedo everything, that's not great. But I would say that the majority of centers and initiatives and other things I know are only two, perhaps three, big negative incidents or events away from basically evaporating uh into thin air. Obviously, they would still leave a legacy with the people who are part of it, but the actual initiative or whatever it was could easily disappear with just two or three things going differently. Now, the chances of all of those things going bad at the same or similar time is obviously pretty low, but it's not zero. Uh, and so it's something that does, and I've seen this happen uh happen quite frequently. The sort of things that can uh scupper you again, one of these you should be reasonably robust to uh would be things like one or two key people uh leaving or disappearing. That could be that they've taken another job somewhere, it could also be personal circumstances or tragedy or caring responsibilities, it could be a bunch of different things. And ideally, you have an initiative or a group that is somewhat resilient to one or two people leaving, but it's still going to have a significant uh impact. Other typical things are a trusted and assumed to be reliable source of funding suddenly changing so that that funding is either withdrawn completely, unexpectedly, or radically reduced. Again, dealing with that just by itself is manageable, but dealing with uh that in conjunction with one or two other major negative things can be very, very damaging and sometimes fatal to an initiative. A third type of negative thing is something that someone or the organization or group has done that is a really big mistake or something that's had major reputational backlash, and again, you can typically weather the storm and deal with that by itself, but if it happens at the same time as one or two of these other big negative things, again, it can be uh fatal, it can be the end of an initiative or a group as it was previously known. One of the reasons why the conversation I highlighted at the beginning of this video comes up is there's obviously a mismatch between the public-facing persona of individuals or even groups or centers or initiatives and what's actually going on behind the scenes. There is a strong incentive to bias public coverage towards the achievements and celebrations and positive successes. Sometimes some of the negative setbacks will be aired publicly, but generally speaking, they will be getting less public attention than all of the positive things. So whenever you see a public image of a person or a center or an initiative, that is usually somewhat more biased towards positivity than the actual reality if you were to document all of the good things and all of the challenging things that they're going through at any one time. I don't think there's anything uh critically wrong with the situation that I described in terms of the public versus actual behind-the-scenes slight mismatch in presentation. I think the problem would come up if people or the community in general blindly believed the public profile and image being put forth by a person or an organization without understanding that a lot of the time there's a number of challenging things happening behind the scenes. The other thing, which I think is a bit of a depressurization thing, is simply realizing that most things cannot weather a number of substantially bad things happening at the same time. So, again, if one bad thing is gonna completely uh demolish everything, that's probably a sign that you don't have enough resilience in the thing you're doing. But in today's sort of stretched uh climate and academic and research ecosystem, uh having the robustness to weather mostly unchanged two or three really bad things happening at the same time, uh, that's probably a pretty unrealistic expectation. And a lot of the time that would not be a storm that could be weathered. Uh, some some groups would be sufficiently resilient to handle that, but I think a lot of them uh wouldn't be. Now, the chances of those two or three really bad things happening simultaneously uh again, it it's very low, but it's not a zero chance. And I think one of the ways I try and depressurize conversations like this is no matter what you do and how much you try to robustify what you're doing, make it resilient, there is always the chance that a bunch of really negative things can happen at the same time, and it is possible that that will knock you out of action, and that's that's okay, that's part of I guess the uncertainty of careers like this. Now, this video is not prompted by anything particular happening in my own uh little uh neck of the woods, but it was prompted by having an unusually large number of these conversations recently with high-flying uh leaders in the field where publicly it looks amazing uh and then you get to chat to them and they really want to vent and ask you for advice and sort of just share some intel on all the struggling, all the things that they're struggling with behind the scenes, and the fact that they're genuinely uh pretty stressed about their future, and and I guess the the role of a colleague in providing some reassurance that they're they're doing all the right things, uh that they're probably gonna be okay, but of course, there's no way you can guarantee um any of that.