Fast Track Impact

In the second of this three-part series on getting your research into policy, Mark interviews a researcher who ended up leading a country's negotiations at a UN summit when the chief negotiator he was advising died, the head of climate science for WFF who has the discomfort of being based in the USA and the head of a global initiative to protect peatlands for UN Environment. All three explain ways you can get your research heard at the highest levels, and it is easier than you might think.

This week, Mark considers the moral premise of responsible policy engagement and discusses four ways that researchers often inadvertently lose the trust of members of the policy community. Using his four-step check-list, you can make sure your policy engagement is on the right side of your morals and engage more confidently in challenging policy contexts.

This week, Mark considers how you can learn from your experience in the lecture theatre to become more effective in your generation of impact, and how impact can inspire better learning and teaching. He also considers how you can evidence pedagogical impacts from your research, and design interventions in the classroom that can affect change well beyond the academy.

This week, Mark draws on his experience writing bids, as a reviewer, ​and on funding panels, to explain how to write the impact sections of a grant proposal. Funders are increasingly expecting researchers to consider the likely impact of their work, and increasing weight is being given to impact in funding decisions. So it is worth getting it right...

This week, Mark considers how researchers can become more authentic, and how this can reduce the likelihood of imposter syndrome and help you grow in confidence. To do this, he discusses the daily practice of letting go of who we think we should be and embracing who we are, having the courage to be imperfect, and the need to cultivate compassion with clear boundaries.

This week, Mark interviews Karen Laing, Senior Research Associate and Co-Director of the Centre for Learning and Teaching at Newcastle University. Karen has been studying co-production manuals and is developing her own guide for researchers who want to work more closely with their publics and stakeholders to co-produce research and impact. Find out more about Karen's work: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/ecls/staff/profile/kjclaing.html#background

On Monday this week, Mark was at a Royal Society conference on changing research culture, where he was awarded a prize for changing research culture with colleagues Rich Young and Tanya Collavo. Find out about their idea to create a Tinder for researchers and hear ideas that emerged from the conference via interviews with participants.

This week, Mark revisits his most recent book, The Productive Researcher, published a year ago this month. As he has taken the book on the road over the last year, he has been challenged by numerous questions and objections, which he addresses in this episode, giving you a short-cut to the core lessons of the book whilst helping to apply these lessons to some of the more challenging contexts that colleagues have presented him with during trainings. To get your copy of the book, visit https://www.fasttrackimpact.com/the-productive-researcher

In this episode, Mark explores how you can become more resilient as a researcher, using grant and publication rejection and workplace bullying as examples. Strategies based on robustness and rapid recovery may work in some circumstances, but adaptive and transformative strategies have the potential to give us longer term resilience to a wider range of unpredictable challenges, in some cases transforming pain into the richest experiences of our careers.

This week, Mark asks questions that can enable you to achieve impacts from your research that disrupt old ways of doing things and lead to fundamental transformations in organizations​ and society. Based on different ways of conceptualizing​​g resilience, this episode will make you rethink your ambitions for impact to dream bigger and achieve transformational change.

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The questions:

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1. How can my research strengthen people and organisations so that they are able to withstand or resist change, and continue to provide or get the outcomes or benefits they need?

2. Can my research enable a person or organisation to change what it does and how it does things so that they can protect their core mission and still achieve the things that are most important to them?

3. How can my research enable people to look completely differently at old problems, or disrupt old ways of doing things, so that people and organizations​ can do completely new things in new ways that are actually valued more than the old ways of doing things and the things they produced?

4. Can my research help a person or organization​ become more robust so they can resist change and maintain what’s most important to them in a changing world?​