Fast Track Impact

In this second part, Mark discusses a range of practical methods for managing power in meetings and workshops, including methods for opening up the discussion and exploring, methods for analyzing​ and methods for closing down discussion and making decisions.

How to make meetings and workshops with stakeholders and colleagues safe, fun and productive. This week, Mark explains how you can identify and manage power discrepancies in a group to successfully​ manage difficult individuals and situations using subtle cues and three simple techniques.

This week, Mark interviews Saskia Walcott, an independent impact expert who has helped researchers generate and evaluate their impact for over 15 years. In this interview, she talks about her research on perceptions of impact and the power of attitudes to shape how we respond to the impact agenda.Read Saskia’s blogs ‘3 nuggets of advice’ and ‘Research impact: individual interpretation and translation’

This week, Mark gives us an insight into two days of his working week, to illustrate how he puts the lessons from his book, The Productive Researcher, into practice. He illustrates practically how he prioritizes​ based on his values and builds mental health resilience into his working week.

This week Mark shares three ways to overcome imposter syndrome, based on his own experience battling feelings of inadequacy as a researcher. The first solution is to re-calibrate how you judge yourself to reframe your worth based on your values. The second solution is to re-balance your internal, invisible power with the external, visible power that is given to you by the world. The third solution draws on the previous two to create equally credible, evidence-based alternative narratives to your imposter syndrome narrative.

This is the third and final part of Mark's series of episodes on getting research into policy, and the last episode of 2018. Building on the ethics and principles from part 1 and interviews in part 2, in this final episode Mark considers practical ways to both inform and influence policy based on reliable evidence from research. He considers how to take a more relational approach to developing a policy brief and how you can make a "pincer movement" to work from both bottom-up and top-down to achieve impacts from research in the policy arena. The podcast will be back for more in February 2019.

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 effect 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...