Fast Track Impact

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.

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. Get your copy of the book here. 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​ resilience, this episode will make you rethink your ambitions for impact to dream bigger and achieve transformational change.The questions:How can my research strengthen people and organizations​ so that they are able to withstand or resist change, and continue to provide or get the outcomes or benefits they need?Can my research enable a person or organization​ 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.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?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?

This week Mark looks at emerging evidence that the impact agenda is creating institutional cultures that can lead to unintended negative outcomes. What are the motivational levers we can use to inspire colleagues to engage with impact for diverse and healthy reasons, and what mix of extrinsic incentives should accompany such a bottom-up and empathic approach to creating an impact culture? Mark defines three elements of an impact culture and asks practical questions that can enable you to characterize​ the impact culture of your own group, and decide what strengths you can build on and the things you might want to do differently.

This week Mark shows how you can use seven elements of powerful stories to plan for and create impacts that engage and inspire. He uses examples from The Lord of The Rings, and two impacts from his own research on peatlands and research impact.The seven points are:know who you want to benefit and treat them as the “hero” and you as the “guide” in your pathway to impact;identify the external and internal problems your publics and stakeholders face and care about deeply;3) be a guide who enables your publics and stakeholders to become the hero in their own story;give them a plan to engage more deeply and learn about your work and/or act on what they learn;make a call to action and give people concrete opportunities to put their new-found knowledge into practice;identify what your audience has at stake if they don’t solve the problem - what is the cost of inaction or failure;help people visualise what success might look like for them.To download the stakeholder and public analysis template mentioned in this episode, visit www.fasttrackimpact.com/resources

This week Mark considers how we can harness creativity in the research process to derive original insights, and shows how some of the best new ideas arise from the greatest personal and professional challenges. He outlines five practical methods for finding new depths of creativity by embracing and exploring the places we tend to avoid.

Rosi talks about her Ph.D. research on science-policy exchange, explaining how you can increase the likelihood that evidence from your research is taken up by policymakers​. Key messages include increasing meeting once a quarter, if possible face to face, working with professional facilitators and knowledge brokers, and providing opportunities for co-production from the start. Find out more at www.twitter.com/RosmarieKatrin