Research is Chaordic: Let’s Recognize its Many Splendors

I am a biomedical researcher by training, but I now spend most of my time working with social benefit start-ups and firms in transition between business models, helping to transform vision into product strategies, pilots, and community engagement plans.  Each project centers on serving a community need, which serves as the context for establishing progress metrics and success indicators.

Compare and contrast this to my previous life as a researcher.  I did analogous work: articulating a hypothesis, writing grant proposals, performing experiments.  But, even while driving the frontiers of knowledge, each project measured impact the same way, every single project: the count of citations for articles in highly esteemed journals.  

One of my all-time favorite books is Lean Analytics, by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskowitz, who state, “Too often, idealistic start-ups underestimate a market’s inertia. “Good enough” can bite you in the ass.” In its whole-hearted adoption of “good enough” metrics, the research community has created a zone of inertia that precludes consideration of other measures of success, and in so doing, stifles innovation.

Team Communication and Chaos

The incessant focus on publishing coupled with a shift to larger research teams has driven the culture of research to its breaking point.  We are not measuring or rewarding what matters: capability, capacity, vision, community.  Researchers have become cogs in a hierarchical “innovation machine” rather than creative contributors in the knowledge economy.  

This situation has parallels in start-up environments, particularly the management challenges of moving from small start-up teams in which everyone has to cross-train and communicate frequently, to larger teams where people start to specialize and communication overhead becomes a barrier. The transition from effective to near-impossible communication happens between 6 to 10 people. In a wonderfully illustrated article on Brooks’ Law, Dave Nicolette shows that “a team of eight people has 28 lines of communication. A team of six people has 15 lines of communication.”

So, as research teams grow to address more complex research questions, communication lines also increase in complexity.  It becomes more difficult to train and mentor, share results, and maintain a shared understanding of quality.  And even harder if, as is usually the case, researchers do not get any kind of communication training or exposure to agile project management techniques. However, over the last decade the adoption of open research information infrastructures - such as ORCID - coupled with a strong push by funding agencies and scientific societies to improve rigor and reproducibility is starting to have an effect on the culture of science.  The recent NASEM workshop on Data Management and Sharing is one example of this.  

Chaos plus order

A colleague recently shared an article by Michael Waldrop about Dee Hocks and the creation of what is now Visa.  Dee thought that command and control hierarchical corporate structures created during the industrial revolution were killing innovation.  He designed a “chaordic organization”, an organic structure that allowed for both cooperation and competition. Members cooperated deeply on a core set of essential activities, and everything else was decentralized to enable members to compete and innovate.  This approach has allowed Visa to succeed on a global scale in the face of diverse cultural, legal, and currency standards.  

How does this apply to the research community?  The central core includes training and ongoing guidance on rigor and reproducibility. Transparency and cooperation are enabled through team management and use of interoperable research information infrastructures.  Outside of that central core are the many ways researchers contribute to innovation. Who shares their data well?  Who innovates by re-using data?  Whose lab has the best team environment?  Who does the best job placing their students?  We can embrace this chaos - because it is essential for innovation. 

In Closing ...

I love Dee’s vision.

“We are at that very point in time when a 400-year-old age is dying and another is struggling to be born — a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of the regeneration of individuality, liberty, community, and ethics such as the world has never known.”   -Dee Hocks