Why Don’t You Just Eat Less? — Research Management Edition

Running a great research org is like losing weight

Running a great research org is like losing weight. The prescriptions for each are painfully straightforward, but actually executing on them is incredibly hard, potentially painful, and varies intensely by situation.

To lose weight you need to sustainably burn more calories than you take in. But figuring out what macronutrients make you feel full, strategies to avoid overeating, the right amount and kind of exercise, and how to maintain the discipline to do it all day, day in and day out can take a lifetime of work. Work that many people ultimately decide is lower priority than other things.

To run a great research organization you need long enough timelines coupled to useful forcing functions, talented people with just the right amount of independence, and the resources to execute on your goals without becoming too fat and happy.

It’s a simple prescription, but an extremely hard one to nail both because there are many tensions that you need to balance and pressures, both internal and external, can prevent even well-intentioned leadership from ever finding the right setpoint.

To give you a sense of what we’re talking about, we’ve listed a few common pressures that derail research orgs. These are the equivalent of “work stress causes you to overeat” or “time pressures mean you can’t exercise.” Like losing weight, figuring out how to deal with these is hard and organization-specific but we think it’s worth at least calling them out

Intermediate metrics on the wrong timescale. Whoever runs the org or a project has to report upward, and those people (often not researchers themselves) want to see some numbers go up consistently. These intermediate metrics are things like papers, money raised by spinouts, or demos. Each of these can be a real signal of good research, and each is trivially Goodhart-able.

Demanding justification up front. Real research is a hypothesis that might be stupid; some of the best of it sounds stupid right up until it doesn’t. Refusing to fund anything you can’t defend in a memo is a clean, professional, responsible way to strangle the portfolio.

Timescale mismatch. “We expect results in two years” is the research equivalent of a two-week crash diet. It’s not that nothing happens in two years; it’s that the things you actually want take longer.

Side quests. Job creation, regional back-scratching, topics du jour, economic growth — every stakeholder wants the research budget to do double duty. We’ve both worked with funders who care about these metrics and we believe they apply to work downstream from research like technology transfer, but to not research itself.

Over- or under-structuring an org. Leaders often need to put in place rigid procedures and structures to make an organization legible and get the support to start. Research rarely fits into nice structured buckets, so closely adhering to a specific “this is how we do things” can kill output. But at the same time, taking “let researchers do whatever they want” at face value is an equal trap!

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