I spent some of the weekend clearing out some of my grown-up kids’ books and came across some of my son’s “Ancient Egypt” collection. One front cover grabbed my attention.  It showed the god Anubis weighing the heart of a dead Pharaoh against that of a feather, with Thoth recording the result.  The heart (of the good) weighing less than a feather allowed the dead to proceed to the afterlife. Now that’s what I call metricating an individual’s lifetime achievement!  And so back to the blog and the point of the anecdote.   As you will gather, my mind is currently occupied with accounting and assessment.  I’ve spent the couple of weeks since my last blog reviewing and assessing a whole heap of  academia, both for our own School’s two units of REF assessment and as an external reviewer on a two-day assessment visit with BBSRC.

It has prompted me to think; Is all of this assessment and the attempts at measurement by our funders a good or a bad thing? I think it’s fair to say that as with most aspects of modern life, there are positives and negatives. When I embarked on my own scientific career in the 1980s assessment of research was much more rudimentary.  Looking back, I can see that there was limited understanding of what “good outcomes” and impact even looked like.  In the main we were expected to list and describe what we had done in weighty reports that often gave little indication of the value of all of the work carried out.  Expectations have certainly changed.  We are required to tick more boxes and to demonstrate clearly that objectives have been met, along with excellence and impact achieved and I know that for many academics that this weighing of your achievements is enormously frustrating.  Some  feel that there is no longer any creative “wriggle room” from proposal to assessment of results. At the other end of the spectrum some colleagues delight in the game of metrics and the associated game playing involved.

Where ever you sit on the spectrum, from bean counting to game player, we live at a time when everyone really does need to read the instruction manual. That applies whether you’re trying to put together your Billy Bookcase from Ikea or write a grant proposal.  If you miss the key point at the beginning then your outcomes are not going to be successful and your bookcase is in danger of collapsing.  I’m sure you have all told students over the years to “read the question!” Without that key step, without knowing what the examiner is looking for and which box needs to be ticked, there is little chance of getting the right answer.  Indeed, you may find you are trying to answer the wrong question.

The reality is that everything we do is being assessed all the time, both internally and externally, whether we are conscious of this or not. Just one example – your My Impact information can be seen and information collected from it at any time by the university.  That is why you need to ensure it is up to date.  Expectations and requirements change constantly, and just keeping up with this can feel like hard work, but it is essential.  Fifteen years ago we were being measured on the numbers of papers published but now what matters is the impact of a paper – how many times has it been cited?  A paper that has no citations may actually be a negative asset.  We have to understand the ways in which expectations change, and respond.  Otherwise you may simply continue to answer the wrong question.

It’s a challenge, not only for this university but for all – I know that from my work as an external assessor. But it will be the organisations that “read the instructions” which survive and thrive.  This applies throughout the research process.  When you are putting together a grant proposal it must address relevant problems, and when carrying out research and assembling information, we have to be addressing the real objectives in the grant proposal and demonstrating this unequivocally.  Afterwards it’s too late to go back and find that lost screw that should have been inserted at the beginning.  Increasingly we are being managed and assessed by people who are not academics but who operate in a business-oriented environment.  Their measurements will be more ruthless and exacting than the processes we have experienced to date.

We don’t need to be too intimidated by this, but we do need to understand the world in which we are operating, the criteria against which we are being measured, and ensure we respond appropriately. Small and obvious actions such as keeping your own records up to date do help.  Just as important is to understand that all the metrics being collected aren’t just measuring the School or Newcastle University, they are measuring you and me and everyone who works in this organisation, and we will all be judged against the results.  It is a collective process so we need to make a collective response.

As you may remember, when I signed off on my last blog I was off to the US to give an invited talk at the Weed Science Society of America annual symposium,about our work in the UK on herbicide resistance. It was great to catch up with old friends in Arlington, then I had three days to myself, so I took the opportunity to drive through the snow and ice to up-state Pennsylvania.  There was a site I particularly wanted to see, and it was well worth the drive because it had quite a profound effect on me. This was the memorial to Flight 93 and to a group of people who didn’t even know one another, but who did something remarkable. You will probably remember that Flight 93 was one of the aircraft hijacked by terrorists on 9/11 2001.  It was heading towards Washington when the passengers brought the plane down by storming the cockpit and attacking the hijackers.  The monument is a very evocative place, miles from any town or main road, and it is a reminder of the collective decision taken by a random group of individuals in the space of few minutes to take decisive action.  They knew at this stage how the terrorists’ plan was unfolding and they actually voted as a group to take back control of the situation in any way they could, realizing that they had little chance of surviving the incident.  In doing so they saved hundreds of lives in Washington.  This is all on record in their final phone calls to loved ones.

Then it was back to work here at Newcastle on Monday, for discussions about the development of our research groups and how we can work together. Obviously nobody is being asked to make the kind of sacrifice I’ve been talking about, but seeing how by acting as one, a group of  stangers to one another can make such a difference did make me think more deeply about the way we work together here in the School.

Both at School and Faculty level we are engaged in pulling together a new structure for how our gropus work that is intended to better support everyone and improve our performance. I’ve seen how that “role of groups” can polarise opinion amongst those involved.  At one extreme we have a “corporate management” view that wants to concentrate on uniform procedures for PDRs, Work Allocation Models, Cost Centres etc etc, while at the other end of the spectrum there is the “maverick academic” tendency who want groupings to work simply as their own intellectual playground, without any need to take real responsibility for the nuts and bolts.  Of course, neither of these is going to work to our advantage.

My personal opinion is that no single formula is going to work for every institution or situation. We encompass many varied disciplines with different cultures and it’s important for us to nurture those disciplines and their academic excellence.  At the same time they have to act as launch pads for new and dynamic groupings that can address the global and multifaceted challenges we face.

Like those people on the aircraft, we are individuals with our varied concerns and aims but, at the same time, collectively we can be enormously powerful. In order to achieve that we are going to need to move from the extreme positions I mentioned above, to form research groupings that will function both effectively and creatively.  That doesn’t mean giving up your disciplinary “home” or always agreeing with everyone in your group.  Groups can be effective “critical friends” and they can also support new researchers and colleagues who are finding challenges of all kinds difficult.  Criticism, debate and challenging what has gone before are all vital to academic life.

We need to be what I think of as “T” shaped people. By that I mean that we have a central pillar that is our own discipline, while at the same time we can reach across to other disciplines via horizontal “arms”.  That ability is a specialism in itself, and it’s a skill everyone has to acquire.  We aren’t seeking to develop hybrid researchers but people who understand and respect the skills and knowledge of colleagues from other disciplines, and are willing to speak their language too.  I’m encouraged to see how many younger researchers in particular do seem eager to shift into this new gear and already understand the potential it offers.

The most effective ways of working in research groupings is a question being debated far beyond our School or Newcastle University. Discussions are going on all over the world about how scientists can work together more effectively – because it’s a world that is changing more quickly than ever before and the challenges are ever more complex.  That’s why I urge you all to get involved in our meetings about the future of our research groups.  If we get this right, we can be so much more than the sum of our parts.  This will be good for our research and for our teaching and it could even help to change the world.