The reason we have a political process is to try to balance all of this information and all of these needs. You will never be able to model it perfectly and come up with THE right answer. We live in a political system where all ideas are contestable, even ideas based on very sound science. This is a good thing. Whenever communities have vested all knowledge and power in a few people – disaster has always ensued.

If scientists want to be influential in this world, they must be:

1. Very honest about what the science says. As we can see from the climate change debate, it does not help the cause of putting across a credible message on science when the results are exaggerated to try and build support for a particular cause. Let the truth tell its own story. In the end civilisations rise and fall on the political process. There is not much you can do to change that. Go along for the ride.

2. Very vocal about what the science says, but more circumspect about what the response should be. Scientists can appear arrogant when they presume that they know the right response. It is important to suggest policy responses and explain what you think the implications are of different approaches, but stick to your knitting and talk about what you know about most of all – the science.

3. Tell your story. People love stories, which is why singing contests, sport, soap operas and crime shows are more popular than shows about science. If you want to reach more people, put a story around what you are trying to say. Corey’s blog-post on  how frogs were disappearing because of the global appetite for frogs legs went viral because it was a interesting story. And the science message got out as a result. Some scientists  complain to me that this is “spin”. True, but not in the sense that you are trying to deceive someone, just that you are trying to get them interested. You are showing respect to your audience by “spinning” the message in an interesting way.

4. I need to hear it at least seven times before I’ve heard it. Putting out one media release, or one article or one presentation and thinking that you’ve done the job of communicating is delusional. Good communicators get their message out lots of times in lots of different ways. When your audience has heard the message so many times they are getting sick of it, (think Kevin Rudd and “working families” or Tony Abbot and “great big Labor tax”) they have finally heard it.

5. Maintain patience and pressure. It is sometimes frustrating that no action occurs even when you think it is obvious that it should. Don’t burn your bridges by taking it out on policy makers in government. You may need to work with them for many years to come, and they are likely to get more powerful over time, not less.  But on the other hand, don’t let up the pressure. Maintain a professional tone to your discussions and presentations in the media. In the end, you will mostly be respected if you keep telling the story about the science. And policy makers can be just as frustrated as you about the lack of action as you are, even if they are not allowed to show it.

I’ll finish this post with a quote from Machievelli, one of the great thinkers on political science, said that “… nothing is more difficult than to introduce a new order. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new…”

True

Written by Paul Dalby on 2 February 2010

I see researchers becoming more interested in working across disciplines, working collaboratively and solving real world problems, but not for the sake of it, to discover new things and do things previously unimaginable. They still work alone and on narrow fields of intense specialty, because break-throughs are found there also. If trans-disciplinary research is going to become more widely adopted, it needs to demonstrate its value, and there need to be tools individuals can pick up to quickly adopt their current expertise to new problem solving processes.

Mike Seyfang’s blog on design, thinking and science describes nicely how transdisciplinary science is a substantially difference science than traditional science collaboration. It requires new skills. In a podcast linked to on Mike’s blog, Tamath Rainsford argues that for transdisciplinary science to succeed, we need  “specialising generalists”, people who know enough about a discipline to add value to discussions across a number of discipline areas (eg. Wayne Meyer from University of Adelaide can debate eloquently with economics, agronomists, modellers and soil scientists).  She also argues that we need to train scientists with new tools  so that they can more effectively participate in transdisciplinary research, such as soft operations research, systems thinking, heuristics, philosophy, working in teams, communication, risk management, decision making processes.

I have seen scientists training their students in these tools for the last 5-10 years, and the number who are is growing. Hugh Possingham, now at the University of Queensland, trains his students in these tools, as well as games theory. His research group is one of the most successful ecological research teams in Australia.

Mike list some common themes that emerge from his reading and thinking on transdisciplinary research. Mikes learnings are in italic, followed by my comments in normal txt:

• Play – a key ingredient in emergent behaviour, playing around with stuff leads to interesting possibilities and great questions. Who resources this stuff? The challenge fopr me is that I need to grow the business. Play must lead to tangible results reasonably soon, or must not distract (too much) from going to where the resources are
• Expand – pure reductionist thinking and methods have served us well in the scientific method and will continue to do so. While we are busy learning more and more about less and less, we should take time out to expand our horizons from time to time. Agree, but again, who is encouraging, rewarding and resourcing? Is this why large research programs are successful over small, short term projects. They give people the opportunity to experiment and play?
  
• Work at the boundaries – one of the key tenets of Transdisciplinarity is to step outside the comfort zone of a single discipline, go beyond collaboration with other disciplines by working at the boundaries. Warning: will expose one to risk and possibly the need to develop new language. (worth it). I’ve seen some of the most exciting ideas for research invented around a table when two specialists meet for the first time. It is beautiful to watch.
• Embrace Risk – learn to fail cheaply and often. You have described my life.
• Open Co-operation – pass it forward, share. The best minds do this. They are not afraid to give ideas away. Because they know they have too many for one lifetime to resolve.
• Swim up-stream and be counter-cultural. I’m not sure this relates to trans-disciplinary science, but it makes old rebels like Mike and I feel smug saying it.
• Trans-disciplinary does not replace traditional research – is an added component. Let’s be careful about telling over-worked, under-paid scientists that they need to throw away their old models and adopt our new great ideas on how they should be doing research. These are new tools to add to the researchers amoury, along with statistics, gell blocks and coffee.
• Speed the Process of Innovation through prototypes, enabling more breakthrough. I have been slow on the uptake on this. I have been resistant to the idea of investing development funds on research, but perhaps if targeted cleverly, will lead to good returns in terms of new business.

Would love to read responses to these thoughts.

Written by Paul Dalby on 1 October 2009

Written by Paul Dalby on 22 October 2008

• Database of research publications for NRM Boards (Paul Dalby, In Fusion)
• Lower Murray Landscape Futures - Google Earth presentation of data (Paul Dalby, In Fusion)
• Victorian Resources Online
• NRM Toolbar (Terry Leeson, education.au)
• Scootle online database (Terry Leeson, education.au)
• Nature Maps (Ian Malcolm and Geoff West from DEH)
• e-nrims (Geoff Yoemans from DWLBC)
• Landscape Mapping Institute (Greg Brown, Vermont University)
• Mt Hood Study (Greg Brown, Vermont University)
• Clickers: Turning point technologies (Greg Brown, Vermont University) or try ebay
• hd.gov – a clearing house for all government agencies for their data and methodologies

Some of the presentations are available fore download from http://www.livinglaboratories.com.au/page.php?pId=278

Other examples include:

• Sahul-time – is a Monash University research project that presents an interactive model of the Australia/PNG continent over the last 100,000 years. A control panel allows a user to quickly move back and forwards through time. As you do, the coastline changes, showing how we were once linked to Papua New Guinea. Scientists are adding links to their archaeological data, so that now a user can find what archaeological data exists at various timescales in Australia’s history
• nrmSPACE has been developed by the South East Natural Resource Management Board as a tool for environmenal managers in this region of South Australia. It includes a database of research publications, an online collaborative space and most impressively, an interactive map that links a user to environmental datasets relevant to the region.
• Jim Rowe from SRA Information Technology also gave a presentation at the Living Laboratories workshop on Emerging Technologies in Environmental Monitoring. His presentation demonstrated how data could be collected and displayed on a GIS interface in real time. SRA won the Telstra Business of the Year award in 2007. Well done Jim!
• Mike Seyfang recently drew my attention to a new innovation by education.au Ltd Australia called openDSM, a lightweight fast search protocol across multiple distributed education repositories (digital libraries, cultural image libraries, metadata repositories, learning object repositories).
• Chris Raymond is a member of the Landscape Values Institute. He and his colleagues have developed a tool for collecting and collating information on what the community values in an environment, which is being used to help make decisions on where to invest resources in environmental management.  For more information on this, you can read their draft report (pdf 3.6MB) on this tool.

These new tools offer an exciting possibility for environmental managers to be much better informed about how to invest their resources in managing our environment and natural resources. Yet Australia is in danger of being a leading “primary producer” of environmental data (attribution to Alan Cooper, University of Adelaide), but with little or no value added to the data. As a country, we need to quickly adopt these new internet-based tools for distributing, displaying, analysing and collecting data. In particular, government agencies who are custodians of large environmental datasets need to release this information freely on the internet and allow environmental managers, academics, other agencies and entrepreneurs to add value.

In the fiercely competitive business world, companies are setting up institutional arrangements to encourage cooperation and “open sourcing” information, as and by doing so, enriching themselves. In fact this has created a whole new economy. In the NGO world, ThinkCycle has been established – a website where NGOs put up design problems for people to help solve.

In Australia’s NRM world, how can we capture this innate property of human beings? In fact, the origins of NRM begin in Landcare, a grass-roots movement that began when farmers and conservations agreed to cooperate to attract resources and energy into rehabilitating degraded resources back in the late 1980s. Perhaps this world has become overly driven by bureaucracy and political interference. The world of blogging, information sharing, collective problem solving and social networking that has revolutionised other industries such as the media, medicine, banking and commerce, could also revolutionise the way we collectively go about managing our natural resources. It could help link science directly to farmers, conservationists to investors and communities to each other. Of course it is not the whole answer, but given the way these tools have effected other sectors of society, there is no reason it could not do the same for NRM.