Impact culture

IMPACT CULTURE
Motivating change
in the metricized academy

REF-driven impact cultures happen by
default. Healthy impact cultures happen on
purpose.
Question:
Impact culture

Question:
Impact culture
YOUR IMPACT CULTURE NEEDS
YOU
Culture change isn't
about getting new
people and
structures; it is about
changing how we
think and behave.
People make culture
and culture changes
one person at a time.

Question:
Publics and
stakeholders
Institution
Group
Me
Discipline
External
drivers
Impact culture

Question:
Impact culture
“Communities
of people with
complementary
purpose who
use research to
benefit society.”
A healthy impact culture:
1. Emerges from clear individual
and shared purpose;
2. Generates impacts that are
based on rigorous, ethical and
action-oriented research;
3. Forms and is lived out by groups
of people as they interact with
both academic and non-
academic communities; and
4. Builds internal capacity and
leadership that facilitate the
research, community and
purpose that underpin impact.

Impact
culture
Purpose
Capacity

Impact
 Impact = benefit (ask “who
benefits?”)
 The good that researchers
do in the world
Impact

 What inspires you about
being a researcher?
Curiosity
Engaging for
future impact
Seeing impacts
happen
Creativity
Challenge
External
validation
Pure
non-applied
Applied
research
Engaged research
Engaged research
Applied research
Pure
non-applied
Impact

Engage with impact if you
want to, for the right reasons Impact
Right reasons = Your reasons

Impact
Unsung Impacts
 Limited reach
 Unmeasurable
 Impacts for the
“wrong” people at the
“wrong” time or place
 Impacts from ineligible
or contested research
 Confidential impacts

Who has a stake in my research?
1. Stakeholder/publics analysis
template
2. Impact planning template
Tools to plan impact
Impact

See my blog for advance stakeholder analysis methods:
https://www.fasttrackimpact.com/blog
Stakeholder analysis
Impact

1. Who is interested (or not)?
2. Who has influence (to facilitate or block
impact)?
3. Who is impacted (positively or negatively)?
Why?
Stakeholder analysis: 3i’s
Impact

Editable template to follow after training or visit www.fasttrackimpact.com/resources

See a worked example on my vlog: https://www.fasttrackimpact.com/vlog
Impact planning
Impact

 An action you are writing for yourself
 A reflection you want to remember
 A question
Question:
Comments and questions
Comment
in chat

Working at the most relevant organisational
scale to you, identify bright-spots and issues
with your research culture:
 Choose a diagnostic question that interests
you and discuss, moving to other questions as
you have time (it is better to discuss a small
number in depth – you can do a full diagnostic
assessment after the training)
 List actions (where possible focusing on
things within your control)
Question:
Break out room

Researc
h
 How rigorous is my research?
 How inclusive is my research
(how early and widely to I
engage with likely users)?
 How responsive is my research
(do I envision future impacts,
reflect on risks and assumptions
and adapt to changing contexts
and needs)?
 How open and transparent is my
research (accessible,
understandable and
open data)?
Diagnostic
questions

Purpose
 How would I describe the most
common identities and values in
[my group]?
 What does my group ask me to
prioritise and what does that say
about its identity and values?
 Why do people in [my group]
typically engage with or avoid
impact?
 How (and what contexts) do people
in [my group] talk about impact
 How often do we talk about
impact?
 Do we mainly use “impact” or do
we have a richer vocabulary?
Diagnostic
questions

 How much time do you spend
outside project meetings and
between projects with non-
academic partners?
 Do you return emails, calls and
messages on social media from
those beyond the academy who
engage with your work?
 Do you make unrealistic
promises to non-academic
project partners and how do you
deal with non-delivery?
 Do you tell people you meet at
workshops and events that
you’ll get in touch, but bin their
business cards weeks later?
Diagnostic
questions
Community
Non-
academic

 Do your researchers have the skills
they need to generate impact or
opportunities to gain mastery and
confidence in new skills?
 Do you have resources to support the
impacts colleagues want to pursue?
 Are you able to systematically learn
and share lessons about what works
(or not) when generating impact?
 Do you have strategic partnerships or
institutions/people who sit between
organisations you seek to serve?
 Do you have leaders who inspire and
facilitate others to achieve impact,
and connect you with those who have
needs your institution could meet?
Diagnostic
questions
Capacity

Share with the wider group:
 Key bright spots others could learn
from
 Actions you’ve identified that might
address issues in your culture
 What actions did you identify?
 Things within my control
 Conversations I need to have
with others
Question:
Feedback
Comment
in chat

Impact culture starts with
you

Publics and
stakeholders
Institution
Group
Me
Discipline
Bottom up: me and my group
External
drivers

Question:
Impact culture
YOUR IMPACT CULTURE NEEDS
YOU
Cultures happen between
people. Your impact culture
starts with you.
But how can you lead
change when you’re
paralysed?
 Competing demands
 Imposter syndrome
 Perfectionism
 People-pleasing
 Fear of failure

Question:
Managing competing goals
Unsworth et al. (2014) Multiple goals. Journal of Organizational Behavior 35: 1064-1078

Question:
 Rank: decide which values and identities
are most important to choose whether you
prioritise research or impact tasks, and
stop feeling guilty about the trade-off
 Integrate: find tasks that integrate multiple
priorities, identities and values e.g.
prioritizing a workshop to solve a policy
problem that I can write up as a paper…

Do an impact
evaluation
Do a mini research
project to understand
the effects of our
research in policy or
practice
RESEARCH
IMPACT
RESEARCH
IMPACT

Finish that
paper or book
that’s been on
a back-burner
for years
Reframe and update
paper/book in time to
write a policy
consultation response
or present at a
stakeholder conference
IMPACT
RESEARCH
IMPACT
RESEARCH

Who has a stake in my
research?
• Barriers to authenticity, “the daily practice of letting
go of who we think we’re supposed to be, and
embracing who we are”
– People pleasing
– Perfectionism
– Imposter syndrome
– Fear of failure
• Three ways of tackling them
– Relational esteem
– Achievement-based esteem
– Intrinsic esteem
Becoming more authentic

• In your group discuss:
– How do you manage competing priorities?
OR
– How do you tackle people-pleasing, perfectionism,
imposter syndrome or fear of failure?
Break
out
Discussion

• How might you continue these sorts of conversations as a
group?
Take it further
• Work with someone one-to-one to
resolve deeper issues (e.g. Dave
Ellerby can work as a counsellor
and coach)
• British Association for
Counselling and Psychotherapy
and National Counselling Society
• Get one-to-one help to build better work-
life balance and health (e.g. health
coaching from Fast Track Impact)

Question:
 Your purpose emerges at the intersection
between your values and identity, and
dictate the tasks you prioritise
 To prioritise tasks that will generate
impact, you need to understand why
impact might be a priority for you

Priorities forest:
 Understand how your values and identity
shape your priorities and tasks, including
your motivation for impact
 Understand how your institutional culture
promotes or inhibits your ability to achieve
impact or other priorities
Question:
Individual exercise
Individual
task

 List your professional and
other identities
(combining/merging as
necessary)
Question:
Priorities forest Step 1

Question:
Priorities forest Step 1 continued
 Draw as trees,
writing
identities along
the trunk
 Make the size
of each tree
proportional to
the importance
of that identity
to you

Question:
Priorities forest Step 1 continued
 Identify at
least one
identity
(tree) that
benefits
others (draw
some fruit
on it so you
can revisit
this later)

Question:
 Identify values
that feed each
identity, writing
along roots
 Start with your
answer to the
ice-breaker
question (what
inspires you),
character traits,
principles or
beliefs

 Identify priority
trees based on
tree size and
number of feeder
roots
 What kinds of
activities and
behaviours are
linked to your
priority trees?
 Write in canopy
Question:

 Is the growth of
trees (identiites),
roots (values) and
canopies (priorities)
promoted or
inhibited by your
organisational
culture?
 Colour those being
grown green and
those being
inhibited red (or a
bit of both)
Question:

 Based on your priorities (what you wrote in
the canopies of your trees), do certain parts of
you bring more benefits to others than you
realized? Hang more fruit on these trees…
 Are the majority of your fruit trees green or
red? Do any of these green or red fruit trees
contain priorities?
 To what extent does your organizational
culture promote or inhibit your impacts? Why
and how does this happen?
Question:

 Considering what is enabling or inhibiting impact,
what could you do to overcome barriers or build on
opportunities to achieve more impact?
 What tasks could you do that would enable you to
meet other important priorities (in non-fruit bearing
canopies)?
 What time-consuming tasks linked to non-priority
trees could you drop (task ranking)?
 If you can’t drop these, what motivational tasks
linked to your priorities could you do that would
help you deliver more consistently on lower priority
tasks (task integration)?
Question:

 What actions did you
identify?
 Things within my
control
 Conversations I need to
have with others
Question:
Actions list

Publics and
stakeholders
Institution
Group
Me
Discipline
Bottom up: institution and beyond
External
drivers

Look at your impact trees (with fruit) and ask:
who do I interact with to generate impact?
1. Within my institution
2. Within my disciplinary networks
3. Non-academic partners,
stakeholders, publics?
Question:
My impact community: Task 1
 Hard to reach groups?
 If you’re not engaging much
yet, add people, groups or
organisations you would like to
interact with
Individual
task

 What could you do to
strengthen your social
capital with those you
have identified?
 Are there strategic gaps or
strengths you could focus
on?
 Revisit community
questions you didn’t
answer on p1-2 handout
Question:
My impact community: Task 2

Participatory
organizational
change

Publics and
stakeholders
Institution
Group
Me
Discipline
Where does change come from?
External
drivers

Where does change come from?
External
drivers

Top-down change (messaging)
External
drivers
Workload
allocation
models
Annual
Appraisals
Promotion
criteria
Impact
sabbaticals
Impact funding
e.g. HEIF &
IAA
Extrinsic incentives

Top-down change
External
drivers
Implicit
conflicts of
interest
Attributable impacts
outcompete
evidence synthesis
Eroding trust
Impacts driven
by self-interest
(e.g. REF) not
public interest
Discontinued
relationships

Top-down change
External
drivers
Only 26% of those
involved in change
processes perceive
them to have worked
(6% when you ask
front line staff only)
Best case
scenario is
that it doesn’t
affect you
Sense of having
change “done to
us” rather than
being part of
something
Prioritises
efficiency over
enabling our
best work
McKinsey
(2017) The
people power
of transform-
ations

Top-down change
External
drivers
Words researchers use to
describe research culture
Wellcome
Trust (2020)
What
researchers
think about the
culture they
work in

Top-down change
External
drivers
researchers think that
creativity is stifled due
to research being
driven by an impact
agenda
75%
Wellcome
Trust (2020)
What
researchers
think about the
culture they
work in

Top-down change
External
drivers
researchers have
negative attitudes
towards REF1
57%
1 Weinstein et
al. (2019)
Real-time
REF review
2 Wellcome
Trust (2020)
What
researchers
think about
the culture
they work in
feel pressured to meet
REF and funding
targets2
54%

Top-down change
External
drivers
Top-down change
driven by external
drivers, handed down
via extrinsic incentives
has created the status
quo. More and better
incentives is not the
answer

Participatory change
Group
Me Intrinsic
motivations
 What if a change management process asked:
 What is preventing you doing the best work of your
career?
 What would need to change to facilitate your best work?
 What if you could already make some of these
changes?

Lessons from evolutionary organisations
 Start small, experiment and evaluate
 Survival of the fittest (ideas): stop or adapt what
doesn’t work; build on and replicate what does
 Participatory change works because
 No need to fight the status quo: “The best criticism of
the bad is the practice of the better” (Richard Rohr)
 It starts small and builds on evidence of what works
 Because you start small and low-risk, you can start
now, without permission (within reason)
 It challenges assumptions about what we can and
can’t do and fosters innovations in the way we work

Socio-technical systems
 New ideas for the
people by the
people
 Safe
spaces/niches
 Experiment, learn
and adapt
 Windows of
opportunity
 Mainstream new
ideas

Participatory change
“Managing the present to create a new direction of
travel is more important than creating false
expectations about how things could be in the future.”
Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge
 This is not a monolithic research culture led from the
top, but an evolutionary process with multiple
cultures, each aligned with different group values,
emerging together at different speeds
 One thing in common: people making things better
around themselves, pursuing priorities that align with
their identity and values

Question:
Chat and open mic
Comment
in chat
Open
mic

Design your own experiment
Populate this grid from your
Actions sheet:
 Actions or conversations you
“can do” now, or that you “can’t
do” yet
 For those you can’t do, examine
assumptions – why isn’t this
possible and how might you
overcome barriers?
 Where possible, move from
“can’t do” to “can do”
Individual
task

Design your own experiment
 What is the action (or
actions)
 How can you make the
actions safe to try?
 What resources/help will
you need?
 What you will try first, with
who and when?
 How will you know if it was
beneficial or not?

Empathic
leadership
for impact

Finding leadership
 Which of these words come do you typically
associate with leaders?
 Confident
 Decisive
 Authoritative
 Powerful
 Directing
 In control
 Self-sufficient
 Expert
 Demanding
 Intimidating
Vote
now

Finding leadership
 Most of us appreciate working for inspirational
leaders
 But what proportion of the leaders you’ve
worked under would you describe as
inspirational?
 All of them
 Most of them
 Some of them
 Few of them
 None of them
Vote
now

Finding leadership
 Think of two leaders that have inspired you and
describe their characteristics
 One from work
 One from anywhere
Write
in chat

Finding leadership
 Find at least one characteristic that you share
with one of your inspirational leaders
 Could you aspire to be that sort of leader?
 How could you cultivate other characteristics in
your interactions with colleagues?
Individual
task

Finding leadership
 What do you want your leaders to do for you?
 Outcomes of effective leadership that matter to you
Write
in chat

Finding leadership
 To find that sort of leadership, do you need to
move teams or institutions?
 Are there other ways to these outcomes?
 Seeking out mentors
 Seeking resources (e.g. grants) or finding alternative
ways (e.g. virtual PA) of getting the support you need
 Seek collaborators within/beyond your institution who
appreciate your strengths and forgive your failures
 Clarify your vision and seek out others who share it
 Can you support, equip or build up the
colleagues around you? If so…

Finding leadership
 You can be your own inspirational leader and
provide the leadership those around you crave
 Leadership is not for managers, it is for those
who want to see change. If you want change,
then you need to lead it
 I want to give you permission to start leading
your own change with those around you, so that
change can happen despite the way you might
be managed

Empathic leadership: weak or wise?
 Weak: Empathy is too “nice” to be strategic,
always trying to please everyone
 Wise: Empathy adapts to strengths and needs to
empower people to do and be their best
 If your leadership role models are not autocratic,
empathy probably powers their leadership style
 Democratic or participatory
 Coaching
 Supporting
 Delegating

What is empathic leadership?
Empathic
Leadership
Service

Tools for empathic leadership
 Participatory and deliberative tools e.g. multi-
criteria evaluation for making decisions
 Facilitation skills e.g. probing, reframing,
diagnosing and managing power dynamics
 Interest-influence-impact stakeholder analysis
 Compassion training, “acts of kindness”
challenges, meditation, coaching, learning from
failure seminars
 Logic models and Theory of Change to co-
produce plans

What can you do?
 Based on your most important priorities, what change(s)
do you want to see, and how could this benefit others?
 What needs can you
meet as you pursue
change with these
people, and how
might these needs
influence the change
you want to see?
 Who could you connect with to access the knowledge,
skills and resources necessary to achieve the change
you want to see, and what benefits will
they get from engaging with you?
Empathic
Leadership
Service
Comment
in chat
Open
mic

Privately (to Mark) or to everyone:
 Write a message to your future self with at least
one action you want to commit to or a
conversation you want to have with someone
about wider change
Provide your email and you’ll receive them back in
around a month to remind you to do your actions
and have your conversation
Question:
Message to your future self

Question:
Change happens slowly
Disconfirmation
Simple
addition
Complication
Course
correction
Internalisation
You are here

www.fasttrackimpact.com
@fasttrackimpact

Impact culture

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