Host Sarah McLusky looks back on how guests chose to use their wave of the Research Adjacent magic wand.

• Why giving guests a magic wand is a magic question
• Improving recognition, reward and support for research-adjacent professionals
• Using the magic wand to promote collaboration, improve equity and inclusion, and sort out systems
• The one wish that might make everyone else's wishes come true

Find all the guests featured in this episode and many more in the podcast archive.

Would you like to share a comment which might be included in the final episode? Record a voicenote here https://www.speakpipe.com/researchadjacent or send an email to [email protected]

Mentioned in this episode:

Helping you have conversations that move research forwards

When she's not hosting Research Adjacent, Sarah McLusky organises, facilitates and trains people to run events, workshops and meetings that get people talking about research. To find out more about working with Sarah and to book a free call go to https://sarahmclusky.com/

Hello there.

I'm Sarah McLusky, and this is Research Adjacent.

Each episode, I talk to amazing research adjacent professionals about what

they do and why it makes a difference.

Keep listening to find out why we think the research adjacent space

is where the real magic happens.

Hello, and welcome to episode 99 of Research Adjacent.

And my name is Sarah McLusky.

As always, I am your host.

And today, it is going to be the last of the compilation episodes that I'm putting

together as we look back over the now nearly 100 episodes of Research Adjacent.

So this episode is going to be all about the magic wand question.

Now, if you've listened to at least a couple of my previous

episodes with guests, you will have heard me ask them what they would

change if they had a magic wand.

Now, I haven't asked this question in absolutely every single episode,

but I did ask it right back when I had my first guest on, Kirsty Ross.

So I decided that I was gonna have a question that I would ask

in every episode, and the logic behind it is pretty straightforward.

The first reason is to do with just effective communication and that was

because if you have one or two what they call signature questions in every

episode, it helps to create a sense of continuity and community for listeners.

So, part of the reason was to do it to help you to feel connected to the series.

And you might have heard other podcasts that do this.

Zoe's Science and Nutrition podcast, they have a kinda quick-fire round at

the start of every episode where guests are only allowed to answer yes or no.

And if you've ever listened all the way to the end of Steven Bartlett's

episodes of Diary of a CEO, he has a thing where each guest leaves

a question for the next guest.

So these kind of signature questions just act as quite good hooks for a series.

That said, obviously there's lots of different signature questions

I could have had, so why did I ask this question about what people

would do if they had a magic wand?

And that is because I knew when I started the podcast, and it still is

now, we're, we're in no way sorted on this, but I knew that we were gonna be

talking about some tricky situations and some tricky topics, and I didn't

want the podcast to just become a total moan fest and a bit of a downer.

I have found that in my time, I've noticed that a lot of research

culture conversations spend an awful lot of time identifying the

problems, but not a lot of time on finding solution to those problems.

And I wanted to give my guests an opportunity to suggest their solutions

to some of these really tricky problems.

And as, as you've maybe guessed from some of the other episodes that we've been

on, I do tend to the optimistic side, and I do think it's really important

to imagine the future that we want to have, even if it seems a long way off.

So that's the reason why I wanted a positive question.

But why a magic wand?

Well, it comes from this, and you've probably noticed this in your own life.

If you ask people why they can't change something, they almost always blame

a lack of money or a lack of time.

And this isn't something that just happens with work.

If you say to people, "Why don't you eat more healthy food or exercise more?"

They will always say that, for example, healthy food's too expensive, it takes

too long to cook, they don't have the money to go to pay for a gym membership,

they don't have the time to go to a gym.

They just… It's always about time or money, and it has become a culturally

acceptable excuse for just about anything, and a way of shutting down conversations.

So that's why asking people why they can't change something isn't

necessarily a very good question.

But if you take time and money out of the equation, or if you essentially say

time and money are limitless, then the conversation gets a lot more interesting.

Because people then have to think about how they would actually use

that time or that extra money.

And so that's what the magic wand question does, and that is why, in

my opinion, it is a magic question.

So this compilation episode is gonna be looking back.

I've been through all the episodes and kind of clustered together the

things that people wanted to use their magic wand for into some themes.

Some of them have already come up in previous episodes.

I don't think they will be a huge surprise, but I

think some of them might be.

So let's listen on and find out what our guests want to use their magic wand for.

Given the whole theme of this podcast, it's probably no surprise that a lot of

my guests, their answers in some respect were about improving research culture.

And that included lots of different things including job precarity,

recognition, more flexible careers, better CPD, all that sort of stuff.

So let's go through some of those in a little bit more detail.

So precarity I'm gonna pick first, and that's partly because Kirsty Ross,

the very first guest on the podcast, kicked it off by wishing right back

then in 2022 that all impact and engagement professionals would be

given full-time open-ended contracts.

And there are other people who have picked up that baton since then coming

at it from some different perspectives, some of them looking at it from the pers-

perspective of people who are employed in organizations, some as freelancers,

and some doing different kind of roles.

So coming up now you'll hear from the current lead for the PRISM Network,

Isabella von Holstein, also science writer Melissa Hobson, artist Sian Docksey,

and careers consultant Sarah Ashworth.

Isabella von Holstein: I would like universities to understand that

keeping professional staff, research professionals in-house long-term,

that doesn't mean in the same role, is an advantage, that all of that

institutional knowledge, all of that sectoral knowledge, all of that network

capital that they have built up, it's worth building structures to keep them.

A lot of writers will have to supplement editorial

work with other types of writing.

And also a lot of journalists leave the sector and move into

PR or comms because the stability of the income is a challenge.

There's precedents in Ireland there is more of a like basic

income for artists who are maybe like in between residencies or in

between jobs or in between projects.

Or it would also just look like sick pay and like maternity pay for creatives,

or if you work full-time in another job, workplaces, maybe including

universities, like easing up a little bit so people have a bit more time

for their own like creative practice.

To have enough funding that people don't have to

have fixed term contracts anymore.

Because I think that's one of the really, really difficult positions that our

professional researchers find themselves in, to be in the top 1 or 2% of most

educated people within a country, but still not having a fixed term contract.

If everybody could just have permanent position or a permanent contract, then

they could have the freedom and the flexibility to think about their careers

and their lives in a very different way.

So the freedom and flexibility that both Sian and Sarah

mentioned in their comments there came up a lot too, particularly recognizing

that flexibility comes with benefits not just for the employees, but for employers

too, and also for the work that they do.

So we'll hear now from project manager Ally Hughes, policy

director Rosalind Gill, and careers consultant Holly Prescott

I would love to see careers just being a little bit more fluid,

where we have lots more secondments in different areas, where we have lots more

blending between industry and academia, where going away and working in industry

or working in policy and then coming back to an academic research, that that's

much more widely, not only more widely accepted, but is happening more widely.

I guess the, the thing that I would most like to see

changed is that I think sometimes we view knowledge exchange as quite an

abstract kind of concept, when actually

it's people moving between different careers, people sharing

their ideas, expanding their ideas through networking and co-creation.

And I'd like to see much more sort of investment and support for

people to be able to move freely between different sectors, think

freely between different ideas.

All of the language we have at the moment for talking

to researchers about options and paths is we've got non-academic,

alternative, outside, even a adjacent.

Yeah, and there's two issues for me with that.

One of them is it situates everything as if academia is somehow at the center.

Yeah.

And that everything else is defined by its proximity to, or its distance

from academia, which, it doesn't really sit well with me, but also I think

it bolsters that idea that you either have to totally stay or totally leave

and that there are not variations.

I decided to include that quote from Holly as it makes a

really important point about language that has come up again and again

throughout the course of this podcast, and I previously talked about in the

What is Research Adjacent episode.

And the lack of coherent language to talk about the work that research

adjacent professionals do has been a massive contributor to the lack of

recognition that seems to still face people in research professional roles.

So it's perhaps no surprise that several of my guests wanted to use their magic

wand to fix this recognition problem.

Here is outreach specialist Lorraine Coghill, impact expert Ged Hall,

and technician Andrew Cripps.

Actually, as a sector, let's celebrate our professionalism.

Let's celebrate what we actually do.

We've talked before, Sarah, about the invisibility

of public engagement professionals, but also the invisibility of the, the

skills that we bring, and a lot of those, because they are soft skills,

because they happen in the background, they aren't celebrated and valued.

I think for me it's about changing that value system that we have.

You know, I mentioned the academic CV, and that kind of almost holds sway in

terms of our value system in the sector.

So I think it's about changing that as a default and actually

recognizing all the contributions.

And not just recognizing, but supporting them.

For technicians to be properly recognized by the

university they work at, to be properly remunerated by the institute, to be

recognized in publications, papers.

I know this is something that is starting to be pushed more and

more but it's something that I think still needs a lot of work.

So I am one of those annoying people who's always asking

that so what question, and it comes this call for more recognition

sometimes can face that similar call.

It's like, "Well, you're getting paid, you're doing a nice job. Why do you

need more recognition?" But partly it's because that recognition would

improve some of these other issues like precarity and also getting promotions

and actually building long-term careers in research professional roles.

Another big gap that research professionals face is around good

quality CPD, and I have to say that I never cease to be amazed by the

fact that organizations who are all about educating students often neglect

the education of their own staff.

Now, quite a few people mentioned CPD, CPD means professional development for

everybody who doesn't know the jargon, continuing professional development.

There were some specific requests.

John Elvin wanted more work placements, and Laura Evan Hills

wanted more communication training.

But here I've chosen to go with a quote from Andy Tattersall because he

is explaining the knock-on benefits of better CPD right across an organization.

If I was like king for a day, we would be in this position

where everybody, absolutely, everybody has guaranteed time to carry out CPD.

And I am lucky that I've been able to do a job where largely my job is continual

CPD, so I'm continually developing and learning, but a lot of colleagues will not

give themselves time for CPD or will not have the time given to them, and they'll

have line managers who don't support them.

But it's about the things that make you better at your job.

And actually you care about your job more, because I think if you are

better and then you care about the work, you take more interest in it and

you try and develop it and change it.

And I think the really valuable professional services people

are the ones who try and change their environment for the better.

I'm now starting to feel at risk of saying, "And another

thing," too many times in this podcast.

But another thing that would be solved by having more recognition is the

allocation of resources, especially people to research adjacent work.

Quite a number of my guests wanted to use their magic wand to create

bigger teams or to just create more capacity within the system for the

people who are already working in it.

There's various things they would do with that capacity, so let's hear

what they are from collaboration manager Orla Kelly, librarian Alice

Cann, research manager Claire Toogood, and exhibition curator David Wright.

Yes, we don't have enough money.

That's for sure.

Everyone doesn't have enough money.

But even if you threw all the money at it, we still don't

have capacity in the system.

So if you think of the academic base, and they're strained to deliver teaching and

to get research grants and publish papers.

Where is the space in their time to explore those risky opportunities,

go to networking events, make contacts with industry partners?

Just take risks and explore ideas.

They're so stretched, and so they need capacity to be able to do that.

I think I would want to create the capacity for a lot more librarians

who want to, to be involved in research, to be involved in funded research.

Being able to buy space in your day, your week, to have time to

just think and be creative and be curious is something that a lot of people are

finding really challenging at the moment.

We're not lacking good ideas in this sector, but what

we are lacking sometimes is the resource to actually deliver them

or deliver them in the best way.

I think most museums and galleries are really understaffed, but they have teams

of really passionate and dedicated people and, and that can be quite dangerous and

people can end up doing way too much.

And of course, one of the consequences of a lack of resources or

resources being spread too thin, a lack of capacity, is then intense competition

for those resources and for that time.

Quite a few of my guests would like to wave their wand to reduce

competition and increase collaboration within the research system.

Here's research office director Lorna Wilson and researcher

developer Johanna Stadlbauer.

One of the things I find quite frustrating is that the kind of

element of competition is so entrenched at times, and it doesn't have to be.

And I think, like for example, with ARMA and some of our networks, you

know, some colleagues will happily just openly talk to each other about

problems, about challenges, about opportunities, but there is still

a sense that some people hold back.

And I just think things would be much better if everybody

engaged in that open dialogue.

I put down, make it more collaborative and less hierarchical.

So make academia maybe more like in the spirit of the Dutch universities,

they have a slogan that's called Room for Everyone's Talent.

That would mean, little bit of the loosening of the different staff

categories and just thinking in terms of the shared mission of a

university and how everyone can contribute to the shared mission.

Following on from Johanna's comment about there being room for

everyone's talent, that means everyone from not just a perspective of different

job roles, but also from a perspective of their ethnicity, their lived experience,

and all the different multi-facets that make up the person that they are.

It's perhaps no surprise that equity and inclusion were another research

culture dimension that featured in many of the magic wand wishes from my guests.

The lack of diversity in the research adjacent world is no

secret, but I do think it's one that we don't talk about enough.

I think as you'll hear Sean say in a comment in just a moment, you only need

to look around a room at a research adjacent event to see that this is

something we need to be doing better.

If this is something you want to dig into, I really recommend the Diversity

in Research podcast, Jakob Feldvos Christensen is one of the hosts of that

one, and I've been a guest on there as well talking about the diversity

in the research adjacent world.

But here are some of my guests now sharing their wishes in this particular area.

It is unconscionable to me that we are so far down the

line of knowledge creation and we still confine knowledge to certain

identities at the exclusion of others.

So we wouldn't have to do all of this like extra heavy

lifting to make sure black and brown people have the same resources

or people that have special needs have these resources as well.

Like we would already think that, we would already realize, oh,

we should listen to these folks.

We need to make sure we have a transcript for this, or we need

to make sure this is in braille.

We think of these things a lot more tactfully and inclusively

instead of looking at it as a pie, if I have this, you can't have it.

Esther Lisk-Carew: I'm a black woman working in a sector that is

historically underrepresented with people of color and particularly

black people in positions of power.

So I go to a lot of meetings and a lot of the time I will be the only person there.

I used to do a thing called the Count where I go into a meeting and literally

just physically count how many other people in the room A, spoke or B,

didn't just look like a one homogenised look so always I like seeing more

people who look like me and more variety, just generally in the world.

If I had a wand, I would convert half us all into men.

The joke was there.

No, but it's, you.

It's a good, it's a good point.

I've only realized from coming here last year to

the Research Academy with a cohort, we're 25 in the team.

And there's only five men.

I just realized, I'm part of, I, I'm one of four, there was three

women are Queens colleagues almost.

So I just find it a very female orientated, that's not a bad thing.

Just an observation.

You just heard Sean McCaul there talking at the Impact

Ignite conference where we were invited to do a live podcast recording.

You'll hear from the other guest, Kirsty High, in just a moment, and

both Sean and Kirsty are among the many impact professionals that I

have welcomed onto the podcast.

It's not surprising that improving impact and also the processes that lead

to impact, like research involvement and knowledge mobilization, are

right up there on the magic wand wishlist for many of my guests.

So here we've got impact manager Kirsty High.

We've also got knowledge mobilization specialist Inbal Itzhak, patient

advocate Helen White, and creative facilitator Mary Robson, who are

gonna have their wave of their wands

Projects are finishing with no money left over, and the first thing

that gets cut is the impact bit, it's the impact delivery or the impact pathways.

And I think it's because it's seen as the icing on the cake.

But no one wants to eat cake without icing, so it needs to have icing on it.

So I wish people would see that it's really important

and you can't just cut that.

So with a magic wand, I'd definitely try to have sort of a

centralized place where both researchers know that there's a reliable place

to go if they wanna communicate their science outward and share it elsewhere.

And also a place that would help you as a researcher build relationships

with the target knowledge users.

And I think if I had a magic wand, I would want to see

patient and public involvement being more embedded, more routine, part of

the norm of research, rather than some cases it being a, a tick box exercise

to get the grant application in.

One of them is the way that the people who are participants

in research projects or voluntary sector, third sector organizations

who help by having the space and the time to partner with research

projects, the ways in which they are not recompensed and i.e., to me, not valued.

I think that's fundamentally wrong, and needs some really

concerted systemic action.

I know there are arguments around it being coercive to pay people for what it

is they do, but as one of my colleagues said this morning, it's not coercive to

pay the researchers to do the research.

Mary's answer at the end there touches on the need for better

systems to help get this work done effectively and importantly, ethically.

And I love the fact that although some of my guests wanted to use their magic wand

to solve quite esoteric problems, quite cultural problems, others wanted to use

their wand to solve very deeply practical problems, whether that was from magically

filling databases or improving capacity in the system for everybody to get the

healthcare that they need, or looking at better ways to allocate research funding.

Here's just a few examples.

We've got knowledge exchange consultant Hamish McAlpine, patient involvement

manager Sam Rose, and research strategy lead Ipshita Ghosh dreaming big.

I'm tempted to say ban three-letter acronyms

I think you'd get a lot of support for that.

But I think, given what I've done and given what I've said

about my frustrations, I think it would be something around this beautifully

harmonized, accessible, information that was completely burden-free to

gather and that, more than that, that decision-makers and policymakers

actually had the ability to read and understand and act on it properly.

So if I had a magic wand, I would love to instantly just fill the

database with all of the information that we haven't collected yet, just

to, to make it easier to see what conditions people have and where

are they living, and what are their demographics, and all that sort of stuff.

There's a lot of unfunded research, excellent unfunded research,

that almost seems a waste sometimes because people have spent a lot of time,

they've collaborated with people, they've come up with new tools and methods,

and projects, and it goes nowhere.

Now we are coming towards the end of the episode, and I hope that

having heard 25 minutes of people talking about all the things that they want to fix

about the world that we work in, I hope that you are not feeling despondent or

overwhelmed at the scale of the problem.

As I said at the outset, my goal with this question wasn't just to

highlight problems, but to also highlight potential solutions as well.

No workplace is perfect.

As I have said in previous episodes, I am not ending the Research Adjacent

podcast because I think that we have fixed everything, 'cause clearly we haven't.

But many of the things that people have suggested are possible with the

right resources and collective will.

So how do we get it all done?

Well, my last two snippets have their own suggestions, and to end on a little bit of

a lighter note, I'm gonna hand you over to research facilitator Charlotte Stephenson

and open research advisor Nick Sheppard.

The first thing that came to my mind when you said

that was to eradicate deadlines.

Which of course would be an impossibility, but imagine a world where we could work at

our own pace, do what we wanted to do, not fear the dreaded 5:00 PM Friday deadline

or, you know, whatever it might be.

I think, yes, an eradication of deadlines would be heavenly.

I suppose as well, what might be a slightly easier

job actually, is to stop time.

'Cause there's that much to read and to learn and to, and that's perhaps

an easier spell than actually fixing the governance and bureaucracy

of the higher education sector.

Nick might be right there that stopping time is easier

than solving all of these problems, but maybe if we can get just that little

wave of the wand to work, and we can stop time for long enough to catch up

with ourselves and everything we need to do, then that might get us some way.

I find myself wishing, not for the first time, that that magic wand was real, and

I have to say, stopping time is something that appeals to me very much sometimes.

So thanks very much to all of my guests, whether they were featured

here or not, you can still go back and listen to that archive and, whether you

want to pick up on one of the people who's been in this episode, find one

of the other ones, see what people wished for with their magic wand.

I know at times people found it an incredibly difficult question to answer,

so I really appreciate everybody, having a go and creating a collective vision

for the future of the research space.

You might be wondering now what I would choose.

Well, magically editing these episodes would be a good start.

But if you want to find out my real answer, you will have

to wait for the next episode.

We are coming to the close.

The next episode, number 100, will see the tables turned, and

I'll be in the guest's chair.

Your host will be Andy Tattersall, who you heard earlier in this episode, a

veteran of excellent podcasts, including Under Review and Communicable Research.

And he will be hosting and asking me all about life behind the scenes

of this podcast, and then you will find out exactly what I would do with

that magic wand, if only it was real.

See you next time.

Thanks for listening to Research Adjacent.

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then use the links in the episode description to find full show notes

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You can also find all the links and other episodes at www.researchadjacent.com.

Research Adjacent is presented and produced by Sarah McLusky,

and the theme music is by Lemon Music Studios on Pixabay.

And you, yes you, get a big gold star for listening right to the end.

See you next time.