Facilitating conversations for collaboration
With Dr Cristiano Malossi
Building effective collaborations in academia or industry, and at the interface of both is always a challenge. It requires for individuals to take the time to understand each other’s’ interests and explore commonalities. Sometimes it works and occasionally it does not. Bringing large numbers of potential collaborators together could be a recipe for disaster if partners are just focused on showing off their results. We have all sat in these long series of talks. We owe to do much better in creating spaces for discussions. It is as simple as limiting the time for presentations and bringing people together with a focus on solving problems not just focusing on showcasing results. The format of our research gatherings is crucial in enabling spaces for effective collaborative possibilities. A little bit less of formal presentations and a bit more of discussing.
About Cristiano
Dr Cristiano Malossi left his beautiful Italy to do a PhD in Switzerland. He comes from an engineering background and gained a PhD in mathematics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. His stellar path led him to get a position at IBM after his PhD and he has stayed there ever since.
I was interested in hearing about his collaboration experiences in the world of industry.
Get in touch with Cristiano via LinkedIn
Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking about:
How facilitative are you in creating discussions between potential collaborators?
Can you remind yourself that your professional struggles are your best spaces of learning?
How do you use constraints as useful frameworks to develop your most innovative ideas?
Access full interview transcript here.
Some reflections and questions to ponder based on my discussion with Cristiano
What would be really “pirate” in reconfiguring the way researchers come together?
The discussion with Cristiano got me thinking about the approach we’ve always had in the way we bring researchers together. We mostly rely on either talks and posters to initiate conversations between researchers. Many organisers of conferences play around with the format of events. Some even call their events non-conferences…although the only non-conference event I attended felt pretty much the same as a regular conference!
The discussion with Cristiano triggered my thinking about how we may create gatherings of researchers that have less power structures, than what we mostly experience in conferences. The formats of conferences reproduce patterns of privilege and power.
Our default is always…let’s start with a talk and then we can ask questions. Discussions are likely to continue in the corridor, the dinner or the bar. Why do we never just start with the discussions…why could we not have our research gatherings become totally focused on the discussions, when we are together. Talks can be recorded and shared in advance. Then if you are not interested in one, you don’t have to waste your morning!
By providing in our research gatherings the centre stage to discussions, maybe we could have more of a chance to have all voices heard. In what Cristiano described about what he did when he started the development of a research consortium, partners gathered and focused their discussions on the problems to address. Everyone had an opportunity to contribute from their own expertise and disciplinary angle. Partners did not get blinded by the shiny light of expertise of others and piles of data. Creating spaces for real exchanges is hard. I remember colleagues changing the format of a PhD symposium and using the famous 3 min thesis approach to presenting PhD research. Based on their feedback, it felt that more conversations had been generated between researchers through limiting the formal presentation of data and using very short inputs, just as an impetus for conversations. Maybe the way forward could be to just have pre-recorded content for conferences and using the gatherings for more conversations. Could this improve the quality of exchanges? Could this dampen the road of privileges in academic spaces? I don’t know, but I feel it is worth a try!
o How daring are you prepared to be, in the way you will organise your next research symposium?
o Can you think about the power dynamics that you create through the format of your meetings?
o What’s the worst that could happen, if you decided to abandon presentations in meetings, started to record talks in advance and just spent your time with others in full and collaborative exchanges?
Between stretch and support
The idea of learning at our best through our struggles shared by Cristiano is an interesting one. When I asked him to reflect back on his career and to consider what he may say to his younger self, he chose to say that he would not want to make his journey easier, as he felt he had learned and developed through overcoming challenges. Whilst this is a wisdom often shared by professionals, I wonder how we could think about this in terms of how we can contribute to a supportive research environment.
As a research leader, you role is to support your team deliver a project and at the same time to enable them to develop their own professional skills and professional independence. The balance between letting a team member figure things out by themselves so they can learn, develop confidence and professional autonomy, and not letting people feel overwhelmed, lonely and stressed in their learning journey is a bit of a conundrum.
Creating a supportive space for people to think, play and experiment with research ideas is a core task of building an effective research team. The way you approach stretching a PhD student in their development could be a complete stress inducer for another one. As a research leader, you may feel that it is just too hard to get right and to know what the appropriate approach may be.
That’s why a coaching approach to leading your research team members is incredibly powerful. In coaching, we ask questions and clarifications, we do not offer solutions. In balancing between stretch and support for your team members, you may simply ask them questions on whether the space you are giving them is what they need right now, or whether more direct input could help them in their progress. When we manage or supervise others, we may use an approach because the approach has worked for us or with other team members. We may also use an approach but not communicate with the team member that it is what we are doing. It often feel like an overstretch to explain what and why we are supervising in a certain manner.
Maybe if you articulated more often the choices that you makes with your supervision/ line management, your team members would have more of a clue of the why of your decisions. We tend to avoid transparency in the choices that we make. We are busy and just want to get things done. I have a sense that by more openness in explaining your choices and approaches, your team members are more likely to understand your perspective. I truly believe that this can also enable them to communicate more often with you, what works for them or not, in the way you are supporting and stretching them.
o Have you ever asked feedback from your team members on whether your approach to supporting and stretching them is working for them?
o How prepared are you to receive this feedback and to accept adapting your approach to working with each team member?
o Will you acknowledge that what worked for you as a junior researcher may not work with the researchers you are working with now?
“I gave you this project and you take care of it. I didn’t have to care about it anymore ... If there was a problem, I found a way to solve it...that’s the mentality that you need to have.”
