Fast Track Impact

This week Mark discusses three ways you can evidence impacts arising from media coverage of your research, with a particular focus on understanding the significance of the benefits, rather than just focusing on measurements of reach.

Have you ever thought about starting a podcast? This week, Mark talks to an academic whose podcast gets 1.5 million downloads a year and has spun off into a book series and live show. Together, they follow James’ story from a history academic who doubted anyone would be in his research, and consider the unique benefits of podcasting for impact. The episode finishes with their tips on how you can pick up the microphone and start one yourself. Read the blog version of this episode here: https://www.fasttrackimpact.com/single-post/2019/06/26/Podcasting-for-impact

Rosi talks about her PhD research on science-policy exchange, explaining how you can increase the likelihood that evidence from your research is taken up by policymakers. Key messages include increasing meeting once a quarter, if possible face to face, working with professional facilitators and knowledge brokers, and providing opportunities for co-production from the start. Find out more at www.twitter.com/RosmarieKatrin​

This week, Mark continues to reframe failure as something that deeply affirms our values and leads to greater meaning and contentment. In part 2, he thinks about how we step back, withdraw from the fight and change tack, drawing on a philosophy of pessimism. This views challenge as a psychological necessity that makes us feel more fully alive, rather constantly looking forward to a time when there will be no suffering or being nostalgic for a lost time before our challenges began. Academic life is full​ of rejections, but this episode will help you transform your view of failure to become more resilient.

This week, Mark explores how you can reframe the failures and rejections that are part of everyday academic life as something that deeply affirms our values and leads to greater meaning and contentment. In part 1, he focuses on how we pick our battles and choose to do things that are high risk but high reward in terms of expressing our values, and how to know when to stop fighting a losing battle in line with our values. Read the some of the tweets quoted at the start of the episode here https://twitter.com/ph_d_epression/status/1130976574629715968?s=12

This week the podcast showcases a personalized​ approach to impact training being pioneered by Universities of Salford and Warwick. Find out how researcher development and impact teams can co-produce training to meeting key skills gaps on impact as part of a long-term personalized​ approach to training that enables researchers to build capacity systematically through a three-year​ training plan including targeted workshops and one-to-one coaching. Find out more about Davina books at http://davinawhitnall.co.uk/books.htmlWhitnalll’s

This week Mark interviews Jane Mills and Jasmine Black from CCRI at University of Gloucestershire about how they are using social media to generate research impact. They discuss how to build stories and engagement throughout the research process (including before findings are available), how to break into stakeholder networks on Twitter and how to use case studies to evaluate, communicate and build impact online. Read their paper: Mills, J, Reed, M, Skaalsveen, K and Ingram, J The use of Twitter for sustainable soil management knowledge exchange https://doi.org/10.1111/sum.12485

This week Mark considers how we can harness creativity in the research process to derive original insights, and shows how some of the best new ideas arise from the greatest personal and professional challenges. He outlines five practical methods for finding new depths of creativity by embracing and exploring the places we tend to avoid.

In this second part, Mark discusses a range of practical methods for managing power in meetings and workshops, including methods for opening up the discussion and exploring, methods for analyzing​ and methods for closing down discussion and making decisions

How to make meetings and workshops with stakeholder and colleagues safe, fun and productive. This week, Mark explains how you can identify and manage power discrepancies in a group to successfully​ manage difficult individuals and situations using subtle cues and three simple techniques.

This week, Mark interviews Saskia Walcott, an independent impact expert who has helped researchers generate and evaluate their impact for over 15 years. In this interview, she talks about her research on perceptions of impact and the power of attitudes to shape how we respond to the impact agenda. Read her blogs linked to this episode: https://www.walcottcomms.co.uk/blog-1/3-nuggets-of-advice https://www.walcottcomms.co.uk/blog-1/research-impact-individual-interpretation-and-translation

This week, Mark gives us an insight into two days of his working week, to illustrate how he puts the lessons from his book, The Productive Researcher, into practice. He illustrates practically how he prioritizes​ based on his values and builds mental health resilience into his working week.

This week Mark shares three ways to overcome imposter syndrome, based on his own experience battling feelings of inadequacy as a researcher. The first solution is to re-calibrate how you judge yourself to reframe your worth based on your values. The second solution is to re-balance your internal, invisible power with the external, visible power that is given to you by the world. The third solution draws on the previous two to create equally credible, evidence-based alternative narratives to your imposter syndrome narrative.

This is the third and final part of Mark's series of episodes on getting research into policy, and the last episode of 2018. Building on the ethics and principles from part 1 and interviews in part 2, in this final episode Mark considers practical ways to both inform and influence policy based on reliable evidence from research. He considers how to take a more relational approach to developing a policy brief and how you can make a "pincer movement" to work from both bottom-up and top-down to achieve impacts from research in the policy arena. The podcast will be back for more in February 2019.

In the second of this three-part series on getting your research into policy, Mark interviews a researcher who ended up leading a country's negotiations at a UN summit when the chief negotiator he was advising died, the head of climate science for WFF who has the discomfort of being based in the USA and the head of a global initiative to protect peatlands for UN Environment. All three explain ways you can get your research heard at the highest levels, and it is easier than you might think.

This week, Mark considers the moral premise of responsible policy engagement and discusses four ways that researchers often inadvertently lose the trust of members of the policy community. Using his four-step check-list, you can make sure your policy engagement is on the right side of your morals and engage more confidently in challenging policy contexts.

This week, Mark considers how you can learn from your experience in the lecture theatre to become more effective in your generation of impact, and how impact can inspire better learning and teaching. He also considers how you can evidence pedagogical impacts from your research, and design interventions in the classroom that can affect change well beyond the academy.

This week, Mark draws on his experience writing bids, as a reviewer and on funding panels, to explain how to write the impact sections of a grant proposal. Funders are increasingly expecting researchers to consider the likely impact of their work, and increasing weight is being given to impact in funding decisions. So it is worth getting it right...

This week, Mark considers how researchers can become more authentic, and how this can reduce the likelihood of imposter syndrome and help you grow in confidence. To do this, he discusses the daily practice of letting go of who we think we should be and embracing who we are, having the courage to be imperfect, and the need to cultivate compassion with clear boundaries.

This week, Mark interviews Karen Laing, Senior Research Associate and Co-Director of the Centre for Learning and Teaching at Newcastle University. Karen has been studying co-production manuals and is developing her own guide for researchers who want to work more closely with their publics and stakeholders to co-produce research and impact. Find out more about Karen's work.