7 Days of Research In-sights

7 Days of Research ‘In-Sights’

A collection of 7 research ‘in-sights’ each designed to give you food for thought.

Here I’ve collated 7 days of ‘In-Sights’ posts which I first presented over on LinkedIn. They are designed to inspire, provoke and identify useful techniques and ideas we use every day in academic research. The insights I covered were:

1. Story-telling
2. Reading
3. Why
4. Note Making
5. Experimentation
6. Journaling
7. Replication

🧠 ‘In-Sights’ Day 1: Story Telling 📔

Story telling is fundamental to effective communication.

We all love a good story and it helps us remember stuff. But, Dr Craig Cormick, author of ‘The Science of Communicating Science’ says we don’t use stories enough to communicate our research. Therefore he recommends identifying different “narrative structures” we can use to convey our message. The simplest he recommends is:

➡ ‘ABT’: “… and … but … therefore …”

Notice anything?

Here’s another example:
Hi! I’m Annette and I love research, learning about new things and sharing them with people. But as a result of this constant desire for consuming knowledge, I regularly suffer from information overload. Therefore, I like to distil what I read into easy-to-digest ‘mini stories’, like what I’m trying to achieve with these daily ‘In-Sights’ posts.

➡ ‘ABT’: “… and … but … therefore …” Try it!

🧠 ‘In-Sights’ Day 2: Reading 📚

Reading is as essential to writing as listening is to talking.

I wish I could read more than I do. I’m a devil for starting 5 books at once and making painfully slow progress through them all.

At the end of every blog post I write, I put the books I’m reading. On occasion, I also review the books I’ve finished. This is partly to keep track of my progress, but also to provide some accountability of forward momentum.

Unfortunately reading is one of the first things that tends to fall by the wayside when I’m busy or distracted. Yet immersing ourselves in a book, fiction or non-fiction, is one of the best ways to switch off background brain chatter and focus on a new channel, if but for a while.

🌟 Reading gives us new insights, perspectives and learnings. Most importantly it teaches us a different way to ‘listen’ to what other people have to say. 🌟

❓ What are you reading? What are your favourite books?

🧠 ‘In-Sights’ Day 3: Why ❔

“People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.” Simon Sinek

Simon Sinek’s famous catch phrase is probably one of the most widely flaunted pieces of business advice. He believes that if we focus more on the WHY, and less on the WHAT and the HOW, then we have a much greater capacity to drive change.

For a PhD, the WHY is more important than ever. It’s what keeps us going when experiments don’t work out, or there’s just too much to do. Losing sight of WHY, I believe, is one of the reasons we can disconnect from our PhD work. We get so bogged down in the WHATs and the HOWs, that WHY just seems like a wild fantasy or pipe dream.

I mean we all want to solve climate change, right?

Wrong.

I’m not saying we don’t want to, but very few people in the world see solving climate change as their day-to-day WHY. Because if it was, we’d be living very different lives.

And here too, I must hold up my hands. I mean, I’d love to ‘solve climate change’, but that’s not me. Instead my WHY is honed into a smaller piece of the puzzle. It is focused towards finding ways of living more harmoniously with nature in the face of a changing, multi-societal, multi-cultural and multi-opinionated world. Part of that is about opening our minds to knowledge, learning and understanding, not only to what we do and experience our selves, but also more importantly, to the experiences of others.

Once we come to a global consensus and understanding on WHY we do what we do, the WHAT and HOW will start to sort out themselves.

➡Simon Sinek (2019) Start With Why. Penguin Books⬅

🧠 ‘In-Sights’ Day 4: Note Making 🖋

“Note making forms linkable assets that fuel our career and creative endeavours” — Nick Milo

Now that’s a quote I love. Note making is very different from note taking.

Nick Milo recommends his ‘NoMa’ method:
1️⃣ ‘Be a thing finder’ — find something that’s interesting.
2️⃣ Instead of highlighting or taking a note, instead say ‘that reminds me of another thing’.
3️⃣ Then consider, ‘it’s similar (or not similar) to that other thing because … ‘ to tease out differences and similarities.
4️⃣ Finally, ‘it’s important because … ‘ to identify why it stood out to you and what it means in the wider context of what you know.

Since I’ve been learning different ways to take notes, this one really stood out to me. It provides one of the most powerful methods I’ve seen to tackle confirmation bias, where we tend to hone in on ideas that reinforce our current beliefs or understanding of the world. Nick’s method encourages us to think more widely around what we have encountered. Whilst it doesn’t eliminate the problem of confirmation bias, done correctly, it forces us to question how what we have read fits in with what we already understand. A big first step in opening ourselves up to new ideas.

Nick runs annual, free, online ‘Linking Your Thinking’ conferences, which I find inspirational and fascinating in equal measure. Here’s a link to the replay of the 2022 event:
🔊 https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/conference

🧠 ‘In-Sights’ Day 5: Experimentation ⚗

How much do you experiment on a day-to-day basis?

Experimentation is exciting. It means we want to test what we think we know or to find out something new about something we don’t know. Done well, experiments grow our knowledge, experience and understanding. Often they don’t work, but this still tells us valuable information about the initial questions, our methods and our processes.

Take for example, these LinkedIn In-sights posts I’m writing. These are an experiment. Given that I have been short on time to write, edit and publish full length blog posts these last few weeks, I decided to try short form for a while. And what better way to do it then to try it on a platform completely new to me!

I’m testing questions, like:
❔ How long does it take me to write a post?
❔ Is it an effective way to communicate?
❔ Do I like writing them?
❔ Do people read them?
❔ How can I apply them in other contexts?

At the end of the 30 days I’ve set myself to write these, I’ll reflect, apply what I’ve learnt and decide on the next experiment. The experiment might not ‘work’ in the sense I’ll just have been shouting into the void for 30 days, but I’ll still have answered all the questions I set out initially.

As scientists, this is effectively what we do everyday; we question what we know, set a path to find out what we don’t, and use what we find to apply to the wider world. With good questions, an experiment will very rarely fail.

Einstein famously said: “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

❓ What’s your next experiment?

🧠 ‘In-Sights’ Day 6: Journaling 📝

“Journal writing is a voyage to the interior” Christina Baldwin

In academia, the word ‘journal’ has lost much of the romantic associations we see in the use of the word elsewhere. Out with academia the word brings up images of dusty notebooks wrapped in the rich physical and mental voyages of explorers and writers. They tell us stories, opinions and heart felt losses. They may be short and simple, or long and intense. They made be read by millions or consigned to burn on the fire of judgement day.

But as a researcher, anything that involves a journal can be a stressful task. A career can be made or broken by publishing a certain number of papers or getting work accepted into certain journal. Entire projects are centred around ‘the paper’. Whilst these still record the voyages of many researchers, they are just a highly structured, snapshot into a much wider story.

I don’t journal often, but when I do it helps me figure stuff out. At the time of writing these notes, they don’t seem particularly useful. But looking back I always find some real interesting ideas hidden in them. Quite often they are a list of questions. Sometimes I write out a definition or expand on something I’ve read.

For example on 17th February this year, I wrote; the “art of information transfer is not to tell people what to know, but to show people the way so they find it out themselves”. This is part of an attempt to try to connect the well known fiction writing advice ‘show don’t tell’ with scientific writing. How can we show our research, not tell it?

The more we can build on the romantic vision of a journal, the more we take people on a voyage of discovery with us. They can learn as we learn. By not telling and condensing what we say down to a collection of for and against statements we have a greater ability to influence the minds of the reader.

Writing in your own journal and sharing what you do, is just one way of documenting this journey.

🧠 ‘In-Sights’ Day 7: Replication 🚥

Replication is at the crux of all #scientific experiments ➡ Could your work be replicated by someone else to get the same result?

Because scientific advancement tends to be based on a consensus approach whereby we are trying to find and fit all the puzzle pieces together, it is important that what ever we do, is able to be repeated. One way we do this is by generally being rigorous and methodical in our experimental approach. Another way is through replication:

✅We always repeat within an #experiment . We have replicates built into our experiments to account for as much variability and error as we can. For example, in one of my current experiments, I have five replicates of every treatment. Unfortunately, it’s already looking like I will have to drop one replicate of one treatment because one of the species did not establish, nor re-establish, in time. 🤦‍♀️ But that’s OK I still have four, I’ll just have to take account of that. For certain analyses I’ll also have technical replicates.

✅Often we repeat our work but in a different context. We might use a different soil or a different nutrient to test what we know. We might use different species, but ask whether the same mechanisms exist. We might take a greenhouse study and apply a similar approach to the field. In my field study, I have 3 between-plot replicates, 3 within-plot replicates and 3 time points. In some scenarios, different timepoints can also be used as a form of replication. Soil in the field is notoriously variable and this is the best replication I could feasibly do within the scope of my #phd .

❎It is however very rare that we repeat exactly the same experiment. Why? The first reason is that doing the same thing again doesn’t give us any new information. The second reason is that we can always make improvements on the first one. It may be that something ‘went wrong’ or ‘could be done better’ than in the first experiment or we find new questions to answer. This is exactly why we did a ‘pre-experiment’, to iron out some issues and test approaches, to work out and and solve such challenges before the big main experiment.

We always strive to do as much replication as possible. Usually between 3–6 sample replicates is practical for most studies. More is better but replication comes at a cost of increased experimental resources so it’s always a balancing act.

And that’s where we come into the debate of fewer ‘high quality’ replicates vs many ‘poorer quality’ replicates.