141 – Reflections on Impact Activation Workshop at ICMS Edinburgh, Part 1

[00:00:07] David: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS Podcast. I’m David Stern, the founding director of IDEMS, and it’s my pleasure to be here today with both Lily and George. You’ve both been on episodes before, but it’s our first three-way episode. And it’s because we were together last week in Edinburgh at ICMS, the International Center for Mathematical Sciences, giving a workshop about impact activation.

Great to see you both. How are you doing?

[00:00:36] Lily: Good to see you too. And and I’m excited to see what we get out of this discussion today.

[00:00:42] George: Yeah, me too. Yeah, it’s great to be here and really excited to be in a podcast with more than just me and David.

[00:00:47] David: I’m gonna start by sort of, last week was a first for all of us. I’ll just give a little bit of background. Over the last, whew, five years now, IDEMS has been having these impact activation postdoctoral fellowships, which both of you have been through Lily. We’ve done an episode, I think about this quite a while back.

[00:01:09] Lily: Yes. It would’ve been about a year ago that we did that episode. ’cause it was, as I. Spend left that role into the new role.

[00:01:17] David: Exactly. And and George, I think when we’ve had episodes previously, we’ve discussed a bit your role. You are currently still an impact activation fellow.

[00:01:25] George: Yep. Yeah, I think my first podcast we, we dived into, yeah. Not just what I was doing, but the wider impact activation setting,

[00:01:35] David: yeah. And now for the first time we were, I was approached by the director of ICMS. When we had a discussion, he said, I like the idea of your impact activation fellowship. Could you give a workshop on that? And so foolishly, I said yes, why not? And and so last week we had a workshop Edinburgh where.

We as a group, people who had been through impact activation fellows, myself, Kate my fellow director of IDEMS got together. We spent two days planning. We spent two days giving a workshop to about 20 participants from actually quite far afield. There was from the US there were from all over in different places.

[00:02:21] George: From Germany, definitely.

[00:02:23] David: Germany from Germany. Yeah. A lot of course from all over the uk from

[00:02:27] Lily: one from, one from Cameroon

[00:02:30] David: Cameroon,

[00:02:31] Lily: studying in living in Germany, but a different one to the, and Italy as well. Anyway, sorry, we could just sit here. Listen.

[00:02:38] David: And what was really interesting for me was that this model we had of preparing. Giving, reflecting is roughly what we also, what I first encountered when we did math camps years ago. And but I like the model, so I’m wanting to discuss today, get your ideas of that model of actually the, how we manage to do that preparation, workshop, reflection, but also what you thought of the workshop itself.

So yeah, I’ll hand over who wants to start.

[00:03:14] George: I guess I can start talking about the the model of it. I think, for IDEMS being a remote first company, we don’t have that. Time together that a lot of other companies do. So just from that kind of perspective of being able to come together and actually finding that big productivity spike was very good for the planning.

Yeah. From, yeah, that purely practical perspective.

[00:03:39] Lily: I think to add, it’s really it’s really nice to have that kind of time together and at points. I even mentioned to the participants like, this isn’t normal, that we’re all together and I. Some of them were most of them were surprised. One of them was like, oh yeah, I noticed on your website that most of you are here.

Because he went through our website and we’re like, oh no, we got

[00:04:01] David: Yeah and this is where it is interesting, just how many. IDEMS members have gone through the impact activation fellowship and then stayed like yourself, Lily, or will stay like yourself, George.

[00:04:16] Lily: that’s a threat.

[00:04:17] David: I’m confident saying that now, after we had the meeting recently where you basically said you want to stay. So I feel I can say this now and I’m looking forward to that transition we discussed,

[00:04:27] George: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:30] Lily: Though, yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think as for the model itself I think a lot of. People were worried, like within the items team of this model of but what’s the plan? Whereas I personally have worked with David Long enough or seen you run such things long enough that I just trust the system that you are going with.

Okay, there might be, we’ll make the plan. That’s why we’re here now. And I think some people are like, okay, we can make a plan in two days. And I’m like, I. This is what David does. He’s done it before. I’m just gonna trust the system.

[00:05:06] David: I think it’s really interesting because there was a reflection afterwards that there were certain sessions where if there had been longer to prepare. Then people would have spent a long time preparing them. And there was one session in particular where there was a really interesting, exciting idea given the time there’d have been role playing and all sorts of other things.

And in some sense, we couldn’t afford that as an organization. This was a workshop where our time is not paid. We have a not-for-profit social enterprise. We don’t have core funding, so giving this workshop is not part of our funded work. So we lost a lot of money last week in a sense, because people weren’t working on what they should be working on.

But it was. I think so rewarding and so having it all contained in that week made it feasible. I think realistically we couldn’t have afforded it if we’d given it the time, which in other ways it deserves.

[00:06:09] George: Yeah.

No. I was just gonna pick up on the. I guess the difference, and I think this came up in reflection between planning and preparing, because not having that fully set out structure we would’ve had, from fully preparing and spelling anything out, allowed us to be a bit more flexible to what the participants were asking for.

Which I think is something we can get onto in a bit. But yeah I thought that. As a consequence of being, was it prepared but not planned in a way? Was yeah, actually allowed us to cater more to what the participants wanted. Sorry.

[00:06:49] Lily: I think that’s links into what I wanted to say about, because it, David said it was feasible this way, but I feel that, I know David, I think it’s a bit more than just like it being feasible. I think it’s also that it gave that like flexibility that we could then have I.

We didn’t need to have these rigid structures that we had to stick to. And we did and we were very flexible throughout the week. After a couple of, I think it was even after the first session, we were like, let’s switch up groups. Each of us in the each of the either Impact Activation Fellows or former Impact Act, basically everyone.

But David and Kate had a group of two to three people. And we were very quickly but I wanna meet more.

[00:07:25] David: And what was really interesting is when we were, and this is in the planning days, we started by saying, oh, we’re gonna switch them up. And then people said, no, we shouldn’t switch them up so quickly. And then when they met them, they said we should switch them up. And so that is that ability to actually recognize that. What you want to do in advance and what you actually recognize is the best thing to do in the moment can be different. And so we were prepared to do one or the other and we were able to make that work as an example. But also because people hadn’t overplanned, if people have spent two weeks preparing a specific session, they’d have been very vested in it going the way they planned it.

Because everything happened so quickly in those two days. The fact that there was one session, and I believe correct me if I’m wrong, George, but it was your session on the second day, which basically got hijacked and turned into something else. Is that right?

[00:08:22] George: Yeah. No, that that’s absolutely right because I think what we’d, what we’d planned for is that each of the facilitators, so us, except Kate and David, were over the course of three sessions across the two days. Each of us were going to give a 10 minute talk and then break out into small groups and kind of discuss, or at least get the participants to work on the themes coming outta that talk.

And what we learned as the workshop went on is after the first two sessions, a lot of those themes had already started coming out in the discussions and actually the us and me being in that final session, us doing that same structure, we would start repeating the same themes and may maybe there would’ve been deeper dives into things, but we thought that probably wasn’t the best use of time. I can’t actually remember.

[00:09:11] David: Emerged. What had emerged was the fact that actually they as participants, they were now wanting to really spend much more time digging in to what could they do themselves and actually us giving them that, that space to dig into to the more. Internal discussions which were forming, which were maybe deliberately informal, but were naturally emerging, those emergent topics, we had put some time in for that, but we’d put half an hour and they clearly needed hours of this time.

[00:09:47] Lily: I was given the fe, I was given the feedback that they wanted more of that time by the end. And and that was also obvious by just how the discussions were going and how, but that was definitely not something that, that I anticipated anyway, and not something that I would’ve felt comfortable.

In the kind of preparing stage to go, and then we’ll give them some time to talk amongst themselves. I’ll be like, but what if they don’t want to?

[00:10:12] George: Yeah, because I, and I and I dunno how it is in stats or even other areas, but going to a pure maths workshop, my experience is your entire time is taken up by people talking. And then there’s maybe penciled in a networking session at the end. But essentially you, in that kind of workshop, you never actually get the time to discuss or work on something.

And I think the structure that we actually ended up with and what the participants are asking for is what I would actually term a workshop where they could actually sit and start discussing ideas facilitated or not. And I thought that was

[00:10:50] Lily: They didn’t us

[00:10:51] George: really nice.

[00:10:53] David: they didn’t need us, otherwise them in would’ve fine. And that wouldn’t have, that wouldn’t have been as productive as I think. Had actually happened. What I think is true is that there was an element of the fact that, and this is exactly this idea of impact activation that they had now concrete ideas and things that they wanted to try and pursue and to try and find others to pursue this with.

They now were wanting to be able to actually say, okay. A lot of what we were explaining is that. This isn’t something where it’s a well trodden path. You you need to find what you are passionate about. You need to actually understand, you need to do things deeply enough, and then you need to get experience.

And so a lot of what they then were wanting to discuss by the end was what experiences can we get? What can we, move towards? And that’s, I. That’s what I was hoping. And we had scheduled in half an hour for that towards the end, it was clear that wasn’t enough. It was and we had another session, which was about their personal journeys, but as a facilitated session.

And that is what led to really the fact that now they’d had that and they’d thought about that. They wanted to be discussing that with others who were on similar personal journeys. And what I found very interesting is that, and George, you were in some sense academically less, less far along than some of them, but in this context, you were seen as so much further.

On, you are, it was a very interesting how this, the experience that you have over the last two years meant that even people who had spent, a many more years in an academic environment than you, were academically more advanced. They were, they recognized themselves as their peers with people who are still in the middle of their PhD in terms of this inter impact activation component.

[00:12:56] George: Yeah, and I think what I was really pleased about actually getting to know everyone there was. The appreciation that they knew there were these things that they didn’t know. And I think that was a really nice and refreshing mindset that maybe you don’t get everywhere. You maybe turn up at a conference and people just want to tell you what they know and leave.

Whereas this was, people were turning up and think, I, I. No, I want to do something impactful, but I have no idea how to get there. So even just the small amount of experience I have in this, yeah they were keen to listen to me in that respect.

[00:13:38] David: But I think, am I correct? It also helped you to appreciate just what you’ve been through over the last 18 months.

[00:13:45] George: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And yeah, actually. Maybe this goes back to the structure of the week as well, having that planning time. Actually, let me sit and , reflect on, on what I’d done, and it wasn’t the reflection time of the workshop, but me reflect on what I’ve been doing in the past 18 months and actually putting those experiences into context with the experiences of others. Because I think one of the things as items we’re not bad at, we maybe deliberately don’t allocate a lot of time to, is just talking about what we’re doing. So to actually sit with Lily, Esme, Chiara, Georg and actually. Everyone go through their experiences and me actually them being able to relate to them and that I could relate was, a really good feeling for me.

[00:14:39] Lily: That is nice. So it’s not a reflection I really thought of. I guess because yeah, I guess because at the first, ’cause we had these team meetings every year and at the kind of, I went to the first team meeting where kind of everyone talked about what they do. Whereas now at the team meetings we don’t talk about what we do as much.

We talk more about. Yeah I don’t know.

[00:14:59] David: Yeah, I no. You’re right. And this is actually a very interesting thing. It’s also part of why when we are thinking about. Our ideal for impact activation postdoctoral fellowships in the future. We envisage them being cohort based and this is something where I think then, Lily, as you say, people who have already talked about that, you’ve had that exposure, that experience of each other.

If you have a cohort of people coming through and getting these different experiences, that’s then easier to share because you are coming through at that same. That in that same time span.

[00:15:33] Lily: Yeah.

[00:15:34] David: think that is a challenge that we have. But let me just push on what. George mentioned about actually these common experiences.

Did you find that Lily as well? Were you surprised at how much people had in common? Because you are actually coming from a different perspective, from many of the more mathematical if you want. You are very much on data science coming from statistics, and I noticed in the event you would occasionally see yourself, but I’m not a mathematician. Many statisticians and data scientists feel. But did you feel that those commonalities of experience were still there? Or did you feel that you’ve had quite a different experience?

[00:16:17] Lily: Yeah, it’s a good question. Firstly, I don’t mind being called a mathematician. I’m more just try to give a voice to the other, to the statisticians and the data scientists out there that don’t like that. Just to, just for people to be aware. I don’t mind being called a mathematician, but anyway.

But in terms of. I guess what it is a lot of people are talking about that they want to see what they’re doing is okay I like, say pure maths. I’m enjoying my pure maths, but I can’t see the kind of application of it or how it can be useful like where the social impact is, not immediately obvious where the usefulness of kind of statistics with social impact is. Many years ago I went through a kind of mindset of, I can’t see the, I was trying to choose between if I want to go onto the stats side or onto the pure math side, and I went for the stats side.

’cause I liked that I could see at least a application of it. And then as time went on, it was okay, but I don’t want to see just a application. I wanna see a useful kind of, I wanna see an impactful application. I suppose in terms of that, it’s a bit, it is a bit different because I suppose the skills, some of the skills are more directly obvious.

Whereas like I did stats as my degree and I get to do stats now. I did R in my PhD and I use R now. Whereas for, say, George, you didn’t use Python in your degree in your PhD or any of them. But in the last year you’ve learned it and now you are, I understand you’re pretty good at it. I still feel like I got a lot of obviously like still doing like the impact activation kind of fellowship, gained so much from that.

Of course.

[00:17:55] George: I think what I’m yeah. Picking is the idea of transferable skills basically is one of the, I guess it is one of the big things we wanted to get across in the workshop and we didn’t do it. Explicitly in a kind of here’s the skill you have and here’s the, here’s how it applies.

’cause I don’t think that’s a good fit for everyone. But I think you are right that maybe people coming from pure maths backgrounds don’t think too hard about their transferable skills.

[00:18:28] Lily: I think it’s less, less obvious on the kind of like how useful their skills are. Skills that you and David and like es may have, which blow my mind on how much you can think things through and conceptualize. And that, that’s me just like applying a really simple that’s me.

Just again, looking for like a simple application or something rather than that broader idea.

[00:18:56] George: Yeah you blow me away with how you can handle the handle data and just read it

[00:19:03] Lily: But that’s like something that

[00:19:04] George: people are just opaque. But you are saying that’s something that you directly picked up in your degree.

[00:19:11] Lily: yeah.

[00:19:11] David: I want to challenge you on that because in the workshop you highlighted how your degree didn’t give you some of those skills.

[00:19:19] Lily: Absolutely that is true. And I believe we’ve even spoken about that before, but you know about not really, not even realizing that I didn’t fully understand what standard deviation was and things like this, which then came out over the impact activation fellowship. And have virtually also really led me to what I’m really interested in now on working at items.

But, but at least like I worked with, I think that there’s a lot more of a direct link. It’s still not direct, but there’s much more of a I can see the link between my PhD and now by doing statistic before and now I work with data here. Whereas if you look at Esme, she actually, I dunno what her PhD was on, so I’m not even gonna try, but.

[00:20:03] David: But I think you are right that there’s the more abstract, the mathematics you come in with, the less obvious the link between what the skills you’ve gained in that and the and then the value, and you can bring through impact oriented work. However, I do think that there’s, what I found very interesting was that.

That even amongst the participants, there was that full range. We had people who came in who were saying, we’re, I’m a statistician. I want to work in a pharmaceutical company too. I can see the impact on it in that way of the work that I’m doing. And we had other people who were, pure mathematicians coming in who could see no direct.

Applications of their skills, and we’re even questioning, is it true that these skills are useful? Or are we just fooling ourselves? Which is a great question, that’s the sort of person I want to employ. The person who asked that question.

[00:21:04] George: that was so my question is do you see that as almost an advantage for activating, impacting people who don’t have that preconceived path or.

[00:21:19] David: I think yes, to an extent that in some sense, but in other ways, and I think Lily, you’ve highlighted this, that, actually the nature of the education people have gone through is it doesn’t matter if you’ve done STAs data, pure math, supplied maths, the need for activation to actually convert the abstract knowledge you have the deep understanding of concepts into things which are into skills, which make you.

Invaluable working collaboratively with partners who are working towards impact. That process is needed equally across the spectrum, and

[00:22:04] Lily: and I think that, yes. Yeah. No, absolutely agree. Yes. And definitely as well, like the impact activation is not, it’s not okay, because you did stats, you are closer to impact activation than if you’ve done pure maths at all.

I think I’m all just meant I could see a link better than, or you can before going into it, get an idea of Okay. I can, I think I can see how stats can work in like kind of social impact where it’s like pure maths. I don’t think I can see that.

[00:22:35] David: I think that’s right. You can see how the skills you’ve gained should be useful.

[00:22:42] Lily: Yes.

[00:22:43] David: But this sort of part of what we’re articulating, and I think this is something where I. I’m excited to see where this goes because the hope is we are now going to give a similar workshop again next year.

We still need to apply and get funding of course from but we’ve been invited to put that application in and then we’re gonna try and actually find ways to communicate this and George, I think we are planning over the next few weeks, months. To have a number of conversations where we try to dig out some of the concepts that came out that we want to articulate about our vision of impact activation.

[00:23:24] George: Yeah. Yeah. And I’m really looking forward to the, that kind of process because there, there’s, I think being the, I would say youngest academic, or it’s not even academically youngest the newest joiner. There’s a huge amount that I, a, don’t know and b, haven’t been exposed to yet, and I, yeah, I’m looking forward to this as a way to dig into that as well.

[00:23:50] David: I’m conscious that I really want to dig in to actually the workshop itself and the experience of the two days with the participants and talk through that. But I’m also conscious that this episode is already quite long and so I’m going to suggest that we try and arrange another episode in the not too distant future where we go a step further and we try to actually give the listeners a more concrete idea of what happened. What we are thinking, what we experienced in this process of trying to expose people to what our concept of impact activation is. We’ve talked around that and I am fairly confident we won’t actually explain what impact activation is in that next episode, but we might hint at it.

There are any last thoughts from either of you to finish this episode.

[00:24:46] Lily: No I I don’t think anything for me, just that it was a really interesting week and I’m looking forward to digging into kind of the workshop itself.

[00:24:55] David: Right.

[00:24:55] George: I’ll echo that as well.

[00:24:58] David: Thank you.

[00:25:00] Lily: Thank you.