142 – Reflections on Impact Activation Workshop at ICMS Edinburgh, Part 2

[00:00:00] David: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS Podcast. I’m David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS, and I’m delighted to be here today again with George and Lily for our second three-way episode, discussing the ICMS workshop on impact activation, ICMS, being the International Center for Mathematical Sciences based in Edinburgh, and we were privileged to be there recently giving a workshop.

We’ve described this process. We’ve talked about some experiences in the previous episode, and I’m looking forward to digging in further today. Hi, both.

Lily: Hi.

George: Hi David. Yeah, it’s great to be back with the two of you.  

David: Great and really to dig in, the workshop with the participants, we had about 20 participants, as we mentioned before, was [00:01:00] aiming to expose them to this idea of impact activation. In the preparation days of the workshop, we spent quite a bit of time trying to understand what we understand by impact activation and we got somewhere on that road, but I think it’s still not something we could formally articulate.

And George, I think we mentioned very briefly in the last episode that over the next few months, the two of us are probably gonna spend a few episodes digging into this a bit more deeply. But we felt that we understood enough to try and expose participants to areas of this, or areas which hopefully will resonate on what is needed to take someone with, as we put it, a mathematical mind, who’s going through a maths PhD who has been through [00:02:00] a maths PhD, who is maybe in academia, maybe beyond, and to really enable them to become valuable when working collaboratively with partners on topics of positive social impact, whatever that may be. 

That’s broadly a framing. Do either of you have a comment on that framing? Does that resonate with your understanding?

George: Yeah, definitely resonates with me. And I think one thing to make open is that the concept of impact activation that we presented is our concept of it in a way. And a lot of, participants who turned up kind of had their concept of what impact meant and therefore their definition of what impact activation was.

Lily: Which was something I guess I hadn’t, I’m not your pure mathematician here, who is as obsessed with definitions, still slightly obsessed with [00:03:00] definitions, but not as obsessed with definitions. So I wasn’t aware before that there were these different definitions of impact , and people would come in with their own ideas of it. 

And I found that really interesting to see that. And I guess, yeah, just another comment to add was that a lot of the participants were also interested in, kind of, this third stream, this third kind of, to them it’s, okay, I have go into industry or I go into academia, okay, what’s, what else is there?

David: Thanks Lily. I think that’s a really important framing that we did for this, that we were sort of part of the framing of the workshop, the idea of impact activation that we were putting forward is that for mathematical minds, for mathematical scientists who are doing PhDs, very narrow experts on this, there is a sense that in terms of career pathways you can continue in academia and that is valued and valuable, [00:04:00] you are in great demand in industry in certain contexts, particularly banking industries, the tech industries and so on, large, corporate in general. But if your passion is to have social impact in the world, then that is not a well-trodden path.

And part of what we were trying to do, which broadly the core of IDEMS, is taking these mathematical science minds and making them available to partners to work collaboratively on problems of social importance. And so part of what we had put forward was that the workshop would discuss the fact that there is this third route, so to speak, or a route into sort of working where you are focused on social impact.

Lily: And I think [00:05:00] that a lot of them were surprised that this isn’t a well-trodden path, and hopefully they saw the opportunities that there is, that it’s not well-trodden. But I know that a lot of the participants, I guess just wanted a list, and I’ve worked with David long enough, I’ve worked with you long enough to know that you don’t just get a yes or no, you don’t just get the list of answers, there’s never a simple yes, that’s correct, there’s never a list. 

David: That is the most common answer you’ll get out of me.

Lily: Well, it depends yes and no. But anyway, I think a lot of them were quite surprised and that came out in the first kind of session or two, that it’s not a well-trodden path.

George: I think, and this is my understanding of this third path. It is to do with space, the space to be able to do things, because a lot of our participants were coming from academia, in the UK we now have this [00:06:00] REF, this research excellence framework, which is designed to give credit to research or specific impact case studies of research to count towards your total research output as an academic. 

And I think one of the good conversations that came out, particularly towards the end of the second day was how to engineer, even as an academic, how you can engineer your, your space, even if constrained by the framework, to try and do things that you want to do. I don’t know if that’s a good…

David: Let me build on that because I think it’s really important. One of the things that we were very careful to present is that the third path, so to speak, leaving academia, not going into industry is not the only way to be impactful. And so we discussed and we actually had this division of what we called, I like to call it hobbies. 

We [00:07:00] called it extracurricular, but I prefer to think of it as hobbies. You know, doing impactful things almost as a hobby alongside. We talked about integrated and we had a wonderful example of Professor Chris Sangwin from Edinburgh University who has, as an academic, gradually shifted his focus towards what he believes his contribution to social impact can be, and is now focusing quite a lot of his effort on being as impactful as he can be through his expertise as an academic. 

And it is a wonderful example where the REF framework, research excellence framework, and the focus on impact case studies has created the space for him to succeed as an academic with that transition towards not just working on research excellence, he does [00:08:00] excellent research, but he is now focusing between now and the next assessment in 29, he is going to focus on the impact case study on actually making sure his research is as impactful as it can be.

And this is where this issue around the definition of impact becomes so important. And this is a big part of where I was very interested with the way you framed it, that this is our idea of impact activation. And I think that’s correct, that we are starting to formulate a specific concept of impact activation, which hopefully over the next couple of years we’ll be able to communicate, where we are taking mathematical minds, mathematical scientists who don’t just have a mathematical mind, but have gone through deep training, getting to this postdoctoral level. And activating their latent skills to [00:09:00] now really become part of collaborative teams working on the big social challenges. 

And why has this concept emerged within IDEMS? It’s because IDEMS exists because we believe that the skills that we bring, these mathematical minds if you want working towards social impact, the poly crises we are in, the world right now, needs people with these skills to be working towards understanding and how to solve the biggest problems in the world, these social challenges we’re facing. 

In the past, maybe it was okay for them to sort of focus on, the narrow problems, which we are naturally quite good at. But right now there is an opportunity and a need for our skills given the complexity of the societal [00:10:00] challenges and opportunities at the moment.

And so I guess what I’m wanting to sort of draw us back to and dig into is you’ve mentioned a bit the way different participants engaged with what we called the hobby, being involved in social impact almost as a hobby on the side, integrating it. And many of them were interested into continuing to pursue academic careers, but integrating the social impact into their academic career.

And what we termed the big leap, this third route, the route towards actually a career which is different and focusing on social impact, but using the mathematical minds, that this particular audience had. And I should be clear, everybody in the audience [00:11:00] was either a PhD student or postdoc. So everybody was going to come out with a mathematical science PhD of some form, or they already had one

Lily: Or they were Kate. 

David: Or they were Kate, yes. 

So I guess really what I’m wanting to get the two of you to reflect on is. As you had much closer interactions with the participants than I did, I’d like you to reflect on these three, the hobbies, the integrated, and the big leap, and how they reacted and interacted and were thinking about those three. Was that a useful framing in the interactions with them?

George: I think for me the most interesting thing was watching them think about the Big Leap side, because that’s such a personal definition of what constitutes a big leap. And for some of them, speaking to some of them, it was [00:12:00] just the thought of actually expanding their skills to be able to do some kind of coding project, which they felt could be really useful, really impactful.

But the big leap for them was just to take that first step into how do I interact with an open source code base, for example. Whereas Big Leap for other people, and particularly like your context, David is starting a company to do social impact. 

Somebody else was just going and working somewhere in a low resource environment, and just exposing themselves to that. Sorry, carry on. 

Yeah, I found it really interesting in the conversations, just understanding what constitutes a big leap for different people and in a way, whether you see something as a big leap or not, doesn’t matter. What matters is that the person doing it is actually challenging themselves.

George: And I think that’s one of the things that came out in our reflection is actually a good way to start activating yourself is to put yourself or be put into a situation that you [00:13:00] are just scared of facing in a way. And I think that we didn’t quite make that explicit in the workshop, but I think that was already coming out with some of the participants thinking about, okay, what is a big leap for me?

David: That out of your comfort zone component was, if you want, one of the themes that we were, as you say, it wasn’t explicit, but it was an implicit theme that we had as part of the planning, if you want, or the preparation of the workshop. 

Lily, do you have any thoughts?

Lily: Yeah, I’m interested that George pinpointed on the big leap and I guess to me the big leap part was what was less clear by what a big leap is. That’s, I suppose when I had less discussions I think a lot of participants really wanted to get some exposure into, okay, what does this mean and then found out about the maths camps, and so we’re really interested in having that as kind of part of their hobbies. I guess to me it’s [00:14:00] the hobbies and the integrated is oh my every day, what can I do? 

 Okay, I mean, maybe traveling to Africa isn’t an everyday for a lot of people. But the big leap, I found harder to get my head around because I was like, how often can I do a big leap? Surely you do a big leap like once in a while. So then what is a big leap? Have I ever done one type thing, which David and I then discussed later on, and he said like you joining IDEMS is your big leap.

George: Do you feel like joining IDEMS was your big leap? 

Lily: No, it felt very natural.

George: I feel like I did take a big leap.

Lily: Okay.

George: Only if I can pinpoint something. Yeah, it is again, that personal kind of definition of Big Leap. But I think you’re right that for a lot of the attendees, the slightly more practical handhold they got from thinking about hobbies or integrated components [00:15:00] actually did definitely help them and a lot of people got, I think, at least some idea outta that. Which maybe allowed them to think a bit more about a big leap. But yeah.

Lily: One of the things that was interesting was on the first day when we were in our initial groups, in our first groups, I was speaking to someone and they said about how in the past they had tried to work in, oh, what word do I want? Snake serum, serum snake. If you get poisoned.

George: Yeah, anti-venom. 

Lily: Anti-venom, thank you. 

Yeah , they had previously, I think they even said as far as that they had set something up to try and work in that, but faced various challenges such as storing the anti-venom in a place where it’s needed. But at the end of the workshop, their big leap was about getting that again. And I found that interesting that on the first day they framed it as a, oh, I tried to do this once and I was interested in this, but I couldn’t get it to work. And now on the [00:16:00] last day, the second day, but towards the end they were like more talking about that being their big leap.

George: Yeah, it’ll be interesting to just, almost be able to follow up with some of these ideas down the line and see where they got to.

David: Yeah. I think what’s really interesting listening to both of you on this is that I think, as I say, I was a little bit more removed deliberately and I was observing a number of different dynamics. And one of the ones that I was very interested in was this , it was the fact that the language helped, I felt, in terms of actually people recognizing that not everything has to be a big leap. Some things can be a hobby and that that’s good. There’s a time for one, there’s a time for the other. 

Actually recognizing what [00:17:00] moment are you in it was I think, something where I felt that the discussions at the beginning didn’t have a language or a structure. Whereas, I was quite impressed by the end. There was some really concrete ideas coming out, which may not have been huge, and they may have been things that they were thinking about or wanting to do at the beginning. But in some sense, part of what I think the exposure to other people’s experiences gave them was the confidence to just say, well, okay, I can work through this.

Many of them came in with really inspiring experiences and challenges and weren’t having a community to discuss that with. Whereas I felt that quite a lot of them left with a language which had emerged, [00:18:00] and a network of people who they could relate to a bit more. Does that resonate as part of what emerged?

Lily: Absolutely. Well with me. Absolutely. Yeah. Having that kind of network, especially because towards the end, as we spoke about in our other episode on it, but towards the end, they were actually having really good, insightful discussions without needing the kind of facilitators .

George: Yeah. And there natural leaders emerging who were not gathering support for their idea but, you know, that other participants who perhaps don’t have that ability to make that big leap themselves, but they could group together and hopefully now have gone away and started to discuss those ideas.

And I think one of the, one of the big messages we left them with was, we can help in some ways, and it’s maybe not in the form of a job, but we can help in, [00:19:00] once you’ve started to bake your idea a bit, we can then start suggesting and then putting things together. I think that was reassuring to a lot of people that kind of going back to my space point, that yeah, you can make space for yourself, but then how do you actually get, what’s the next step? How do you actually get your foothold into this? 

And I think speaking to a lot of people afterwards they felt that was, yeah, one of the best things that came out was just being able to group together and then know that there are then things they can do with that next.

David: Yeah, and actually following some of these things through, which I think is where this is what will be interesting to see what emerges over the next couple of years. So let’s watch this space. I think there is a core idea of emerging here, which I’m excited by. And I want to maybe finish from my side by saying, we are not the first people to recognize that mathematical minds are useful and have impact in different [00:20:00] contexts.

There have been efforts around embedding people into government, there have been lots of efforts on this before in many different ways. But I think where we are starting to sort of articulate something about our impact activation process is that the process that we are potentially starting to articulate is a process which has happened a lot in the past in ad hoc ways.

 I myself feel I went through an impact activation process and I can point to a number of other people who have similarly found careers going through these more ad hoc processes. And what I hope we should be able to do is to actually pinpoint and articulate some of the key, well, how this process could be scaled.

And my real [00:21:00] hope on that is if we can scale some of these processes, then actually there’s a resource here, which could be leveraged to add value to the work which is happening in so many areas, in so many places, but where a certain mindset is sometimes missing and is not present in the room. 

And this is where I was articulating quite often the value I bring isn’t that I bring value, and I can give a very concrete example of a meeting I was in yesterday where we were planning for an event and the timings didn’t make sense, that what we were planning would just not work because people weren’t thinking through if this many people need to present in this way and so on, that attention to detail on the timings, [00:22:00] I was obsessed by. And it added value to the preparation process because otherwise, it is possible that that session would then have been overcrowded. Sometimes that detail is missing. 

And I was able to add value just by being present in the room. It wasn’t something where my particular skills matter, but just having somebody who won’t let those details drop can add value in those spaces, for example.

Lily: Yeah. I think, or I really hope that kind of idea got conveyed to the participants. And I think that it did, of the value that they can add through these transferable skills.

David: Yeah. And just through being themselves and being present in spaces where they are not trying to lead necessarily, [00:23:00] but they’re just trying to add value. And I think that was the key point, that if you can be present in a space with a skillset which is rare, then you can add value in those spaces.

 George, do you have a last thought?

George: Nothing in particular. I am probably reflecting on things which will require yet another podcast, afterwards. I think we should schedule that in and, pursue that further. Yeah.

Lily: Well, I’m excited as well to see where your discussions on kind of impact activation go in these kind of future podcasts.

David: Yes. I’m looking forward to those discussions. Watch this space and we hope that this is something which will emerge with something concrete that we can then share with others. 

Thank you both.

Lily: Thank you. 

George: Thank you everyone. [00:24:00]