224 – Turning Challenges into Opportunities

[00:00:06] Lily: Hello and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m Lily Clements, a Data Scientist, and I’m here with David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS.

Hi David.

[00:00:15] David: Hi Lily. It’s a happy time of year, New Year is with us. What should we discuss?

[00:00:22] Lily: Well, I thought we could, you know, as the new year comes, there’s always going to be challenges as we face this new year.

[00:00:29] David: Opportunities you mean.

[00:00:31] Lily: Well, exactly, and that’s one thing in particular I know you’re very good at, is turning challenges into opportunities.

[00:00:40] David: I gave a talk about this last year, of course, in a particular context, we work a lot in low resource environments, in education, and with lecturers who were working in challenging environments, and I gave a talk about turning their challenges into opportunities. 

[00:01:00] Lily: Absolutely. And on top of that, I believe you even made the talk interactive.

[00:01:06] David: Yes, I gave them the opportunity to pose their challenges and for me to then try to on the spot, turn them into opportunities. And once they saw the set of challenges that I had up there, they said, actually, no, that covers most of them. They did put a few more to me in the end. But, some of the challenges that were there, one of my favourite ones, which I had recently in another talk I gave, how lack of funding is actually an opportunity.

[00:01:31] Lily: Yes. Okay. Okay. So how do we turn the lack of funding into an opportunity?

[00:01:36] David: Well, when you are in a high resource environment, you need to keep getting funding because otherwise people lose their jobs and all sorts of other things happen, the whole system is set up around funding being available, and often it is. And so what you do is determined by the funding you get.

You might apply for many different grants and the ones that you get determine the work you do. In many low resource environments, it doesn’t work like this. You might have your job at the university and it’s very difficult to do things, but there’s almost no funding available. So occasionally you might get a piece of funding, but it’s all a bit random and it isn’t as if there is funding there for you to apply for and it’s available.

And this actually can be quite liberating because then the decision making on what you actually work on is not necessarily decided by what is funded. One of the big constraints that I find quite frustrating in the high resource environments is that many good ideas get proposed, they get put together into proposals, they don’t get funded, and therefore they don’t happen, nothing happens.

Whereas in many low resource environments, people just get on and do the things that they feel need doing. And it kind of works not because they’re enabled to do it, but because they’re not enabled to do anything, so they do what they can, and often people are really motivated to do something. And that creates opportunity.

So this idea that when you get funded, you do what you get funded to do, that gives all the onus to the funder. They have the power of deciding what gets done, what happens. Whereas when there’s no funding around, people decide what to do based on their own opinions, what they feel they need to do, how they’re spending their time. It’s a very different process.

And I find, or when I was in that situation, I found it very liberating that you actually could choose and you just got on and did what you did, recognising you were doing it within a constrained environment, that it wasn’t going to be done as well as it could be done with funding, but you know, you gotta do what you can in the context you’re in. It can be very empowering. 

[00:04:00] Lily: It’s interesting to hear, because it is just such a different way to look at things. And I remember one comment or one other challenge that was posed, I believe by the audience, but it might have come from you, which is linked to this is on lack of facilities.

[00:04:16] David: Yeah, well, my favourite example of that comes from personal experience. When I first went to lecture in Kenya, I recognised the lack of facilities and the fact that my students needed computers to be able to learn better. For example, applied statistics students without a computer, I felt couldn’t do good applied statistics because they didn’t have access to statistical software or data, so we needed computers.

And so my approach was to try and find and put in place facilities and get a maths lab for those students so that they could come in and use the computers of the university. And for various reasons, this was not initially successful, and instead of worrying about the fact that this wasn’t happening and it was being blocked for interesting reasons, we just got on and we said to the students, we’re very sorry, we can’t give you access to computers, but we’ll have an optional part of your course where if you have access to computers, then you can do that and you’ll learn more, and this is what we’d recommend you learn.

And at the beginning of the semester, less than 20% had access to computers, and by the end of the semester, over 90% had access to computers, and it was incredible, the learning that happened on this optional component to that course was phenomenal. In fact, it was so good that this got recognised by the university and eventually the university then, against our advice put in place a lab of computers, and then of course the students now, in theory had access to it, but were only allowed in every now and then when there was a particular class.

And so it actually wasn’t, they didn’t have as much access with the lab of computers, with the infrastructure as they did when they didn’t have the infrastructure and they found their own solutions. It was, again, the fact that the onus was on them, and it was optional, just had a different motivation, it meant that of course there were challenges, there were people who grouped together and used each others’ and shared, it was not perfect, but it was much better than when there was the actual institutional infrastructure, which was not accessible and not serving people’s needs.

[00:06:39] Lily: Okay, so there was this more kind of collaborative approach between students working together and learning from one another.

[00:06:46] David: And sharing devices, there was, I think when 90% had access, only 30% actually had machines. The other 60% either were borrowing machines or had access to a friend’s machine, which they could use at times and so on. They created solutions, a group of a few students had clubbed together to get a machine between them, there were all sorts of imaginative solutions that they found.

And so it is this element of where is the onus, where’s the impetus to make things happen? When you are in a low resource environment, actually giving, providing access or providing infrastructure can be disempowering because when it doesn’t work, it’s supposed to be provided for me and it doesn’t work, so therefore I don’t have access.

Whereas when the infrastructure isn’t there, and it’s valuable and useful, imaginative solutions can be found in ways which can be much more sustainable but also impactful.

[00:07:51] Lily: So, I guess, having that agency can be, well, having lack of resources can then mean that you have more agency, which can shift students into being more problem solving or decision making.

[00:08:05] David: Well, I think there’s the broader perspective, whether it’s for students or whether it’s for staff, and it comes back to this sort of lack of funding. When there are no opportunities to apply for funding, you actually have the agency to choose what you do. You’re not giving that choice to the funder as to what do you choose to fund.

When we’re writing proposals, we are always looking, well, what does the funder want to fund? And we try to adapt the proposal to what the funder is looking to fund because that’s what you have to do to get funders. Whereas, actually having the agency yourself, this is really important to recognise, and it isn’t, I think, as appreciated as it should be, that the importance and the value of individual agency and initiative in creating systems that are highly functional is central.

And yet we actually in high resource environments, we often capture agency either through funding or through infrastructure or other structures in ways that aren’t always appreciated. And especially then when these get projected into other contexts.

[00:09:16] Lily: My only other kind of hesitation that I wanna bring up is I wanna be careful here because, I had these resources, so it’s very easy for me to sit and say, oh, you are fine, do you see what I mean? I don’t want to be sat here saying, oh, you are lucky that you didn’t have resources, I guess, do you see my point? 

[00:09:37] David: Absolutely. And I think one of the things which is critical to that, and that’s a really important point to make, is that it is not that you are lucky to be in a challenging environment, it’s that being in a challenging environment can create opportunity. And this is an important distinction.

Being in an environment which is enabling is a great privilege, it’s really wonderful. And I’ll give one of the other examples on this, what if you have a class of a thousand students with no tutorial assistance or any help? Surely that’s a bad thing.

But at the same time, that class of a thousand students with no tutorial assistance or anything is an opportunity to learn about scalable education and to do educational research in a way which is incomparable to what is possible when you only have small classes, or when you only have access to small classes, or when the responsibility for classes is divided in lots of different ways.

So the speed at which you can work can change. So it is not that this is better. It is much better if you have a class of a thousand students, as I know in many well resourced environments, to have a number of professors working on it with a team of 15 TAs, and the rest of it. And then of course, because you have those different streams, you can actually go through a really rigorous process and set up an experimental design across the different TAs, where different TAs play different roles, and you can create some really wonderful research. But it takes a lot of preparation, a lot of extra time to do this.

One of the things is, it is not that it’s better to be in that constrained environment, it’s that you can turn that into an opportunity to be able to do things faster and to be able to do things with more impetus for yourself. With the context with the high resource environments, you’ve got to get everybody on board. You’ve got to really go through the process and do this in a way where it is collaborative, where you’ve got a whole system that you are going through and you are actually convincing everybody that this is the right thing to do, and it takes time, it often takes years to prepare.

So it is not that it’s better, it’s that it creates opportunities. What do those opportunities mean? They mean that somebody in a low resource environment isn’t necessarily condemned to do less or worse than someone in a high resource environment.

This is what’s amazing about this idea of taking challenges and turning them into opportunities. Do I want to be faced with some of these challenges? No. I’d love to live in a world which didn’t have these challenges, where there was enough funding to go around, where there were enough human resources, and so on.

But that’s not the world we live in. The key is, if you live in a low resource environment where you are facing these challenges, if you can turn them into opportunities, then you can find success, and opportunities follow opportunities. 

[00:12:51] Lily: And do you think that any challenge can have an opportunity in it?

[00:12:55] David: The expression I love is silver linings, look for the silver linings, it may be a cloudy day, but look for the silver lining, it’s really beautiful. You know, this is a personal thing which I’ve grown up with, losing my mother very young, looking for the silver linings, and taking challenges in your life and turning them into opportunities, I think it’s something which can apply to anyone, anywhere, whatever challenges you face.

It doesn’t mean that the challenge you are facing is any less real or any less valid or any less challenging. It just means that you are not defined by the challenges. Can any challenge be done in this way? No. I mean, absolutely not. There are people who are facing challenges, which are just debilitating.

What I can say is, the people I admire most are the people who took such challenges, which I just cannot imagine being able to overcome myself and have turned them into opportunities. They are the people for whom I have the most admiration, the people who amaze me at how they’ve managed to do this and take a challenging environment and turn it into something from which they’ve created knowledge, insights, impact, whatever it may be, but taking challenge and turning it into an opportunity is something where I really admire people who do that well.

[00:14:20] Lily: So if someone has a challenge, then they can, in relation to teaching, I suppose in this case…

[00:14:27] David: There are challenges in life which are different, and there are many which are beyond me. But I think within the teaching context, I did enjoy that interaction of actually people saying, well, what about this challenge? This is something which we face in low resource environments. And actually thinking about how with that mindset, you could say, well, okay, yes, it’s a challenge, yes, I recognise, I see the difficult situation you are in, but what can you do to work with it to find success? It’s a beautiful way to look at life.

I’m not claiming that this is the solution to everything in any shape or form, but I am saying that it’s a very powerful tool if you have it in your toolbox. If you’re working in low resource environments, you know, if you look at challenges and you say, oh, I’m sorry, we need to remove the challenge, then that’s different from looking at the challenge and saying, yes, I see your challenge, I hear you, how can you turn it into an opportunity?

And the latter is much more empowering, it really gives agency, it creates opportunity by its very nature.

[00:15:35] Lily: So maybe we should do one more challenge. I remember one that came up was postgraduate supervision.

[00:15:41] David: Oh, this is a good one. I fell into this trap when I was a lecturer in Kenya. At one point I had over 30 postgraduate students, and I didn’t do well. The simple truth is, you know, I did not turn that challenge into an opportunity, so I failed at that. However, I know some people who did do well, and so I can tell their story, and if I was in that situation again, that’s what I would be trying to do.

[00:16:04] Lily: Sure.

[00:16:05] David: They built a sort of pyramid scheme. They had the more senior students mentoring the more junior, and they said they had this sort of pyramid, they managed to find ways, and this is where actually a little bit of funding went a long way on this, and they created this sort of whole pyramid where each of their senior postdocs would have multiple PhD students who were working with them, and they would have master’s students working with the PhD students and they would have undergraduate students working with the master’s students and so on, and more and more at every level.

And what was amazing about this and why this is such an incredible insight, and I have shared this with other people since, is that actually everybody wins from this because the mentorship that is given by some postgraduate students to more junior postgraduate students, done well, in the right framework and so on, this tends to be actually better mentorship for the younger students because they’re being mentored by somebody who’s relatable, who has enough knowledge and so on, and they have access to more knowledge if they need it.

But it is also great experience that you are actually preparing people to go ahead with work and to be able to do more themselves because of the mentorship they’re giving. And I can tell you this is, you know, I now have been discussing this with colleagues all over the world, not just in low resource environments, as ways to manage teams. And a colleague of ours at a well-known US university has used this to be able to build a group which others would not have thought possible within her context.

It’s something where this isn’t just for low resource environments. It’s a really interesting opportunity and possibility to think differently about how you do mentorship. If you are only limited by what you can do as an individual, then you simply limit the numbers. But the need is much greater.

And so what I did, what I failed to do when I was in that situation is put in place the structures at that point to be able to get multiple layers of this, where you have those multiple layers of mentorship and everybody winning from those interactions. The person I know who’s done this the best has actually been on the podcast in the past, it’s a Professor Baoua from Niger, and great admiration, I just have so much admiration for how he successfully trained the next generation of entomologists in this way, through this sort of multi-layered mentorship approach.

[00:18:43] Lily: It sounds like, how do you start that, I guess, but then I guess it comes through when you start to have more students and you can build it, and then the students can get more skills.

[00:18:55] David: Yeah, and the key is it’s about recognising that if your problem is you have too many postgraduate students who need supervision, then what you have on the one hand is too many students who need mentorship. But on the other hand, you have a lot of manpower.

[00:19:15] Lily: Yeah. 

[00:19:15] David: If you only consider your manpower, then you don’t have enough. Whereas if you consider the students themselves as manpower, now that suddenly changes the whole dynamic. It turns that challenge into an opportunity.

This is at the heart of that process, it’s recognising within the context you find yourself, if you have a challenge because you have too much of something, then that too much of something is probably a resource. How does that resource serve you actually helping reduce or helping to address or create an opportunity from that challenge? 

[00:19:53] Lily: Great. Yes. Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. Well, a great way to think of it. Nice. Do you have any final thoughts?

[00:20:00] David: Only that we didn’t make this very festive. A New Year’s special, it was a bit, it was a bit serious, but nevermind. 

[00:20:07] Lily: Well thank you very much, and Happy New Year.

[00:20:10] David: Happy New Year to you too.