Diversifying research for greater impact

Tackling grand societal challenges, I argue, requires wide-ranging, creative, and big-picture thinking.

The whole is often much greater than the sum of its parts. Working across disciplines can help identify solutions to grand challenges. Photo by Georg Eiermann on Unsplash

Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.

—

David Epstein

, Range

Since having kids, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to best spend my limited time. I consider my role as a father and husband to be my most important role in life. So I work hard to limit my time at work and maximise my time with family. As a result, I also think a lot about how to best spend my limited working hours.

I became an ecologist not only because I was excited about trying to understand the complexities of ecosystems but also because I was concerned about the state of the world. We spend much of our time as ecologists thinking about the intricate connection among organisms and their environment. But we are also bombarded with the massive threats that things like climate change, biodiversity loss, habitat loss, and pollution have on ecosystems.

Many of us feel a responsibility to do something about it. Yet, much of the time it can feel like our science isn’t getting through. As a result, many leave the career due to burnout, feelings of helplessness, and questioning their role as a scientist. This isn’t surprising: it can be hard to stay upbeat when you see so much bad news and not feel you have the agency to turn things around.

Yes, but how does this all relate to the quote from David Epstein?

As scientists, and more specifically ecologists, we’re often taught to specialise early and become masters of our small domain. I certainly think there is benefit to this and becoming known for something in your field. For instance, I would like to think I have some standing in the field of freshwater community ecology, as that’s the area that I’ve worked in the most. Recognition like this brings many opportunities.

But, I’ve chosen to range widely for reasons I explain below.

Leveraging our unique assets as human beings to bring positive change

I’ve been reading an interesting book called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. This book discusses how the model of doubling down on a specialisation early and racking up thousands of hours of deliberate practice isn’t necessarily the path to success. In fact, for the world’s top performers, early specialisation is the exception, not the rule. Sure, there are the Tiger Woods and Andre Aggasis of the world, but there are a thousand success stories who took circuitous routes for every one of them.

Science is no exception. Sure, there is 100% a need for highly specialised skills in many fields of science. Much of what we do requires deliberate practice to master the key skills, even for those that range widely. But I equally believe there is a need to let our creativity and broad-thinking brains loose. Ranging widely, not only in terms of what we read and do for our hobbies but also in what we pursue in our research, can help to broaden our perspective and, as a result, do better science.

This need comes at a time when the landscape is changing rapidly. Computers are increasingly capable of doing parts of our jobs for us, particularly specialist skills. For instance, I recently signed up for Github Copilot to give it a try. This is an AI-based pair programmer that sits in your IDE (integrated development environment — a piece of software you use to programme/code) like Rstudio or VS Code and suggests new bits of code and solves your coding problems.

Side note, most of ecology is a very quantitative discipline, despite what people’s first impression is (it’s not just cuddling fluffy animals). So we spend most of our time, in my lab at least, statistically analysing complex datasets or dreaming up theoretical mathematical models.

For what it’s worth, this is super helpful — and can speed things up immensely (particularly for someone like me who codes less and less as my career has shifted to being a supervisor). And you do need to be skilled in programming to know what it’s suggesting is correct or not. However, it is also just one more example of how specialist skills like this will become increasingly threatened in the coming decades.

Our greatest contribution as humans is our ability to think broadly, dream big and connect up diverse ideas. The more things shift to big picture strategy, the more humans have to add. At least, that’s relative to computers or AI.

Humans are most useful at big picture ideas. Computers can do the narrow technical stuff.

So, that’s a roundabout way of saying that we need to be thinking big about the wicked societal problems we face like climate change and biodiversity loss in new ways. It’s important to maintain those specialist skills we have but it’s also important to recognise that our special skill as human beings is our ability to think big. Only by thinking creatively, leveraging our unique human skills, will we solve many of our grand challenges.

Thankfully, there is a push towards more multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches to research. I think this is a good thing, but (big caveat time) I also strongly believe we need to continue to support specialist disciplines. A healthy balance between the two is the answer.

In my career, I’ve followed the strategy of being open to new directions and as a result have followed a very winding path. While this may have cost me in some areas, it has opened up many wonderful new opportunities to collaborate with people outside of my core area. This includes exciting new opportunities that align nicely with this newsletter (more soon). And this newsletter is another example of my intent to continue this strategy by 1. sharpening and broadening my thinking in important topics that I might not have otherwise spent much time thinking about, and 2. attempting to reach a much wider community than my usual crew of scientists. In the process, I hope to grow a community from which we can all learn from. Let’s see how that goes!

What do you think? I’d love to hear thoughts.

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