Fast Track Impact

Take your understanding of publics and stakeholders to a new level with the 3i's approach. This week, Mark introduces a new Fast Track Impact guide based on ongoing research, and explains how the interest, influence and impact of different groups may vary in relation to your research at a surprising number of (increasingly deep) levels. Read the guide and download the template Follow Mark at  @fas...

Many of us encounter individuals with deeply held convictions that run directly counter to all the evidence we know as researchers. It is easy to dismiss conspiracy theorists as crazy or irrelevant, but when we do so, we often inadvertently fuel the root causes of their beliefs. In this episode Mark explains some of the psychology that explains what attracts people to conspiracy theories, and sugg...

When did you last think about what you could do to enhance your career, make things easier for yourself or enable yourself to do new and exciting things you can’t currently do? What can you do to enable those around you to develop their careers? A new Researcher Development Concordat means UK research funders are increasingly going to ask us to make substantive investments in researcher developmen...

Announcing the winner of the Unsung Impacts prize! Listen to inspiring impacts that will never be celebrated by any University, based on the entries to the Fast Track Impact Unsung Impact Prize 2019.  Read the article with images of the unsung impacts . Follow Mark at  @fasttrackimpact  and  @profmarkreed  or on  LinkedIn . If you want more information about training courses, please write to train...

We’re all familiar with the publish or perish mantra, but for many of us it is less about the number of publications we produce, and more about their quality. The need for rigour goes with saying, but we are all striving for that one significant, original contribution that changes our discipline forever. In this episode, Mark uses the creative process of the poet, John Keats, to explore an unusual...

How do you introduce yourself to others, and what do the labels you choose say about you? How do these labels influence how others perceive you? In this episode, Mark explores the many labels we can all choose from when someone asks us “what do you do?”, to show that we all have multiple authentic identities we can project to the world. He then describes three ways of thinking more deeply about th...

Few of us have enough time to do all the things that are expected of us, and when we have more goals than we can achieve we will trade them off against each other in different ways. When we get it wrong, this can lead to important things never being done. But when we get it right, we can increase our focus and motivation and do incredible things with our limited time. This week Mark works through...

Interview with Bec Colvin and Chris Cvitanovic from Australia National University about their work with policy on climate change and first nations communities, in which they describe surprising research about the danger of generating too much trust with policy-makers. Follow Mark at  @fasttrackimpact  and  @profmarkreed  or on  LinkedIn . If you want more information about training courses, please...

This week Mark interviews Yamni Nigam, Professor of Biomedical Sciences, and Clare Lehane, Impact Support Officer, at Swansea University, about how Yamni got her research on maggot therapy for wounds featured in four episodes of the popular UK soap Casualty, watched by 4.5 million people every week. They have commissioned a polling company to do a before and after evaluation of the impact the epis...

This week Mark discusses three ways you can evidence impacts arising from media coverage of your research, with a particular focus on understanding the significance of the benefits, rather than just focusing on measurements of reach. Follow Mark at  @fasttrackimpact  and  @profmarkreed  or on  LinkedIn . If you want more information about training courses, please write to training@fasttrackimpact....

Have you ever thought about starting a podcast? This week, Mark talks to an academic whose podcast gets 1.5 million downloads a year and has spun off into a book series and live show. Together, they follow James’ story from a history academic who doubted anyone would be in his research, and consider the unique benefits of podcasting for impact. The episode finishes with their tips on how you can p...

Rosmarie Katrin Neumann talks about her PhD research on science-policy exchange, explaining how you can increase the likelihood that evidence from your research is taken up by policymakers. Key messages include increasing meeting frequency to once a quarter, if possible face to face, working with professional facilitators and knowledge brokers, and providing opportunities for co-production from th...

This week, Mark continues to reframe failure as something that deeply affirms our values and leads to greater meaning and contentment. In part 2, he thinks about how we step back, withdraw from the fight and change tack, drawing on a philosophy of pessimism. This views challenge as a psychological necessity that makes us feel more fully alive, rather than constantly looking forward to a time when...

This week, Mark explores how you can reframe the failures and rejections that are part of everyday academic life as something that deeply affirms our values and leads to greater meaning and contentment. In part 1, he focuses on how we pick our battles and choose to do things that are high risk but high reward in terms of expressing our values, and how to know when to stop fighting a losing battle...

This week the podcast showcases a personalized​ approach to impact training being pioneered by Universities of Salford and Warwick. Find out how researcher development and impact teams can co-produce training to meet key skills gaps on impact as part of a long-term personalized​ approach to training that enables researchers to build capacity systematically through a three-year plan including targe...

This week Mark interviews Jane Mills and Jasmine Black from CCRI at University of Gloucestershire about how they are using social media to generate research impact. They discuss how to build stories and engagement throughout the research process (including before findings are available), how to break into stakeholder networks on Twitter and how to use case studies to evaluate, communicate and buil...

This week Mark considers how we can harness creativity in the research process to derive original insights, and shows how some of the best new ideas arise from the greatest personal and professional challenges. He outlines five practical methods for finding new depths of creativity by embracing and exploring the places we tend to avoid. Follow Mark at  @fasttrackimpact  and  @profmarkreed  or on ...

In this second part, Mark discusses a range of practical methods for managing power in meetings and workshops, including methods for opening up the discussion and exploring, methods for analyzing​ and methods for closing down discussion and making decisions. Follow Mark at  @fasttrackimpact  and  @profmarkreed  or on  LinkedIn . If you want more information about training courses, please write to...

How to make meetings and workshops with stakeholders and colleagues safe, fun and productive. This week, Mark explains how you can identify and manage power discrepancies in a group to successfully​ manage difficult individuals and situations using subtle cues and three simple techniques. Follow Mark at  @fasttrackimpact  and  @profmarkreed  or on  LinkedIn . If you want more information about tra...

This week, Mark interviews Saskia Walcott, an independent impact expert who has helped researchers generate and evaluate their impact for over 15 years. In this interview, she talks about her research on perceptions of impact and the power of attitudes to shape how we respond to the impact agenda. Read Saskia’s blogs ‘ 3 nuggets of advice ’ and ‘ Research impact: individual interpretation and tran...

This week, Mark gives us an insight into two days of his working week, to illustrate how he puts the lessons from his book,  The Productive Researcher , into practice. He illustrates practically how he prioritizes​ based on his values and builds mental health resilience into his working week. Follow Mark at  @fasttrackimpact  and  @profmarkreed  or on  LinkedIn . If you want more information about...

This week Mark shares three ways to overcome imposter syndrome, based on his own experience battling feelings of inadequacy as a researcher. The first solution is to re-calibrate how you judge yourself to reframe your worth based on your values. The second solution is to re-balance your internal, invisible power with the external, visible power that is given to you by the world. The third solution...

This is the third and final part of Mark's series of episodes on getting research into policy, and the last episode of 2018. Building on the ethics and principles from part 1 and interviews in part 2, in this final episode Mark considers practical ways to both inform and influence policy based on reliable evidence from research. He considers how to take a more relational approach to developing a p...

In the second of this three-part series on getting your research into policy, Mark interviews a researcher who ended up leading a country's negotiations at a UN summit when the chief negotiator he was advising died, the head of climate science for WFF who has the discomfort of being based in the USA and the head of a global initiative to protect peatlands for UN Environment. All three explain ways...

This week, Mark considers the moral premise of responsible policy engagement and discusses four ways that researchers often inadvertently lose the trust of members of the policy community. Using his four-step check-list, you can make sure your policy engagement is on the right side of your morals and engage more confidently in challenging policy contexts. Follow Mark at  @fasttrackimpact  and  @pr...