Impact broke the academy. Only a culture change can fix it

I will be looking at this week’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) results from a unique vantage point.

As well as having experienced first-hand the weight of responsibility and pressure to achieve impact success before the submission date, I also trained or advised every Russell Group university – and the majority of other institutions – over the last REF period. And I saw the underbelly of the impact agenda, as colleagues scrambled to construct, evidence and polish their own narratives.

For every success story that we hear on results day, there will be another untold story of an impact that went wrong. Some academics attempted to speed up, push through or skip vital testing stages in an attempt to get results before the REF deadline. Others claimed impacts that wouldn't have happened without the help of external organisations or junior colleagues who weren’t given credit because there wasn’t enough room in the allotted five pages. Still others requested or drafted testimonials from stakeholders who didn’t recognise the impacts they were being asked to corroborate and sometimes couldn’t even remember the researchers.

I have experienced these impact bounty hunters first-hand, too, as research lead for an international conservation charity. Despite our having very limited resources, researchers regularly expect us to write last-minute letters of support for proposals we don't have time to review properly. It is assumed that we will contribute to academics’ projects without charging for our time, working alongside a researcher who is paid significant overheads on top of a salary that could easily be greater than the combined salaries of our entire team. Sometimes we respond to invitations for workshops we are unlikely to benefit from just so we are there to help put out the fire when researchers inflame conflicts in our networks.

Such experiences have contributed to the growing erosion of trust between researchers and society. How did it get like this? How did we lose our way? The answer is simple: we took our eyes off our original purpose to focus on the prize that impact now is.

It is not a coincidence that the impact agenda has led to so many negative unintended consequences in the UK. Nowhere else has impact been so directly linked to funding, and hence to so many extrinsic incentives, from rankings to promotions. This might have been necessary to get people to engage in the early days, but these incentives are breeding not only mistrust but also apathy and unrest.

In a 2020 Wellcome Trust survey of more than 4,000 UK researchers, 75 per cent said their creativity was being "stifled" by the impact agenda. Over half felt pressured to meet REF targets. Research culture is broken, and the impact agenda is part of what broke it.

So how can we fix it? Some have advocated refusing to submit to demands for impact case studies. I have argued that we need to weaken the link between funding and impact by creating a new system based on universal basic income for researchers. But instead of starting with the system, which tends to lead to one-size-fits-all solutions, we should instead focus on creating a healthy research culture.

Cultures are co-created by people through interaction with others who share compatible values and aspirations; they can't be imposed from the top down. And that means that a healthy culture will always be composed of multiple subcultures, constantly evolving with the ebb and flow of new researchers and collaborations.

The role of the institution in this more inclusive, bottom-up model of culture change is to facilitate individuals and teams to pursue the work they find most meaningful. Not everyone has to generate impact, and not every subculture will have impact as a focus. However, impact will be one of many emergent properties of a system that supports ethical, robust and action-oriented research, promotes engagement with those who might benefit from research, and enables researchers to focus regularly on their core purpose (whatever that may be).

The regularity and timing of work on these priorities is more important than the overall amount of time spent, so I am not advocating for an individualistic culture in which we abandon our responsibilities and team members. By designing spaces to enable creative collisions with people from industry, policy and the like, as well as with other researchers, it may be possible to help researchers find deeper purposes for their work, as they discover new ways to benefit society.

You might feel broken by the system you work in, but it is possible to take small steps to create a culture you can belong in. The hope must be that unexpected new ways of working emerge and spread from person to person and group to group. The emergence of a diverse, authentic and values-driven culture will inspire the creative thought that the world needs so badly right now.

Mark Reed is professor of rural entrepreneurship and director of the Thriving Natural Capital Challenge Centre at SRUC. He is CEO of Fast Track Impact, which offers health resilience training and coaching. His latest book, Impact Culture, is published by Fast Track Impact. Most of it is available open access, with free resources and a year’s worth of free training and events, at www.fasttrackimpact.com/impactculture.