Last week, I spent two days at a symposium entitled “Governance, Performance & Leadership of Research and Public Organizations“. The meeting gathered professionals from all walks of science and research: economists, psychologists, biologists, epidemiologists, engineers, jurists as well as politicians, university presidents and other leaders of the most respected research organizations in Germany. It was organized by Isabell Welpe, an economist specializing in incentive systems, broadly speaking. She managed to bring some major figures to this meeting, not only from Germany, but notably also John Ioannidis from the USA or Margit Osterloh from Switzerland. The German participants included former DFG president and now Leibniz president Matthias Kleiner (the DFG being the largest funder in Germany and the Leibniz Association consisting of 89 non-university federal research institutes), president of the German Council for Science and the Humanities, Manfred Prenzel, Secretary General of the Max-Planck Society Ludwig Kronthaler, or the president of Munich’s Technical University, Wolfgang Herrmann, only to mention some of them. Essentially, all major research organizations in Germany were represented with at least one of their leading positions, supplemented with expertise from abroad.
All of these people shape the way science will be done in the future either at their universities and institutions, or in Germany or around the world. They are decision-makers with the power to control the work and job situation for tens of thousands of current and future scientists. Hence, they ought to be the most problem-solving oriented, evidence-based individuals we can find. I was shocked to learn that this was an embarrassingly naive assumption.
In my defense, I was not alone in my incredulity, but maybe that only goes to show how insulated scientists are from the political realities. As usual, there were of course gradations between the individuals, but at the same time there seemed to be a discernible grouping in what could be termed the evidence-based camp (scientists and other professionals) and the ideology-based camp (the institutional leaders). With one exception I won’t attribute any of the instances I will recount to any particular individual, as we better focus on the solutions to the more general prohibitive attitude, rather than on a debate about the individuals’ qualifications.
On the scientific side, the meeting brought together a number of thought leaders detailing how different components of the scientific community perform. For instance, we learned that peer-review is quite capable of weeding out obviously weak research proposals, but in establishing a ranking order among the non-flawed proposals, it is rarely better than chance. We learned that gender and institution biases are rampant in reviewers and that many rankings are devoid of any empirical basis. Essentially, neither peer-review nor metrics perform at the level we expect from them. It became clear that we need to find solutions to the lock-in effect, the Matthew effect and the performance paradox and to some extent what some potential solutions may be. Reassuringly, different people from different fields using data from different disciplines arrived at quite similar conclusions. The emerging picture was clear: we have quite a good empirical grasp of which approaches are and in particular which are not working. Importantly, as a community we have plenty of reasonable and realistic ideas of how to remedy the non-working components. However, whenever a particular piece of evidence was presented, one of the science leaders got up and proclaimed “In my experience, this does not happen” or “I cannot see this bias”, or “I have overseen a good 600 grant reviews in my career and these reviews worked just fine”. Looking back, an all too common scheme of this meeting for me was one of scientists presenting data and evidence, only to be countered by a prominent ex-scientist with a “I disagree without evidence”. It appeared quite obvious that we do not seem to suffer from a lack of insight, but rather from a lack of implementation.
Perhaps the most egregious and hence illustrative example was the behavior of the longest serving university president in Germany, Wolfgang Herrmann, during the final panel discussion (see #gplr on Twitter for pictures and live comments). This will be the one exception to the rule of not mentioning individuals. Herrmann was the first to talk and literally his first sentence was to emphasize that the most important objective for a university must be to get rid of the mediocre, incompetent and ignorant staff. He obviously did not include himself in that group, but made clear that he knew how to tell who should be classified as such. When asked which advice he would give university presidents, he replied by saying that they ought to rule autocratically, ideally by using ‘participation’ as a means of appeasing the underlings (he mentioned students and faculty), as most faculty were unfit for democracy anyway. Throughout the panel, Herrmann continually commended the German Excellence Initiative, in particular for a ‘raised international visibility’ (whatever that means), or ‘breaking up old structures’ (no idea). When I confronted him with the cold hard data that the only aspects of universities that showed any advantage from the initiative were their administrations and then asked why that didn’t show that the initiative had, in fact, failed spectacularly, his reply was: “I don’t think I need to answer that question”. In essence, this reply in particular and the repeated evidence-resistant attitude in general dismissed the entire symposium as a futile exercise of the ‘reality-based community‘, while the big leaders were out there creating the reality for the underlings to evaluate, study and measure.
Such behaviors are not surprising when we hear them from politicians, but from (ex-)scientists? At the first incidence or two, I still thought I had misheard or misunderstood – after all, there was little discernible reaction from the audience. Later I found out that not only I was shocked. After the conference, some attendees discussed several questions: Can years of leading a scientific institution really make you so completely impervious to evidence? Do such positions of power necessarily wipe out all scientific thinking, or wasn’t all that much of it there to begin with? Do we select for evidence-resistant science leaders or is being/becoming evidence-resistant in some way a prerequisite for striving for such a position? What if these ex-scientists have always had this nonchalant attitude towards data? Should we scrutinize their old work more closely for questionable research practices?
While for me personally such behavior would clearly and unambiguously disqualify the individual from any leading position, relieving these individuals from their responsibilities is probably not the best solution. Judging from the meeting last week, there are simply too many of them. Instead, it emerged from an informal discussion after the end of the symposium, that a more promising approach may be a different meeting format: one where the leaders aren’t propped up for target practice, but included in a cooperative format, where admitting that some things are in need of improvement does not lead to any loss of face. Clearly, the evidence and the data need to instruct policy. If decision-makers will be ignoring the outcomes of empirical research on the way we do science, we might as well drop all efforts to collect the evidence.
Apparently, this was the first such conference on a national level in Germany. If we can’t find a way for the data presented there to have a tangible consequence on science policy, it may well have been the last. Is this a phenomenon people observe in other countries as well, and if so, how are they trying to solve it?
The “Titanic-Minds” of Leadership.
It is all about the ego and that of being in control.
Without control you will not have the power to enforce your own self-centred ideas upon others.
Sadly so it is then also those individuals having acquired titanic-mind status that are insecure in their own thoughts now only capable of hiding behind the dominance of others hiding under a veil of their own insecurities and shortfalls.
True leadership can only be obtained through WISDOM of which academic achievements plays only an elementary role in true leadership.
Without wisdom all the knowledge in the world becomes meaningless being nothing more than an obstacle in the advancement of intelligence.
There certainly is a huge difference between wisdom, knowledge and intelligence.
Only through the separation of knowledge and intelligence from the ego can it become the breeding ground for wisdom.
The ego is like an inflated balloon “Titanic-Mind” and the bigger the ego the more likely that it will one day end up at the bottom of the ocean having accomplished nothing.
Most of the leaders that have come and gone were only there for the moment having left behind nothing more than wasted time for humanity.
True wisdom can and will only be achieved by letting go of the ego now realizing that all of your academic achievements are worth less than nothing if not nurtured by the unprejudiced thoughts of others.
We can certainly share knowledge amongst ourselves but it is only through intelligence in knowing what to do with this newly acquired knowledge that we can eventually gain wisdom.
Unfortunately the majority of leaders in government and institutions and everywhere else in the world are nothing more than self-inflated-self-centered-individuals with their own agendas of which time never fails to burst their bubbles becoming the laughing stock of future generations.
If we had to write a book about all those “Titanic-Minds” that have failed humanity through sheer dominance then it would become a formidable task with new names being added on a daily basis.
The only question that remains is this;
Will you one day have your name written in this book?
Should we require such science leaders maintain competitive scientific activities? This might keep part of a foot at least in the reality of research. If we quickly forget the trials and tribulations of keeping an active research program going through thick and thin once relieved of the need, perhaps that is the problem. And please don’t tell me that administration is a full time job that precludes research activities. It is only if you allow it to be.
I think this is a great idea, but I worry about the administrational overhead for enforcing such rules and the students who may have to work with a reluctant ‘advisor’. How could one implement your idea without running such risks?
perhaps a two level system — the bulk of the admin load being carried out by dedicated admininstrators BUT these ultimately report to a Board of Governors which is entirely active scientists. The BoG sets the major items of the agenda and has sole decision making power — this would essentially be like the separation of roles between government advisors and politicians. I know, I live in dreams…but a dream where scientific organisations exist to do science rather than serve administrators seems one worth keeping!