Reversing Academic Power Structures to Solve Wicked Problems in Tiny Steps
The number of progressive future-looking think tanks is growing. Here in Oxford we have The Future of Humanity Institute, the Skoll Centre, the Uehiro Centre, and close ties with the Centre for Effective Altruism just to name a few. This growth is a good indicator of both a widespread desire to shape a better future for all and a recognition that for humanity to thrive, possibly even survive, through the 21st century we need, as a matter of urgency, to tackle long-term, wide-horizon “wicked” problems, that is to say problems that are intractable from so many directions that they appear insoluble. Obvious examples are climate change, automation, AI security, food security, barriers to mobility, and pandemic threats.
The more organizations we have looking at these problems the better.
But too many of these institutes look, structurally, like regular think tanks and academic units. That is to say, they bring together expertise that has been built within a narrow curricular framework, and people whose profile follows a clearly established norm to work on problems for which their own experience can give only a partial perspective, and then disseminate their conclusions outwards.
This is a misjudged approach to many issues, but when it comes to the wicked problems we face in the coming century, it is critically flawed for a very simple reason. The more intractable a problem appears, the wider the range of continual, iterative A/B experimentation is needed to attempt to solve parts of it. A greater quantity of hypotheses elaborated and tested from inside the same perspective will only ever make limited progress — a problem that appears intractable from a perspective at the start will likewise remain intractable when we only tackle it using methods within that perspective.
Instead, what we need is to empower approaches from different perspectives. Think tanks and institutes if they get it right can act as the myelin for effecting successful changes in response to wicked problems. They can do this by enabling and empowering not in a top-down way, providing intellectual and financial resources to projects selected from within an existing perspective but by doing so in a radical way.
What I want to propose, which would in itself constitute an invaluable A/B test, is a set of simple, affordable steps, each of which could be undertaken separately and straightforwardly.
- Change the way you recruit. Academic recruitment as it stands perpetuates a narrow and inaccessible Academy — there are many reasons why someone’s CV might not be what you expect of a person capable of doing brilliant research — from the lack of a doctorate to long periods outside academia, to research questions that do not fall neatly into disciplinary categories. We need to be able to recruit anyone who has something incredible to contribute. And that means
- Base academic culture on universal open access.
- Provide tools but fully enable their local adoption. Make embedding and translation by local communities into local communities a key part of disseminating any methodological tool.
- Turn conferences upside down. Ask those whose world you want to change to decide upon panel topics, to be involved in the assessment of abstracts, and to choose keynotes. Smooth the platform for those within marginalised communities to address your event as keynote alongside “recognised” academics.
- Rethink unhelpful paradigms of the kind of project you would expect from someone outside your perception of the academic mainstream. You may think of projects to provide better literacy or digital skills in small communities, but make sure you are just as willing to accept proposals that have wide-ranging scope and have a far-reaching theoretical base.
- Reverse the way white papers and research proposals are authored so that the communities affected by the problems being addressed have authorial input throughout.
- Make your grants open to the best proposals from any source, and make sure that all people from all sources are empowered to submit proposals. And ensure that assessment of proposals is undertaken by as diverse a body as possible.
- When a small, achievable project may contribute to tackling a large wicked problem, radically reconsider what the “success” of such a project might look like.
- Ensure the words that hit the desks of policy makers come from a complete range of voices, not just as listed participants or consultants but as authors.
