The topic today is flexibility and how bureaucracy kills it.
I was reflecting this week about the good old times. I know, I know . . .
I was thinking about a discussion I had with the CEO of a very large pharmaceutical company. Years ago, I met this CEO and it turned out that we had overlapping interests. He was very interested in medication adherence—how often people take their medication as prescribed. I was interested in this question as well. It has to do with motivation and habits and what happens when people fall off the wagon and so on. And I proposed that he fund a research project so we could work on this question. He asked how much it would cost. I said, $500,000 a year. And he asked what exactly we would do? I told him I didn’t know exactly but we would dedicate some manpower and explore different aspects to justify the cost.
A few days later, I got a call from his assistant letting me know that he—let’s call him B—didn’t feel comfortable committing to a contract for $500,000 a year without knowing what the exact deliverables would be. I thought about it for a couple of seconds. And I said, “Would you tell B for me that if he doesn’t think that research should be flexible, and if he’s not willing to risk $500,000 a year on flexible research, then I don’t think he should be the CEO of this large company.” I’m sure you’re guessing how the story ends. We got the contract. We worked with them for quite a while. We produced lots of valuable research. But the point was not just my audacity (which I’m still proud of) but rather that flexibility is incredibly important.
Let’s say you get into a new topic. You don’t know exactly where it will go. But while creating the contract you add strict deliverables. What happens if, along the way, you find out that there could have been something better to do? What happened to first exploring? I think that the lack of trust and the lack of flexibility are basically killers of productivity. They look like they’re the right thing to do. But if you know exactly what you’re going to do, is there really a real point in doing it? I mean, there is some, but not as much. The whole point of doing research is to explore what we don’t know to try to understand something.
Anyway, I was lamenting. I was thinking about the time that we had flexible research projects where there was trust and flexibility between us and our sponsors. Everybody gained more when they existed. These days, this is no longer a possibility. These days, nobody has the flexibility. Everybody wants an exact process. How many hours? What’s the deliverables? When will they be delivered?
What is the outcome? The outcome is less exciting research, more predictable processes, and everybody loses. The research sponsors lose, the university loses, the students who are part of the research lose—all because we love bureaucracy.
Let’s think about how we can reintroduce flexibility into the process.
