The Knowledge Translator

It's a noisy world out there. Whatever target audience you're trying to attract to your research, you can assume they're being bombarded by an onslaught of information competing for their attention.

This unfortunate reality is true for policymakers, investors, funders, practitioners, community members, patients, clients, customers, and even colleagues from other academic disciplines.

A new client, an academic establishing a private coaching practice, recently reminded me of how tough it is in …

To borrow a theme from the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope, a little Canva is a dangerous thing.¹

Canva and other web-based applications provide small businesses with affordable tools that are easy to manipulate. But ease of use doesn’t guarantee quality of results. It wasn’t the chisel or the paintbrush that enabled Michelangelo to carve his Slaves or paint the Sistine Chapel. It was his art.

“Art” has become a rather old-fashioned word these days, relegated to museums and galleries co…

The transition from academic writing to business writing can feel a bit like leaving the highway to go off-roading.

In the academy, the communication path is paved with clear expectations. The goal is usually to inform, explain, or teach. That means, the focus is on the subject matter, and the approach is to explore the subject systematically and thoroughly.

In the business world, however, the road to successfully communicating your ideas tends to be rockier. When you're writing for an industr…

My dad was a pilot, which meant he was always watching the sky with a pilot’s long-range vision. On family road trips, he could see sights his passengers would never have glimpsed without help.

“Did you see that hawk just circle above those trees? It was right over there.”

“Is that a falcon or a crow?…. Oh, it’s gone now.”

“There’s an eagle… Whoops, you missed it. Again”

Visionary leaders have that same gift of farsightedness. And, like my Dad, they can have trouble getting others to see wha…

Reviewing applications to a program that supports applied research, commercialization, or startup acceleration is serious business. Organizations that manage funding programs go to great lengths to make the vetting process as impartial as possible.

At the same time, there’s no way to completely remove subjectivity from the review process. No matter how precise your evaluation criteria, no matter how much anti-bias training the reviewers take, individual readers will still differ in their rating…

Blogging, when you commit to doing it steadily, can feel like a blessing or a burden. You can look forward to blog writing as a time to extend the reach of your research in creative ways. Or you can anticipate it with dread.

What if time spent blogging didn't have to feel like a chore? What if you could create more posts in less time and get more enjoyment from the process, knowing your efforts were amplifying the potential of your research to transform lives?

The blogosphere suggests that the…

It's not just in fairy tales that gifts can come with curses. Like Midas with his golden touch – who ends up turning his daughter into a metallic statue – leading researchers can possess great strengths that come with hidden dangers. One of those strengths, believe it or not, is their capacity for envisioning. 

That’s right: your ability to see a blazing path through the conventional to a breakthrough approach may be a liability if you cannot communicate your vision well. Leaders who are true v…

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we witnessed an appalling demonstration of what happens when a non-expert makes a policy decision without understanding or respecting expert opinion. Donald Trump’s arrogance hit a dangerously new high when he stood on the White House Balcony, fresh out of hospital and still infected with COVID-19 and ripped his mask off in front of the press.

In a perfect world, the people holding power would make decisions based on sound advice from well-informed, w…

When I was young and naive, I foolishly thought that a career in academia would be the ideal place for someone who disliked conflict. My plan was to tuck myself away in the library for most of my days, curl up with my stack of books, and crank out lectures and articles. What could be more tranquil than a working life spent reading, writing, and teaching?

Boy, did I get that scenario wrong. Not only does teaching late adolescents require high-level conflict negotiation skills, but scholarship it…

How do you visualize your writing time in your schedule? Do you see it as fixed or flexible, optional or mandatory? 

I have a tendency to see mine as if it were endlessly stretchable within a fixed 24-hour period. Seeing time like this is a challenge I’ve struggled with my entire life, and I have a shelf of time management books to prove it.

In my mind, time functions as some kind of innovative material, a substance so elastic that you can use it to create a container with infinite capacity. N…