In recent years, many countries have invested in organisations designed to bridge the gap between research and policy/practice. The UK alone currently has nine What Works Centres (WWCs), 30 Health Determinants Research Collaborations (HDRCs), four Local Policy Innovations Partnerships (LPiPs), and dozens of policy and practice engagement teams in universities, businesses and charities.
Leadership is key to these organisations’ effectiveness. But we know little about their leaders – where they come from, what they do, and what skills they need. This matters because, without this understanding we cannot draw on their experience to develop the next generation of leaders.
In Spring 2024, I conducted in-depth interviews with the CEOs/directors of 12 high-profile UK evidence intermediary organisations (EIOs) - eight What Works Centres, three regional evidence centres, and one national policy observatory. (HDRCs and LPiPs were not yet fully operational so it didn’t make sense to include them).
These leaders’ accounts of their roles provide fascinating insights into what it takes to overcome the formidable barriers which existing research tells us stand in the way of evidence-informed policy and practice.
The 12 leaders were all highly motivated and convinced that rigorous evidence can help improve policy decisions and public service delivery. Their professional backgrounds were varied, and they led very different organisations. But they had strikingly similar views of the skillsets and mindsets they needed to do their jobs.
They spoke of the need to be highly attuned to policy makers’ and practitioners’ evidence needs; credible to academic experts; good strategists; effective communicators; competent people managers; and accomplished fund raisers.
They also believed it was important to be able to cope with ambiguity; sufficiently agile to respond to fast-moving political and policy contexts; and resilient enough to persevere when decision-takers choose to ignore the evidence.
This is a unique blend of skills, reflecting a need to span the boundaries between academia and government which work to very different timescales and priorities, and have different ideas about what constitutes good evidence.
Leaders of EIOs must be highly attuned to political/policy priorities and constraints, while understanding the constraints on academics – building and sustaining trust on both ‘sides’. They need to secure funding; work well with advisory/oversight boards; and be able to recruit, lead and develop multi-disciplinary teams comprising staff from varied research, policy, practice and operational backgrounds.
But there are currently few incentives or formal mechanisms to encourage such skills development and none of the leaders I interviewed had received any formal training for the role. Regardless of their previous background or experience, nearly all reported feeling underprepared and isolated. They had ‘learned on the job’, often through making mistakes, and they would have valued peer support and opportunities to learn from other EOI leaders.
As Jonathan Breckon and his colleagues recently concluded, the role of knowledge mobilisers remains ‘poorly understood and largely invisible’ and Matt Flinders points out that academic training doesn’t equip individuals for the role. There are no established career paths, formal networks, training programmes or professional bodies connecting EIO leaders to each other. Nor is their training to develop their successors.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can do a lot better:
Government, research funders and universities have invested heavily in EIOs. To maximise the return on this funding they need to ensure that we develop leaders with the boundary spanning skills needed to work across the research-policy/practice divide to encourage better use of evidence.
Image credit: Photo by Mathias Jensen on Unsplash
Steve Martin is Emeritus Professor of Public Policy at Cardiff University and former Director of the Wales Centre for Public Policy.
This blog is based on an open-access article published in Evidence & Policy. You can read the article here and a related blog post here.
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