Tag: learning

Thought Leadership for Knowledge Mobilization

We are inundated with mis- and dis-information, and this is why human-written, research-based thought leadership is crucial.

Thought leadership from trusted experts helps us all make sense of how research can be beneficial.  Data don’t speak for themselves.  We need help understanding, interpreting, and figuring out what to do with it.

Thought leadership is about situating yourself as that trusted expert.  In the current public trust recession, we need leaders to demonstrate they’ve got our backs by helping us discern how insights might be applied towards a better world and future.  As such a leader, engaging in broader conversations in your field contributes to decision-making, partnership development, and public thought.

How do you “do” thought leadership?

Thought leadership requires different skills and aims from writing up research findings.

I recommend starting with two intentions:

1) be focused (you can’t do or share everything all at once!), and

2) build trust based on authentic relationships, communication, and consistency.

Be Focused

Start by identifying one exciting or even controversial aspect of your research.  Consider what might be most intriguing, counter-intuitive, insightful.  What might challenge conventional thinking, or help your audience see the issue in a new way?  Build your narrative around this.

To help keep your narrative focused, consider what is most essential to share about this particular finding or aspect of your research and stick to that.  As researchers and scholars we want to dive into the nuances, but this can sometimes overwhelm your audience. Focus on clear, accessible, concise language, structured through story to reveal actionable insights.  Linking to peer-reviewed publications can help readers feel confident about the solid foundation your thought leadership is grounded in.

For example, in my blog post about habits, I wanted to encourage thinking that our world is made up of things we each do as ‘collective habits.’  I wanted to challenge the idea that habits are exclusively a personal practice. To put the ideas into action, I drew on a couple of examples to highlight why changing habits should not only be about making your own life better, but to make our world safer and prosperous for everyone.  As an avenue for thought leadership, the ideas in this blog post weren’t just for their own sake, but so they could be applied.

As another example, you can look to this very blog post – the one you are reading right now! I have introduced my take on thought leadership and why it’s important, and have also offered ways for you to apply those ideas.

Build Trust

Trust develops when relationships are built and confirmed by experience over time.  

As you embark on developing trust with your audience and community, engaging in clear, sound thought leadership consistently is imperative.  This doesn’t necessarily mean daily social media posts (although it could be, if that’s your jam!).  Instead focus on building a regular, sustainable practice of publicly sharing and responding to ideas. This helps your audience and community trust that you are committed to your relationship with them.  You can think about what might be sustainable for you, including getting outside support.

Thought leadership can have an immediate impact, but it is also a long game.  In the same way that your research is part of a broader scientific landscape, thought leadership also takes place in broader community, policy, and business conversations.  In this way, you are listening and responding to points of tension, identified needs, and your audience’s queries.

You can also think about how you might use different platforms to engage in those conversations – each smaller piece of content that you share (a blog or a LinkedIn post, a podcast interview, etc.) can build on and link back to previous work.  Your audience will have a myriad of ways to engage with your research and ideas.

How and where to start writing

A client once shared with me that when she thinks about writing something new she feels dread. (yes, DREAD!)

As a seasoned professional, internationally renowned with decades of experience under her belt, she uses writing as a regular part of her work – grant writing, project proposals, website copy, among so many other things.  And yet, she dreaded the idea of starting a writing project.

“How do I start?” she asked, “Actually, where do I start??”

If you have similar feelings of dread, fear not!  

While certainly not the only way to start to write, here is my preferred method of starting a non-fiction project (including academic, or any research-based writing, as well as more complex professional writing): 

Start in the middle and work your way out.  

If this sounds like chaos, it’s really not.  Here me out.

Let’s say you’ve made good headway into the first stage of your process – you’ve done some research or exploratory work, and you have a sense of what you need to include. (If you’re interested to know more about the three stages of writing, you can access a pdf of my Writing Roadmap here – full disclosure, you’ll also be signing up for my newsletter).

But now the time has come to actually put metaphorical pen to paper (or, start stage two – writing itself).  But where to begin?  You have all these ideas!?!  Where and how to begin to organize them!?!

Overwhelming, right?  My advice?  

Pick your most resonant idea, and write it down.

Don’t worry if that first idea is the “best” idea, or the clearest idea, or even if it’s terrible.  Don’t worry about your main argument, or how you will wrap up with a conclusion.  Just get at least one idea down on the page.  Now you have something to work with.  Then, drawing from your research and exploratory stage, you can then put down other ideas around that first idea.   

Writing is an analytic and creative process.  There is uncertainty about what the specific and final outcome will be.  Given this, sometimes the important thing is to put down the ideas you are most certain about, even if you are not very certain. 

It can be powerful to start to see your ideas in front of you, because then you can start to move them around. You start to almost literally “see” them differently, and thus understand them differently.  As you critically assess the ideas and words, you will start to see more clearly how they’re related, including which ideas are most relevant and which are extraneous.  You can add or remove language to highlight the relationships.  

The structure of the writing project forms as you analyse the ideas and their relationships.  You will start to make decisions about what ideas should introduce or follow others to help your reader follow.  As the structure forms, you will also start to comprehend where the holes are – and you can fill these in.  For ideas that are still early or not yet fully formed, adding a placeholder statement like “Add paragraph here about the ways creativity is embodied” (or whatever) will trigger your memory when you return to that idea/paragraph at a later time.  

Again, the idea is to get something down, and move through a process of linking ideas by expanding and removing language, working towards structure and clarity for your reader.

To sum up

It’s true that sometimes the “just leap blindly” approach can work when you feel that you are avoiding writing – but I think that’s rare and it’s not what I’m advocating for here.  I think some planning and preparing for your writing can help you feel less overwhelmed (I’ll flag my Writing Roadmap again, which can help with planning).  

As I mentioned earlier, writing is an analytic and creative process; but it is also iterative.  It is not always linear (in fact, I have rarely found it linear).  If you do become overwhelmed or confused during the process, there is nothing stopping you from taking a step back. In fact, I would encourage it.  The overwhelm and the confusion can feel frustrating, but it is totally normal.  Don’t despair!  And don’t give up.

Sometimes ‘less is more’ when designing a good presentation

I was chatting with a former student recently about giving a guest lecture.  As a new grad student, he was in the throes of preparing to give his first and was asking for advice (so exciting!).  

My big overarching message to him:

Less is more.

For reals.  

I see a whole lotta “more is more” out there in the world, and let me tell you, it really isn’t.  More is often way too much.  Crafting a good presentation isn’t an all you can eat buffet (which can be awesome!).  It’s about helping people learn and engage, which is a different kind of value than being stuffed.

Your audience really needs “just enough” information to understand the big ideas or main skills that you are trying to engage them with.  In a lecture or presentation especially, there is only so much information a person can take in.  So while you might be super excited to share All The Things (“look at all those exciting WEEDS!”), your audience is often just trying to wrap their brains around what you’re even talking about.  This is especially true if you are speaking across disciplines or industries, or to audiences that are newer to your topic.

How do you make sure you are giving “just enough” as part of designing a good presentation?  Here are some ideas:
  • Focus on the change you hope will happen for your audience through your presentation.  What do you hope they’ll take away?  Where do you hope they’ll end up?  Think high level, and keep it high – use descriptions, examples and details ONLY to highlight those higher level aims.
  • Build in pauses.  If you are using PowerPoint, add a 5-10 second pause after each slide change to give people the chance to look before you start speaking again. Sometimes I literally write into my speaking notes “sip water here” so the audience has a moment to breathe and reflect on what I just said.
  • Use different types of strategies to engage your audience rather than just giving information, like a traditional lecture.  Tell a story, ask them a question or two, discuss something visual (chart, image, whatever is relevant!).  This will also slow you down.
  • Write your presentation to an approximate word count – this is especially useful if you are newer to presenting.  How do you figure out the number of words?  Set your timer for one minute, and start reading a page or two of text aloud at a nice, conversational pace (read: chill).  When the timer goes off, count the number of words and write it down (highlight what you’ve read on your screen and use the “word count” feature to help you!).  Repeat this several times with different text, and take the average of the word count totals.  Then multiply your average “spoken words per minute” by the number of minutes you have to present to find the approximate word count for your presentation  (so, if you speak approximately 150 per minute, and you have a 10 minute presentation, you should write a presentation that is approximately 1500 words).
  • Build your presentation for less time than you have been allotted.  You’ve been told you have 45 minutes?  Create a 40 minute lecture.
  • When you have a good draft, practice and time yourself.  Edit accordingly.

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Some Thoughts on Leaving Academia

Possibilities on The Other Side

I get a lot of questions from folks considering leaving academia about what work will be like on The Other Side.  The crux of what they seem to be asking is: “Will I continue to be independent?  Will I have agency?”

When I was contemplating leaving, these were some of my biggest fears too.  

Academia was actually the second stage of my career.  I had worked as an independent artist and creative entrepreneur before turning to academia, so I had an inkling that my skills and contributions from that part of my life would likely be of use.  But my sovereignty as a creative and a thinker was important to me, and imagining what work might be like on the outside left me worried that I would be constrained by the 9-5 life.  

For some perspective, I was burning out in academia.  

You’ve likely heard it before: 

  • Very mixed past academic work experiences that were peppered with great colleagues, a good deal of meaningful research and teaching, and some truly exploitive and demoralizing experiences fueled by gaslighting that overtook the good stuff
  • Unsustainable and fluctuating income and employment (by the time I left I had landed a contract, part-time non-tenure track role, that I bolstered with additional research and writing contracts – these contracts followed a pandemic-induced 18-month period of unemployment after a dismaying postdoc)
  • And a professional future which looked even more bleak given the state of higher education at the time (which is now, in 2025, looking even worse), despite accolades, accomplishments, and very hard work over most of my professional career. 

I won’t dwell on the decision-making other than to say that, practically speaking, I knew I had to leave.  

Yes, it felt existential – cue Billie Eilish “What was I made for?”

Once I was resolved, I had to find my path out.  I reflected not just on what I could do and where I could go, but what work would look like and what that would mean for my life.  In academia, I was used to having a fair amount of agency in terms of how I structured my days, my comings and goings, how I formulated my research and designed my teaching.  Wouldn’t a “regular job” be confining?  I’d just be doing someone else’s bidding, wouldn’t I?  Wouldn’t it be… boring?

Now that I’m on The Other Side, I’ve found that the answer is “kinda,” but also “not really.”  I also now reflect that academia wasn’t nearly as independent as I perceived.

Teaching/work schedules, funding body priorities, institutional values/priorities, organizational expectations about in-person or hybrid work, the particular contract shaping your role – these and more affect the kind of agency you as an individual worker have in your workplace.  This is true in academia as much as it is outside.

At the time of writing this post, I have been working for my current employer for approximately 17 months – my provincial government in Canada.  In my role, I have both some agency and also some limitations (as to be expected).  

Sure, I work approximately 9-5, but I’ll emphasize the word “approximately.”  I have the flexibility to start a little later or earlier depending on what’s going on in my life.  As long as I’m putting in the time, attending all my meetings, available when my manager needs me, and getting the work done, my manager generally doesn’t hover.  My employer requires that I be in the office three days a week, but I can choose which days I’m in or not.  Plus, when my laptop shuts at the end of the day, I don’t touch it until morning.

Of course, not all workplaces on the outside are like this, but this has been my experience so far.

Is the work deeply meaningful and fulfilling all the time?  Nope.  Is it sometimes meaningful, do I work with excellent colleagues, have a steady income, and feel like I’m contributing to something decent in a way that is sustainable for my life?  Very much so.

All of this to say, I am finding my way.  

My current full-time job has offered me an important step to a more sustainable life.  It’s opened up space in different ways: I worked with a therapist to help me process my grief and career transition, I’ve picked up hobbies, I workout 5 days a week, I have started a newsletter which is fueled by my program of research and teaching, specifically about building creative and humanity-centred lives and workplaces, and I’ve started to take on some writing, editing, and coaching clients.  

To return to my colleagues’ initial query, “Will I have agency?”  My answer is Yes.