The Knowledge Translator

When I worked as an eLearning designer, I had the privilege of spending time with high-profile management consultants from global firms. One of the things I noticed right away about this group was that they got to play with some cool toys: frameworks, diagrams, and methodologies with catchy acronyms.

I felt like a kid let loose in the aisles of Toys R Us. As a literary scholar, I’d learned to use different theories to interpret texts, but I’d never before seen a theory neatly captured in a sing…

We live in a world where sound bites rule the airwaves and tweeting contests among political candidates have replaced intelligent public debate. In business, the one-pager rules. Strategic plans are now compressed into placemats and funding requests into short pitch decks

At the same time, the huge challenges we face as a planet—and the solutions needed to address them—defy easy simplification. If it were truly possible to boil climate change issues down into an infographic or blog post, we wou…

If you’ve had any experience sharing research findings with people outside the academy, then you know that knowledge mobilization is never about merely conveying knowledge. Nor is it about ensuring knowledge gets understood. Fundamentally, it’s about building relationships.

Often, however, we get so involved in the process of producing easy-to-digest content that we overlook the relationships that need cultivating.

Take the simple example of writing a news release for your organization’s websit…

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…