Why we blog

What is the most exciting part of a conference? Is it the rare outstanding PowerPoint presentation, the articulate speaker, the new information and insights? No. It’s the coffee breaks. And don’t tell me you haven’t said it yourself.

It’s during the coffee breaks, over lunch, and dinner and drinks at day’s end where we open the windows of our mind to the breeze of new ideas. It’s here we table our ideas for new research projects, speculate and debate with colleagues. It’s where we revel in the exploration of new territory and where we get recharged.

Without that recharge, our research would become monotonous and stale. Our research programs would stagnate and there would be little innovation. That word ‘innovate’ in several forms occurs in the WLE proposal 47 times.  And where do innovative ideas come from? Coffee breaks or situations that foster a similar unconstrained style of thinking. It’s the style of thinking we want in our blog posts.

A blog is a coffee break on a website

And what is a blog? We see “BLOG” on the navigation bar of most websites. Unfortunately, it’s one of those terms we hear and see a thousand times and yet most people would find difficult to define. Let me define it here as a coffee break on a website. It’s a place where you get to present your new and perhaps not fully formed ideas, your opinions, your perspective. It’s not quite like a real coffee break brainstorming session because you are alone and you are writing, but the sense of exploration is similar.

Photo: Alexander Baxevonis on Flickr

 

You have to write a blog post, which many people consider a constraint. It takes time and it’s hard work. But writing is a way of thinking, a tool  for thinking. The act of formulating your words on paper or screen forces you to bring the idea into sharper focus, forces you to ‘think through’ the idea. There has to be a space for this, otherwise there can be no innovation. Innovation is not something we can schedule. We cannot say, “in week 12 we will have a workshop and generate five new innovative ideas to halt terrestrial
ecosystem
degradation.”

I am sure you have heard the expression, “old wine in new skins”. The ‘skin’ refers to ‘wineskin’, a leather vessel for containing liquids. If you pour your old wine into a new container, nothing has really changed.

It has never been publically voiced, but there is a risk that any one of the CRPs could be old wine in a new skin. We are all creatures of habit. We tend to apply what worked for us in the past to new situations. Bundling a collection of research projects under a new label doesn’t guarantee that we are doing anything new or different.

A place for new thinking

And yet that is the promise we have made. The word ‘new’ appears 189 times in the WLE proposal. New research, new approaches, new partnerships, new demands, new challenges. That’s a lot of new. The one ‘new’ I cannot find is ‘new thinking’. It’s there between the lines but never appears in print.

That’s what a blog is for: a place for new thinking. Unlike much of what we write, you don’t have to pass it around for review and comment before you post. No one meddles with it and tells you to use this word and not that word or say this and don’t say that. Say what you think. If people don’t agree, they comment.

People keep saying we cannot continue with “business as usual”. Let’s apply that to our blog. Let’s not make the blog yet another channel for the usual corporate propaganda about how wonderful and important and relevant everything is. Let’s make it a coffee break. See you there.

Want to try blogging but not sure how to get started?

Contact Terry Clayton at clayton@redplough.com Terry is available from now until the end of October to discuss ideas and offer editorial support if needed. You can also read the Agriculture and Ecosystems Blog Guidelines for ideas on the kinds of articles we are looking for.

If you have an article to post, send it to:

Abby Waldorf              A.Waldorf@cgiar.org

Martina Mascarenhas             M.Mascarenhas@cgiar.org

Upcoming blog posts from Terry Clayton

Are you ready for the nexus?

‘What does ‘nexus’ mean exactly and does the use of the term advance our thinking any? A closer look reveals that “the nexus” may be a revival of systems thinking.

How do we break the law?

One of the major impediments we face in our efforts to make research useful is the law of declining marginal utility. Poor farming households tend to be widely scattered in remote areas poorly served by roads and markets. It takes a huge amount of effort to reach them through something as simple as government extensions services. The further afield we go, the more it costs to reach individual households. Can we achieve the kind of large scale impact we talk about without addressing this problem? What tools might we use to reach more people without driving up the cost? Mobile phones show some promise but they still don’t reach everywhere. And have we forgotten radio?

If we knew the answers before we started it wouldn’t be research.

Researchers are under tremendous pressure to deliver “uptake” and “impact”. We constantly hear how our research must lead to action. Is this a realistic expectation? Must ALL research lead to action? Given the nature of  research (i.e. we don’t know what we are going to find), is that possible? How do we strike a balance between doing good research and having impact?

Technology, progress and the poverty mindset. Development has been criticized for its focus on technological fixes. One of the things we want to do in the WLE program is bring people into the picture. Lots of  research devotes some time to exploring things like “reasons for non-adoption”. The results are usually quite similar (lack of access to credit, no extension, cost of inputs…). Does this get to the heart of the matter? Is there a “mindset of poverty” that holds people back (yes there is). What are the characteristics of such a mindset and is it something we need to address? (I draw on work done by the MIT Poverty Lab, the success of faith-based organizations and other sources to argue there is a poverty mindset and  offer some suggestions for how WLE could address it).

The simplicity of complex systems. Some systems are too complex to accurately predict future outcomes, but nevertheless exhibit underlying patterns that can help us cope in an increasingly complex world. Sound familiar? Sound like the WLE program? The conventional approach to science is to study a system by breaking it into small pieces until the pieces can be understood. But intuitively, we know the way the parts interact is critical to how the whole system works. This is what complexity theory address. Complexity theory has proven to be a useful tool across an enormous range of topics including traffic flows, earthquakes, the stock market, Jupiter's red spot, group dynamics, airline networks, the spread of viruses, the internet and urban planning. Let’s add development.

What do I do with gender?

I go from being totally indifferent to the whole gender issue to ranting on my soapbox. There is a conspiracy of silence about gender. “I learned a long time ago to keep my mouth shut when people talk about gender,” said one person who wishes to remain anonymous. That can’t be right. We need to rethink gender so we can get beyond mere counting (men do this 60%, women do that 40%). We need to pose new questions about gender, more exciting questions, and we need to start including men in the gender discussion. Most researchers ignore gender because they don’t see how it is relevant to their work. How do we make it so?