Ideas

As an scientist, your job is to find new ways of thinking. You are often wrong, and even when you are right your ideas can easily be misunderstood, as new things often are (even by you). In the best of worlds, your ideas will be respectfully and supportively critiqued by friendly colleagues and collaborators. However, just as often your ideas will be attacked, ridiculed, dismissed, and actively discouraged. Some people just feel it is their job to shit all over other people's work, and because your ideas seem like your brain children, such treatment might feel intensely personal. As a result, many academics carefully guard new ideas, keeping them safe, nurturing them in private, building up rebuttals to common attacks, and testing their ideas with preliminary studies. However, there are many situations where you have to make your ideas semi-public before they are mature: seeking ethical approval, funding proposals, PI meetings, research talks, working with or trying to find collaborators, or writing up papers exploring preliminary steps.

Without a framework to understand ideas and the various criticisms to which they will be exposed, you can become overwhelmed and shut down. Sometimes the critics will be right; your ideas are flawed, and a project will fail. After enough failures, you might begin to doubt you have any good ideas at all, which can lead you to question your own worth as a researcher or engineer. Failure is part of the process of course, and all successful researchers fail more often than they succeed mainly by trying many ideas while quickly weeding out the bad ones. In any case, you can avoid obvious pitfalls by thinking about ideas differently.

I believe that the foundation of "idea management" is to understand that, in fact, none of these ideas of which we speak are in fact your ideas. Sure, an idea may have occurred to you and feel like your personal invention. But just like a child, it is its own entity. Your job is mainly to challenge it and possibly to protect and nurture it. An idea is a kind of meme, and therefore subject to the dynamics of evolution. Ideas infect brains, are mutated through transmission, and are slightly modified for new applications. They form symbiotic or parasitic relationships with other ideas, institutions, communities, and people like you. Because so many researchers are working in similar fields, going to the same conferences, socializing, and reading the same papers, it is very easy for an idea to occur to two or more people almost simultaneously. Many times have I thought of something, made a mental note of it or even started working on it, only to see it published a year or two later. The idea will have been picked up by someone I don't even know who happens to have been readier to receive or better prepared to instantiate the idea than I.

Part of your job as a researcher is to attempt to create new ideas from old ones. You can do this by brainstorming, writing, having conversations, or taking long walks. It is very difficult to come up with a truly new idea. You might think you have one, but it turns out that you heard it from someone else and merely restated it in your own words. More often you will work to find, identify and evaluate the new ideas you read about in "future work" sections of papers or hear about in the late night conversations at conferences. Really, when we say "your ideas", we mean those ideas with which you have decided to associate yourself. Some of them may truly be your brain children, but most are probably infesting your brain because you happen to have the expertise to understand them. Some of these ideas may be good, some bad, some premature, and some hopelessly flawed. Somewhat alarmingly, the virility of an idea may be independent of its quality, utility, and even soundness. This is because it is likely human nature, or at least academic nature, to become emotionally invested in ones ideas. Something has to motivate you to follow through on an idea. Seen this way, ideas are really just using you. We researchers are like cells, mindlessly copying DNA, sometimes changing it, and sometimes benefitting from doing so.

Within the evolutionary framework of idea management, you will do well to dissociate yourself from the ideas that infest your brain. You want to see them for what they are and to be able to easily dislodge them if you need to. Within this framework you might also begin to see that your efforts to market ideas to others (in proposals, abstracts, and talks) are just more ideas that become symbiotically associated with the original idea. Thus, your job becomes less personal. A criticism of an idea is not a criticism of you. It is just a criticism of the idea. The focus of your job as a researcher is instead to learn all you can about every idea in your field, the old ones, the new ones, the bad ones, and the good ones. Learn the underlying theories and conceptual frameworks. Read voraciously. Teach and be taught. In this way, your brain becomes ready for ideas. It develops a healthy "immune system" to avoid being infested by flawed ideas. It is ready to understand subtle and immature new ideas. And it is able to nurture ideas by testing them, challenging them, modifying them, and marketing them. Take seriously valid criticisms of your abilities to perform these tasks. But if someone criticizes an idea that you happen to have latched on to, evaluate the criticism. Maybe it isn't something you've thought of. Use it to improve the idea, to improve your explanation of it, or to dismiss it as flawed.

In a future blog entry I plan to attempt to categorize the kinds of criticisms that people will launch at "your" ideas. Understanding these categories, you can dismiss illogical criticisms and take seriously the valid ones. You can even try these criticisms on your ideas yourself in relative safety as you work to refine, justify, and support your positions. Hopefully, you'll develop a healthy relationship with the various ideas that infest your brain.