Peter: So who's doing good knowledge brokering now? Can you point to either individuals or organizations?
Daryl: I don't say this because I work there – I think CCL started its organization with the sole intent…not the sole intent but it's major intent being knowledge mobilization and knowledge exchange. It was created not to fund new evidence production in the area of lifelong learning, it was created to help Canada and Canadians and Canadian institutions and systems solve chronic ongoing challenges in the area of learning and education. And because it was created to help solve these problems as opposed to foster a capacity in the academic world to undertake education research its goal really was right from the very beginning to do knowledge exchange. Is it doing it well? I think it's doing it well – it's still very young. I think the challenge with any organization that comes into an environment with a mandate to make behavioral change, and structural change and systemic change is it needs to develop its credibility – that's going to take time. It needs to develop its networks – that's going to take time. It needs to develop relationships with the key stakeholders on both sides and that's going to take time. And fundamentally it needs to do, what I would call, systematic review or a systemic review. It needs find what evidence already exists and what role it plays.
That takes time and I think CHSRF, Canadian Health Services Research Foundation was doing some…was studying knowledge exchange and knowledge transfer in a very interesting way and was doing some interesting knowledge exchange initiatives around health related evidence and knowledge translation. I personally don't know of anybody who's stellar – any organization right now that's stellar in the area of knowledge exchange but I would love to meet some of them. Peter: So it's emerging and I think we've seen some of that leadership emerging in some of the people that I've interviewed in this podcast series and that's a segue to the next concept I want to talk about, which is leadership. CCL is playing a leadership role and you personally have been identified as a leader in knowledge exchange. Given that this is emerging – given that this is complex – given that people are learning things as they go along, what is good leadership look like in knowledge exchange?
Daryl: Boy that's a tough question. I've thought about it for years actually. I still come at it from the demand side of the equation. Knowledge exchange for knowledge exchange sake to me is almost a waste of time so I'm constantly looking at what the social economic environmental needs are in Canada and how can we meet those needs. Take the fact that Canada is trying right now to develop an agenda or a set of objectives around environment and environmental issues. We need to look around the world for the best evidence. It can't just be a made in Canada solution and it can't just be well I think we're going to try incentives to people to reduce emissions or I think we're going to try using the stick – we're going to try disincentives to people who are abusing and are overly creating emission. It's not a matter of I think we should try this. To me we need to look at the social issues and if I were to be…if I were to say, “what would make…what would entrench knowledge exchange and knowledge mobilization as an ordre du jour or a way of doing business in this country is that it has to be seen as value added by the demand side – by the institutions that are making decisions in complex environments and that need evidence and if I go back again and I won't go back anymore to the old concept of stock brokers and their role - companies need equity and companies see the value of going to individual Canadians and we have an institutional structure in the system through stocks and through shares issuing that facilitates this role of stock brokering. We don't have a similar institutionalized approach within the mainstream decision making world for seeking evidence and I think that would be interesting you know right now it's done informally – politicians; one of their major roles whenever an issue emerges is to go back to their constituents and ask them. Right now when an issue emerges that requires some sort of government intervention or attention, they tend to go…MPs or politicians will go to their constituency. If it's an issue around, at a practice level, they tend to go to their constituencies. That's a natural recourse – teachers will go to other teachers, teachers will go to student bodies - to parent associations, they'll go to the institution's decision making processes – wherever they are. There's not a natural right now – a natural bridge between the challenges in the decision making world with going to this particular audience for solutions. Peter: You just mentioned the concept of value and I think that that's actually really important. In the business world, value is quite easily measured – it's stock value – it's GDP – it tends to be fiscal but when you're talking about environmental, when you're talking about social, when you're talking about education, these are complex, perhaps “softer” issues – it's not as easy to measure value. So how do you know when you're getting real value for knowledge exchange? Daryl: That's another very good question. I think the challenge is the issues are so complex and so non-linear. You can't put a dollar value on most of the issues that we're dealing with in CCL – lifelong learning issues. You can't say in 5 years, we're going to significantly measure a decrease in illiteracy in Canada by X % based on three interventions or twenty-three interventions of knowledge exchange type. So the issues are more complex in that the measuring is difficult and the challenge that we always have is how do you measure outcomes? Right now we're very successful at measuring outputs and that's not bad - I think you need to start with outputs. The challenge with measuring outcomes is you need to identify what outcomes you're trying to achieve before you then launch the initiative because you bias your approaches. Evaluation techniques are as rigorous as research methodologies are and I think the important thing to do is to not try and set yourself up to be the be all and end all.
The challenge for knowledge exchange is we are not going to see illiteracy rates drop. We are not going to see graduation rates change overnight. We will see them long term. So how do you measure a short term intervention, which is usually what a knowledge exchange initiative is – they're projects by and large. You will not be able to measure an immediate outcome from that. I think one of the things we might want to look to in the future, if knowledge exchange and knowledge mobilization is about fostering relationships then maybe what we need to do is stop thinking of the initiatives as initiatives and start thinking about them as long term operating requirements. And so you integrate the cost of knowledge exchange into your ongoing operating budget as opposed to saying, “I've go $50,000 from CCL to do this knowledge exchange project, it's going to take a year and then when I'm done, I'm done” I go and apply for a grant to do something else. If we can stimulate a change in both the evidence production side and the demand side so that they see knowledge exchange as part of their ongoing work that they actually start funding it in an ongoing way, I think then we can start to look at developing longer term outcome measures that are measurable.
Peter: Well you've just pointed to some of the greatest challenges and I think that's a phenomenal challenge. What are some of the rewards from doing this?
Daryl: The rewards are always seen in the initiatives themselves. CCL has funded dozens and dozens of knowledge exchange activities. Prior to CCL I worked at SSHRC and we funded some other ones. It's always in the comments that you get…the anecdotal comments you get from events, or the unsolicited emails you get from people who have engaged in your knowledge exchange initiative that says, “you know, I didn't realize before now X” and that's usually the academic side – “I didn't realize there was such an appetite for the work that we're doing”. On the demand side it's usually, “I didn't realize there was a group of people out there that I can go to that are working on this area and that I could use as almost advisors.” And so it's the informal - I've never in all my years of doing this had anybody come back to me and said, “as a result of that particular knowledge exchange project, we've now seen a significant increase in graduation rates for X”. That's not happened but I have had people develop those relationships and if we say that the bulk of what we're trying to do with knowledge exchange is foster ongoing relationships – when you hear people say, “yes I've walked away – I've come away with a commitment to a relationship - I've come away with new contacts that are useful to me outside of what I would normally have done.” Because that's the key – academics get together with academics all the time. Policy makers get together with other policy makers all the time. What we're trying to do is build relationships across those silos. When I hear somebody say to me “I've developed these relationships in a silo that I never would have otherwise engaged in and that's what I found valuable”. They don't use that language but that's what I hear them saying. Peter: Ten years – what will this look like?
Daryl: Ten years, unless there's a commitment from individuals for a sustained engagement in cross silo relationships - this is going to be another event…in ten years from now, worse case scenario ten years from now we're still going to be inventing knowledge exchange. Somebody is going to wake up one day in Lethbridge, Alberta and they're going to say, “What a great concept. We should engage in that”. And they're not going to look back to the history of the early 2000s and the late 1990s. Quite honestly what we're talking about now; knowledge exchange, I used to use the term community development in the late 80s – bringing evidence and people together to influence behavior was something we were doing in the late 80s and yet the academic world invented knowledge exchange/knowledge brokering in the late 90s. And so worse case scenario, somebody's going to be inventing…they're probably going to call it something different obviously but they're going to be inventing it in the future because we haven't taken the steps to institutionalize the concepts and the change. Best case scenario is people wake up in funding circles – in policy development arenas, whether it's…because it doesn't just have to be about money but organizations, whether at the federal, local or provincial level, can regularly become…can institutionalize a concept of engaging in relationship building with non-public servants for example or non-teachers and academe to do something – academics and academic institutions will evolve to the point where there is credibility given to the concepts of knowledge exchange and the institutions themselves have changed so that people get credit for actually doing knowledge exchange. Right now you're tenure track is based on your academic publications yet we're trying to say non-academic publications and non-academic work and activities are as equally important for you as an academic as the academic stuff. So ten years from now if the institutions have bought into this, you'll see as institutionalized knowledge exchange and you'll see more vigorous, I believe, knowledge broker world where you have credentialed knowledge brokers. Peter: I think it's important to always just open-up the floor. Is there something we haven't put on the table that you need to say? Daryl: Knowledge exchange isn't about organizing events to bring people together to talk to each other about a body of evidence. That's part of knowledge exchange and I think people have…people who are working in a very busy world, which we all are, tend to try and find the lowest common denominator as quickly as possible. And so they say “okay it's not about academics getting together with academics – it's not about policy makers so let's organize and event and bring everybody together and we'll have…” And then they do exactly what is traditionally done in either academic or policy world, they set up talking heads at the front of a stage and people will talk about their research results or policy makers will talk about their policy needs and that to me is not knowledge exchange. It's a degree of knowledge exchange but it's just sort of padded knowledge dissemination if I could call it that. So I think that what I think…what I try and get across to people is knowledge exchange is a whole lot more complicated – it sounds simple bringing evidence and people together to influence behavior but it's that chemical reaction to me, that is so critical for success. So it's relationship building but it's relationship building around evidence because you know I'm not a touchy-feeling kind of guy. I'm not one of these guys who believes that we'll go out and we'll do the walks in the parks as a team. We're coming around a specific set of issues and we're going to create a process that's going to help us all benefit from this coming together. Peter: So it's that mutual benefit? Daryl: It's that mutual benefit. And so mutual benefit, mutual investment, mutual return and that doesn't mean the same. Sometimes we're going to require money from one side and (the) other side it's going to be intellectual capital. Sometimes it's going to be intellectual capital from one side and networks and connections from another side. So I'm not just saying…equal does not mean the same. I think all people around the table have to be created as equal or seen as equal are not the same so my big challenge with the world of knowledge exchange is that we don't diminish the field to a point of it's just simply organizing cross silo events. It's much more complicated. Technology, which we haven't talked about a lot, plays a huge role I believe. My own belief is that face to face interaction is required to develop trust but I don't think in today's technological world that you necessarily need to sustain face to face in a regular way but you have technology that can facilitate knowledge exchange. You need to have the tools and the people…so I would probably…bringing people, evidence, and tools and that will cause the chemical reaction to occur. I think people have…my experience in Canada is that people have taken knowledge mobilization to mean organizing, they even use sometimes the term innovative – innovative events but it's still just events. We funded a knowledge exchange RFP process in CCL - we funded about thirty-five initiatives so far - about forty I guess now so far and some of them have been very creative in what they've tried to do and how they've defined knowledge exchange, how they've brought people together, how they've created that chemical reaction and that to me is one of the greatest legacies I think of the knowledge exchange function in CCL is we don't necessarily create all of the definitions and all of the…what knowledge exchange initiatives are – if you have a good idea and you put together a solid team and you put together a solid methodology and you want to test it and you're going to evaluate it then we look at it and say, “hey let's try this”. And so we've funded some really innovative stuff over the years. Peter: Daryl, it's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Daryl: You're welcome.
