Expecting the weather today to be as warm as yesterday, and planning only to hole up in “my” office, alone, to catch up on administrative work, I decided to wander into the office in shorts and a t-shirt. Now, Australia’s a casual place, and anyone who knows me in person is aware that my concept of casual pushes even local norms (a certain not-to-be-named occasional guest blogger around these parts has been known, on occasion, to send me YouTube videos selected for their sartorial relevance). But this was slobby even by my rather generous standards. So of course I got pulled into a formal business meeting intended to lay the foundation for an important relationship with a consortium of private sector organisations…

Perhaps because I spent much of the meeting hoping the floor would miraculously swallow me before I had to draw attention to myself by talking, I found myself reflecting on what outside organisations think a university is, and what they expect a university can do for them, that they cannot do for themselves. Watching the dynamics around the table during the meeting, I was struck by the ways in which assumptions about expertise – the university’s presumed possession of it, the consortium’s presumed need to heed it – structured the interaction on all sides. This observation, of course, is hardly profound… It was just something that distracted me as I watched the pattern of introductions spiral around the table: academics introduced themselves by talking about what they worked on, how long they’d worked on it, and why it was important; consortium members introduced themselves by relativising their professional experience and talking about constraints on what they knew; I introduced myself as a student who was mainly there to listen, but who might also be useful in making some connections between the organisation and student researchers who might share some interests with them.

These formal prolegomena out of the way, the consortium representatives had the opportunity to tell us what they knew – which was, as it always is, rather a lot. They are in the process of constituting what is really a quite beautiful and exciting project, and they have a wonderful grasp of the barriers that stand in the way of what they are trying to achieve. Among those barriers is the simple lack of time to undertake systematic reflection on the significance and implications of what they already know.

Various bits of concrete advice followed on the consortium presentation – you should talk to this person, you should do this or that, you should look at this project or piece of research, etc… At some point, this interaction stalled, everyone shuffled and looked at their papers, and the chair asked whether we should discuss “next steps”. The silence deepened and threatened to become awkward… Since my personal mission in life is to spare people from the experience of awkward silence, this is generally when I start to speak in meetings…

I’m in a strange subject position in these sorts of situations, because I don’t have expertise in much of anything. I can’t offer any advice because I don’t know anything that’s particularly useful to anyone. I can rely on at least one person in the room to know more than I do, about any particular topic we might happen to discuss. It’s therefore quite handy that I’ve developed a way to rationalise my usefulness, in spite of my inability to contribute anything substantive to the discussion… ;-P

I can’t actually remember what I said – when I get caught up in a discussion, I never can… (It might amuse the folks who have been following my professional life recently that whatever I said caused one of the consortium members to wander up afterwards and ask whether I’d consider working for them. ;-) I’ve talked about halo effects on the blog before…) But the gist of what I said would have been something along the lines of: you already have a tacit sense – and you are the only people who have this sense – of what you need. You are also pressed for time and have things to do that, while they may not be more “important” in a global sense, are more urgent in an immediate, day-to-day sense. The question then becomes how to get around this impasse – how to carve out some opportunity for distilling and recognising what you already know, so that you can determine what else you need to know. It’s only once you’ve done this, that you’ll begin to get a sense of how you can effectively use a research partnership with a university.

I’ve offered to jumpstart this process (why do I do these things?) by spending some time over the next month observing key meetings and having some unstructured conversations with consortium members – basically to be involved as a naive observer, to whatever degree they are comfortable being observed. The idea is to be both unintrusive and interactive: to observe with an eye to understanding their experience of what they do, to ask questions, to answer questions (about the university, research design, etc.), and to work out with them some kind of shared vocabulary for understanding how they might work effectively with a university. Then they can decide what kinds of more formal relationships they want to negotiate from here…