Being confident that a consortium project is the right strategy for you
“A highly interactive consortium is like a boat with big bumpers and a bunch of people rowing together allowing you to stay on the chaotic side of the river with much less risk.”
This is chapter two of the book Assembled Chaos. You can get a free PDF copy by joining the BioSci Community or you can purchase a copy on Amazon. Each of the subsequent chapters will be published as a post.
We were in the basement of an Amsterdam airport hotel. It was a typical conference center with folding walls. During a preparation meeting for the second-stage application for IMI funding, the leads of the analysis and systems biology work package of U-BIOPRED[i] were presenting the concept of integrating many different types of “omic” data with clinical data and patient reported outcomes. Preparation of the second-stage proposal is when pharmaceutical company experts join in the proposal development process. This meant that there were a number of people in the room to whom the whole concept was new.
Someone with a lot of experience then made the following definitive statement: “You cannot integrate those types of data.” Stunned silence followed.
The Difference Between Complex and Ambitious
That critic was right. The experts in the consortium did not know how they were going to integrate the different types of data. Integrating data can mean either putting different data types into the same database structure or integrating them statistically. At the start of U-BIOPRED, we had neither. There were lots of other unknowns. We weren’t sure if a large cohort of deeply phenotyped individuals with severe asthma could be assembled. We didn’t know what it would take to develop a virus under GMP conditions. We wanted to promote one common preclinical model. At that time there were almost no instances of more than one research group using the exact same preclinical model. Nonetheless, we persisted. Should we have been as confident as we were? In retrospect, I would say no. Not because of all those scientific and technical unknowns, but because in those early days, we had stumbled upon what should have made us confident but didn’t know it yet.
When we were designing the project with the consortium, as with most grant proposals, the budget wasn’t big enough for our ambitions. As a way to conserve budget, we decided to limit travel and have conference calls instead. Mind you, this was ten years ago so online meeting technology was nowhere near as robust as it is today. In the end, we met face to face as much as any other consortium, but the notion of also meeting frequently via conference calls or online meetings stuck.
Figure 1: Possible course of consortium project achievement over time.
One effect of all the interaction is that we were acutely aware of all the problems we were facing. We were also aware that progress was slow. Some of the more enthusiastic leaders said, “It won’t be all that we expected, but at least we will get something out of it.”
It reminded me of the old Bill Gates saying: “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”
The reality is that the achievement curve in consortium projects is neither one of rapid return (like everyone thinks at the start of a project) nor a curve that rises minimally and then fades (which is the expectation when the reality hits of how hard a project will be). It is more of an exponential curve. A slow start with a much later rapid rise.
Here is the actual curve of publications produced by the U-BIOPRED consortium by year:
Figure 2: U-BIOPRED publication rate over time
Interestingly enough, the exponential rise often happens around the five to ten-year mark, which is a long time scale. The risk is that you interpret the slow start as a predictor of minimal achievement over the long term.
The sunk cost fallacy is a thinking bias where you judge the future value of something based on the costs you have already invested. If you try to avoid the sunk cost fallacy in the early phases of a consortium project, you could lose out, because the rate of rise of the achievement curve in the early stages of a consortium project has no bearing on the eventual level of achievement.
The exponential curve of achievement in a consortium project is a power law. Power laws are common in all fields and domains as well in nature. They occur when there is some sort of compounding effect: as achievements are made, they add to each other.
Interaction = Compounding Achievement
If your consortium isn’t highly interactive, the compounding effect will be less. If partners operate in relative silos, successive achievements will occur in isolation. There will be less opportunity to build upon previous achievements. There is also a compounding effect in consortium projects in terms of the relationships–as people get to know each other, trust increases. With more trust, it becomes easier to work together and build off each other's ideas.
When a consortium is highly interactive, the compounding effect guarantees that at some point, the consortium's rate of achievement will become exponential.
In an interview podcast, Tim Ferriss and Graham Duncan illustrated this principle nicely. Even though business and investment were the focus of the podcast, they brought up a great analogy that helps explain the creative potential of consortia.
While discussing[ii] disruptive innovators like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, they referred to the concept of the river of well-being. In their book The Whole Brain Child[iii], authors Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson present a picture of mental health as floating down the middle of a river. One of the riverbanks represents chaos, while the other represents rigidity. Healthy people might oscillate between the two riverbanks, but they generally stay in the middle.
Ferriss and Duncan highlighted how people like Musk and Jobs are close to the chaotic side of the river, which enables them to be innovative. You know how they say you have to be crazy to be a great artist? That’s the same dynamic at work. A highly interactive consortium is like a boat with big bumpers and a bunch of people rowing together allowing you to stay on the chaotic side of the river with much less risk. Think of a consortium as constrained chaos–that is its strength. The realm of the chaotic is also where major advances occur.
When a consortium is highly interactive, trust increases. This is even more the case when participants have a passion for the shared vision and an appreciation of the consortium as a force multiplier for career goals. This allows you to lean into the tensions while avoiding a descent into the chaos of personal conflicts. Leaning into tensions is how you make massive progress, so, in a sense, a consortium is a way to assemble chaos.
The Five Principles
Maybe I’ve convinced you that with a consortium project you have to persist and not worry about the outcome. But how can you be confident in the face of such uncertainty? You could simply try to graft your typical way of working into a consortium project, but that is unlikely to work well. You could also try to teach yourself, through hard work and experience, how to build consortia and develop consortium projects. Isn’t that, after all, what you’re supposed to do as a medical researcher? With the so called “triple threat” of clinician, researcher, and educator, why not add the design and management of consortium projects to your repertoire?
Not so fast. How many consortium projects are you likely to be involved in over the course of your career? How many experiments will you perform, and how many papers will you write? Leading researchers do hundreds, if not thousands, of experiments and publish over a hundred papers, yet they only take part in three to five consortium projects. Bearing this in mind, should you spend your time learning the ins and outs of consortium science?
Due to unforeseen circumstances, I wound up focusing not on running experiments or publishing research papers but on the design and implementation of consortium projects. In the following chapters, I will condense that experience into a set of five principles for working in highly interactive consortia. These principles are designed to be straightforward to apply, and when you apply them, you can be confident that any consortium project will reach a point where it will deliver exponential levels of achievement.
The five principles are as follows:
1) Engage stakeholders
2) Fulfill both partner needs and project ambitions
3) Leverage multi-disciplinary thinking
4) Work in iterative cycles
5) Foster opportunities to do more
Each of the next five chapters expands upon one of these principles with explanations, stories, concepts, and practical steps you can take. They will be posted here over the next five weeks.
At BioSci Consulting we work to make all collaborative innovation endeavours highly interactive. If you would like to know how interactive your current project is, or how to design the right degree of interaction into a new project contact us.
[i] https://www.europeanlung.org/en/projects-and-research/projects/u-biopred/home. Access: March 2020
[ii] https://tim.blog/2019/03/01/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-graham-duncan-362/
[iii] Siegel, Payne Bryson. The Whole-Brain Child. 2012 ISBN-10: 1921844779
