Story #13
Even while doing my Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo (UW), I realized I wasn’t cut out to be an academic. Despite my great respect for scientists and the scientific process, the complexities of multivariate statistics and the interminable nature of the peer-review publication process ultimately tipped the balance for me in terms of pursuing other career opportunities.
Making connections, getting things done, often with or by partners, and, ultimately, seeing my work as practical and useful to others was what turned my crank. Since graduating, my career has been built more on my communication and organizational skills than on my understanding of the migrations of Atlantic salmon.
I’ll admit I was slow to characterize what I did as knowledge translation or brokering (KT/KB). So how did a “salmon biologist gone wrong” land at the sharp end of KT/KB in the federal government Science and Technology community?
My career’s been more meander than a defined path. Since graduating I’ve never actually formally competed for and won a position: doors opened, sometimes in the most unlikely of circumstances, and I happily walked through.
From UW I joined an NGO, unsurprisingly one related to salmon conservation. There I headed the publications arm and served as the Atlantic Salmon Federation’s Executive Director, Canada. My first official foray into communications.
Five years on, I was asked to join the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans to lead a disparate science group that did not “fit” well in the traditional fish-counting science structure. Consequently I had to hone my ability to “sell” what we did. I wrote prolifically, both in the peer-reviewed literature and in various other media. Day to day I managed research and operations, but science communication became a vocation.
A two-month detour for a liver transplant, and an unfortunate series of circumstances in the life of a colleague, meant that I was in the right time and place to take on a two-year interchange assignment as Director of Recreational Fisheries for the Province of New Brunswick. There, the ultimate challenge was getting science to senior officials and political masters in a timely, polite, engaging, yet firm manner. Speaking truth to power.
My assignment over, I re-joined the Feds, this time in Environment Canada (EC), once again leading a diverse group of researchers including some wonderful “entrepreneurs.” This time, explaining the needs of the Division to administrators proved a significant challenge, all the while continuing to build networks and promote the work of the unit more broadly.
My by-now standard “four or so years in a job” were up, and I was considering a senior position with a university. I asked someone for a reference and instead was persuaded to come to work for his organization. And so, serendipitously, I found myself in my first bona fide “science communications” job as Director of Science Liaison Branch with EC’s National Water Research Institute (NWRI).
I found I was pulling it all together: forming the unit, including hiring someone to run a series of national science-policy workshops, dealing with media and other enquiries, developing an internal newsletter, and revamping the NWRI website. I got heavily involved in the Canadian Science Writers’ Association, forged new networks, and eventually became a board member.
A major transformation in Environment Canada in 2006 included formation of a Science and Technology Branch. The new Assistant Deputy Minister, who came from outside EC and was part of one of those networks I’d been involved with, was aware of our work and thought highly enough of it that my group was somersaulted, literally overnight, into a more centralized role to cover the gamut of EC science activity for the new Branch.
In a fit of self-preservation, or possibly self-immolation, I accepted the role of Acting Director General, forming a new Directorate that included, surprise, surprise – several groups that had key functions, but were, like my own group, outliers among larger science-delivery Directorates.
Over the course of the following year I helped stabilize things in the new Directorate and used my new position to advance some science-policy linking initiatives close to my heart. I was also fortunate enough to be selected for the inaugural Science Communications Residency in Banff.
A two-week master class in science communications, this experience was a transformational micro-sabbatical. I was not a science communicator in the generally accepted sense: delving into the literature (with a big tip of the hat to the health field), and working with new collaborators, I came to better understand the nature of my group’s work.
What we did was very different from what I came to define in a 2008(1) book chapter as Big-C Corporate Communication. Our work was little-c S&T communication. It was, in fact, knowledge translation and brokering.
I stopped the grinding travel to and from Ottawa and elsewhere, and returned to my substantive position as Director of S&T Liaison. There, my unit has continued to build a series of KT/KB tools and approaches that are serving EC well and bringing demands from other federal departments and agencies to share and build on our experiences.
In October 2009, we hosted a federal Interdepartmental Dialogue on KT and KB in Burlington, Ontario, where a number of ideas were supported by the collective group (over 40 participants from 15 federal departments and agencies). These included a need to address challenges for HR classification of KT/KB jobs, build a KT/KB toolbox for federal departments, and the concept of a first-ever International KT and KB Conference and Community of Practice. Reaching out from there, we have discovered others with common interests, including, of course this site, Research Impact, and the KTECOP.
Needless to say, my current work is very much a team effort and I have been blessed to have been working with Leah Brannen and Karl Schaefer, my two Section Heads, for almost a decade. Staff turnover has generally been low and along the way we’ve collectively done some good, learnt from many challenges, published in the field, and had some fun.
You can get an overview of our activities via our EC S&T Expert (one of the tools we’ve built) profiles (Alex – Karl – Leah – Jaime – Michael – Shannon – Courtney – Julie – Kristin – Scott – Janet), and also access a Canada Public Service eMagazine feature on our work.
Or you could give any of us a shout…
Dr. Alex T. Bielak
Director, S&T Liaison
S&T Strategies Directorate
Environment Canada
March 2010
(1)Bielak, A.T., A. Campbell, S. Pope, K. Schaefer and L. Shaxson. 2008. From Science Communications to Knowledge Brokering: The Shift from Science Push to Policy Pull, p. 201-226. In D. Cheng, M. Claessens, T. Gascoigne, J. Metcalfe, B. Schiele and S. Shi (ed.), Communicating Science in Social Contexts: New models, new practices. Springer, Dordrecht.
To cite:
MLA format
Bielak, Alex, "Knowledge Broker Stories: From Science to Science Communication to Knowledge Brokering.” Weblog Entry. Knowledge Mobilization Works Blog. Posted March 25, 2010. Accessed (enter date). http://bit.ly/d3oSDh
APA format
Bielak, A. Knowledge Broker Stories: From Science to Science Communication to Knowledge Brokering. Retrieved (enter date) from http://www.knowledgemobilization.net [http://bit.ly/d3oSDh]
If you would like to contribute a story to the Knowledge Broker Series, please contact Peter Levesque
