Learning to listen

Over the course of talking to the 20 chemists featured in our anniversary interview series (part 1 and part 2), a few themes emerged. One of the biggest is around the nature of collaboration, and how it has evolved over the last two decades.

Digital communication tools have undoubtedly transformed the ways we interact with each other. Videoconferencing, screen sharing and interactive workspaces mean the kinds of meetings that could only have happened face-to-face – and might have required extensive (and expensive) intercity or international travel – are now available anytime, from anywhere with a suitable internet connection.

But collaboration isn’t something that just happens. It takes effort. By necessity, it means bringing together people from different backgrounds, with different skillsets and viewpoints. Whether that is combining technical and financial or business knowledge to create a successful spin-out company or industrial innovation, or bringing together different disciplines from chemistry, biology, materials science and engineering to explore or create something new.

It’s important that all members of a collaboration understand the overall goals of the project, as well as their own roles and how they can contribute to success. But it’s equally important that members from different quarters understand each other’s capabilities, challenges and frustrations.

That means learning to listen and communicate effectively. There’s no technology in the world (yet) that can magically fix a situation where people are talking at each other, with neither party getting anywhere, instead of listening to each other and having productive conversations. Those skills are at least as important as any specialist technical or operational ability.

Chemists are already pretty adaptable, and it feels like there’s a growing openness to harnessing that through movement between sectors, bringing fresh views and diverse skills across both industry and academia. Sometimes that diversity has been deliberately sought out, while elsewhere it has been fuelled by circumstance. A dearth of skills around nuclear power, for example, has led to recruiters reconsidering their requirements for sector-specific experience, opening the door to what had previously been a relatively closed community.

As artificial intelligence and machine learning tools become further embedded in various aspects of scientific endeavour, skills that differentiate humans from machines are ever more important. Core skills like creative and critical thinking, insight and analysis can be complemented by empathy, diplomacy and flexibility.