(Illustration by John Oberlander)
In 2017, Don Green, Jake Bowers, and I launched research4impact, a LinkedIn-style online platform to enable greater connectedness among researchers, nonprofit practitioners, and policy makers. The venue enabled participants to build a profile and then reach out to others.
Each of us had already had extensive experience connecting with people in research, practice, and policy, and personally saw great value in connections with diverse participants. We knew that people from these different networks bring unique knowledge, expertise, and direct experience to understanding and solving many problems of mutual concern, such as how to slow climate change, end poverty, improve education, and boost voter engagement. Yet they often remained disconnected. At the same time, we were also increasingly fielding questions from colleagues in these diverse networks about how to foster new collaborative relationships of their own in order to broaden their knowledge base and engage in research partnerships. Our goal was to build something that would help.
Within the first 10 months, 388 people built profiles that were quite detailed. People took time to describe themselves, their current work, and the topics that they cared the most about. Most also included a picture. They had all overcome many of the major barriers to any new voluntary activity: Although they were strangers to each other, they had taken advantage of the opportunity that the site offered and demonstrated their capacity and motivation to engage. Pleased with this apparent success, we had every reason to expect that they would initiate a flurry of new connections.
It didn’t happen. During that first 10 months, only 7 people initiated contact with someone else on the platform.
The failure of the research4impact online platform (what we have since dubbed research4impact 1.0) underscored an important lesson: New relationships between diverse thinkers require not only capacity, motivation, and opportunity, but also what I call relationality—a belief that others will relate to us in ways that we would like, along with the belief that we can successfully relate to others as well.
At first blush, this idea may sound tautological: “Relating to others is important for relationships.” Yet the key point here is that relationality captures a range of elements that people are often uncertain about when faced with the prospect of interacting with strangers. The result is that we are uncertain how to proceed. We are skittish about how to initiate new collaborative relationships and whether others will reciprocate. And when people don’t know how to do it, they tend to refrain from interacting by default.
In short, because of uncertainty about relationality, it is all too easy for strangers to remain strangers. Once we better understand what relationality is and why people are often so uncertain about it, researchers, practitioners, and policy makers can then use these insights to spark new connections.
An Overlooked Barrier
To better understand why research4impact 1.0 failed, I reached out to dozens of people who had built profiles but not initiated contact with anyone in the network. I asked them to share any sources of hesitation they were experiencing.
Everyone who spoke to me agreed that they would appreciate connecting with others in the network. Yet they also felt doubt about how they would relate to them. They asked questions and voiced concerns that gave them pause as they considered reaching out, such as: Will the other person really want to interact with me? Will the other person value my knowledge and experience on the issue? Will they believe that I value theirs? How should I start the conversation? What is appropriate and inappropriate to say? Will the other person respect my time? What kinds of expectations will the other person have? These were the elements of relationality at work that were stopping people from active engagement.
The last question about expectations is worth elaboration. It underscores how people want new collaborative relationships for different reasons. Sometimes the goal is to broaden their knowledge base and understanding of the problem they’re working on, yet all the while remaining autonomous decision makers. For instance, environmental activists and climate researchers may value the opportunity to share knowledge about neighborhood flooding conditions and the research on nationwide flood trends. Even a single conversation along these lines can greatly influence behavior. Other times, the goal of collaborative relationships may be something more formal, such as projects that entail shared ownership, decision-making authority, and accountability—efforts such as neighbors organizing a clean-up together, public health officials and community leaders jointly running a vaccination campaign, or researchers and get-out-the-vote strategists partnering to study ways to increase voter turnout. Either way, if potential collaborators have unclear expectations from the outset, then inertia can result.
Three-Pronged Approach
So how do we overcome this impasse? I advocate a three-pronged approach: We must raise awareness about what relationality is and why it matters, we must encourage potential collaborators to explicitly communicate not only why they want to connect but also how they will relate to others, and we should create and support leaders and institutions that can reduce uncertainty about relationality between potential collaborators.
First, to raise awareness about the importance of relationality, we must name and describe it. For example, because of my role leading research4impact, I am frequently asked about the best way to form new collaborative relationships to tackle civic challenges. Often people who ask phrase their questions in terms of why they want to connect: “We’re seeing a lot more flooding in our community, and so I need to talk to someone who has unique knowledge about flooding that I don’t have.” I always respond by emphasizing the importance of relationality, perhaps by saying, “You also need people who will be comfortable sharing what they know and valuing the knowledge, expertise, and direct experience that you offer to them.” This always sounds unusual to people when I first say it, but that’s because it departs from how we typically describe what we need.
Second, we should encourage potential collaborators to explicitly communicate how they will relate to others. This point may seem obvious—of course potential collaborators should aim to be relational. Yet as with the previous point, we often overlook relationality when we communicate with others, in part because of a common feature of social cognition. We tend to evaluate our interpersonal actions primarily in terms of competence (“Am I effectively sharing what I know?”), instead of thinking about whether we are being responsive to the needs of the person with whom we are speaking (“Does the other person know that I value their expertise?”). Put differently, we do not always state how we will be collaborative. Yet when we explicitly aim to overcome relationality concerns, new collaborative relationships are more likely to arise.
Consider the results from a field experiment I conducted with a large civic association in 2019. We sent emails to 456 of their group leaders across the United States, offering to connect them with a researcher to discuss research on voluntarism that would help address challenges that they were facing in their work. Some recipients were randomly assigned to receive a baseline message focused on the why. (It acknowledged that many group leaders were struggling with recruiting committed volunteers and offered a discussion with a researcher to talk about evidence-based techniques for boosting volunteer commitment.) Others were randomly assigned to receive that same baseline message, along with additional language that explicitly communicated relationality by mentioning how the researcher would strive to interact with them during the exchange. Some of this language said that the researcher recognized that group leaders were highly time-constrained and as a result would efficiently share what they knew. Other language stated that the researcher valued their expertise and was very interested in their work and wanted to learn about their organization. The result? Adding the relational language more than doubled the response rate to the email, which led to twice as many new collaborative relationships and, as a result, many new committed volunteers.
The third prong is to create and support leaders and institutions that can reduce uncertainty about relationality. Matchmakers, organizational leaders, and facilitators can all play that role. We found this point confirmed with research4impact. After my interviews with people who built profiles as part of research4impact 1.0 (the online platform), we launched a more hands-on approach to matchmaking in 2018 that became research4impact 2.0.
We designed our evidence-based matchmaking method, called Research Impact Through Matchmaking (RITM), to connect diverse thinkers with shared concerns about social problems by explicitly identifying their substantive overlap and establishing relationality. RITM employed several techniques, including using “role assignment” to communicate each person’s unique task-relevant knowledge, expertise, and lived experience; describing the exchange as a mutually beneficial learning opportunity (to prime a collaborative mindset among all participants); and succinctly restating the goal so that expectations were common knowledge.
As part of research4impact 2.0, we’ve also conducted outreach to spark interest in people who may have little prior experience with cross-sector collaborative relationships. For instance, we’ve invited practitioners and local policy makers to share challenges in their work in which they thought that research might be helpful and then said that we would match them with a researcher.
Explicitly offering hands-on matchmaking has proven successful. Since 2018, research4impact 2.0 has created 308 new collaborative relationships.
Taken together, this three-pronged approach focuses on uncertainty about relationality as an important barrier that must be recognized and overcome. It draws our attention to the core problems that would-be collaborators face as they see it. These practices all help strengthen a culture of connectedness to tackle pressing problems in our communities.
Read more stories by Adam Seth Levine.