HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK

National Research Priorities Strategic Forum
26–27 June 2002

CSIRO’s Big Hairy Audacious Goals
by Graham Harris

Graham Harris is Chair of CSIRO Flagship Programs and is an eminent ecologist and freshwater and marine biologist. He was formerly Chief, CSIRO Land and Water; Manager, CSIRO Environmental Projects Office and Director, CSIRO Office of Space Science and Applications. In 2002 he was elected a Member of the International Water Academy. He has an international reputation for work in aquatic and terrestrial ecology, freshwater biology, pollution monitoring, biological oceanography and remote sensing, publishing more than 100 papers and four books. He has also done leading work in fisheries dynamics and the effects of climate variability.

First let me look at the external environment. I really want to give a big plug to Bruce Hobbs, because he started this process of thinking about the future with his Brodie Hall lecture a couple of years ago, back in 2000, and started to look at the external environment. This included:

• Ageing population, population growth ceases around 2040
• Move to services dominated economy – globalisation, low $
• Liquid fuels crunch – energy – Greenhouse, climate change
• Minerals exploration, resource depletion
• Environmental degradation, salinity, water, biodiversity
• Economic growth threatened by environmental degradation?

I heard the minister talking at the dinner last night about what is the national vision, what are the national policy imperatives. Some of them are clearly covered in here, in that if we want to maintain high GDP growth, if we want to continue to be a wealthy nation, there are some interesting constraints as we roll forward.

Secondly I want to make the point that society around us as a group of scientists is changing quite dramatically with major changes in society:

• Requirement for high GDP growth, global competitiveness
• Major socio-economic changes post 1972 – also last 10 yrs
• Post-modernism, power, trust, ethics – more people centric
• Subsidiarity, gender, other voices – other ways of knowing
• Reduced respect for institutions, 'national icons' at risk

There is a real need for science to be involved. Science, as we have heard, needs to demonstrate that it can make a difference, and the social context is critical. I think for too long the science community has tended to feel that it could operate as a monastic society where magical things went on inside old stone buildings. That has totally changed, and at CSIRO one of Geoff Garrett’s actions is to look out – with about three exclamation marks behind it.

As a result of the above, the nature of science in CSIRO is changing very quickly. We have moved away from what Peter Cullen would call the ‘slip the cheque under the door’ mode of doing science, the mode 1 of the lone boffin in the lab, to a much more context-sensitive, much more involved mode of doing science. I like to think that we have even got past the academics and the science policy research units and gone into mode 3: we are actually out there talking to people, influencing the market for what we do.

We have got a very strong outcome orientation, we are very much involved in adoption strategies and how do you get from go to whoa, how do you make a difference? Most of the opportunities that we have identified now are very complex transdisciplinary science opportunities. We need to manage the synergies between the disciplines that we have in CSIRO and with our partners. We need to synthesise and integrate. We have to have partners in order to do this. And you start to see words in my presentation like ‘values’, ‘ethics’ and ‘integrity’. These are absolutely critical for the way we operate.

We are moving rapidly in CSIRO from a research institution which somebody wittily said to me the other day was actually a franchise, to a much more unified enterprise which we are driving now to have some global reach. The changes inside CSIRO are a piece of interesting social science research in themselves, I think, at the moment.

CSIRO’s role itself is changing into a level of much more complexity and great uncertainty; much more fluidity in relationships; as I said, much more emphasis on trust and ethics; and relationships before money. Isn’t that a change in the way CSIRO operates! We are dealing with society in the values domain. It is a real organisational challenge for us. Bruce has talked about the change to an investor/performer relationship, he talked a bit about the fact that we have done a lot of benefit-cost ratios to demonstrate that we can perform, generate value. Overall, what this is for CSIRO – the biophysical challenge, the socio-economic challenge, the social challenge of managing a billion-dollar corporation, which is what we will be this year – is a very interesting and rapid evolution. The BHAGs (the Big Hairy Audacious Goals that we set ourselves) and the Flagship Programs which I chair, which are the delivery mechanism, are really a demonstration of a very new and inclusive modus operandi for CSIRO.

We have turned the spectrum around. We used to operate from the bottom left upwards – this change is not complete, I might say; it is still happening – when you tend to find scientists saying, ‘I’ve got this trick. I’ve got this piece of kit. I’ve got this piece of engineering. Somebody must want to fund me to do something with it.’ That is how we got the ‘2,000 lb gorilla with dollar signs behind the eyes’ reputation. What we are now doing is turning it around and going up to the top end and saying, ‘What are the issues, guys? What are the visions? What do you need? What are the requirements?’ and then reflecting that back down through a series of issues and priorities which we can actually add some value to, in partnership and in alliance with other research and other providers to define a set of research requirements. And, by the way, this stops rebadging. If you run a bottom-up selection process, rebadging is a fine and arcane art which is alive and well in the academic community. It is alive and well in CSIRO. But if, in fact, you set out with some commissioned requirements, you can stop that. So we are not rebadging in CSIRO. We are defining what we need, who we need to work with us in order to deliver it, and we take a make-or-buy decision right across the organisation and indeed in other research providers, other organisations. I do not rule out spending CSIRO’s money, say, in a university somewhere.

So we need to define: what are the issues, what are the priorities, where are we going, how do science and other disciplines make a difference, how do we put the package together?

We have got a really fascinating challenge on our hands, firstly to integrate inside CSIRO – and do not underestimate the complexity and magnitude of that task – and, having done that or at the same time, integrate throughout other universities, other research providers, across all the jurisdictions. I was fascinated listening to the Canadian story this morning. I have spent my entire life in Canada and Australia, two countries that the Poms set up with the most crazy constitutions. We deal with these every day of the week, in various combinations, through the jurisdictions and then into community and society.

This has got to be adaptive, it has got to be context-sensitive, it has got to be recursive, if we are to all come to an agreed position. But remember, science is only 10 to 20 per cent of that package. If you are trying to set up a company, if you are trying to get a farmer to change the way he manages his land, all kinds of things including tax policy and incentives have to be in place. So when we are setting national priorities for research, my challenge to the Chief Scientist is to go engineer the ot