Learning from failure -- in science communication and in life! Guest blog by Jill Caviglia-Harris

KC: Jill Caviglia-Harris is a Professor of Economics at Salisbury University in Maryland and a Leopold Leadership colleague. Her story about her son had me guffawing out loud and learning some critical lessons about science communication. Since her original post on the Leopold 3.0 blog didn’t contain the story, I asked to share it on CHANS Lab Views.

As a Leopold Leadership Fellow, I am interested in learning more on how to communicate research findings and make an impact on current day environmental policy.  In the last year, I have honed in on the secret sauce by researching, practicing, and writing blog posts on how to make compelling presentations and tell captivating stories while abiding by the rules of great design. That is where Kai comes in -- after reading my “5 Secrets of Captivating Stories” and the application of these lessons Kai wanted to read the speech I had created for an honors society induction for a large preparatory school in my area. My charge was to motivate the students to continue along their positive academic path, go to college, and succeed in life. Clearly, these students were already highly motivated. How could I inspire them further? I decided on a story about my son, Solomon, that illustrated the message that in life it’s ok to fail — it’s just not ok not to learn from failure.  What follows here is that speech:

The Secret to College Success

Jill Caviglia-Harris

Cum Laude Honors Society Induction Ceremony, Worcester Preparatory School

April 23, 2014

I am here today to talk with you about success.  Success in school and success in life.  How many of you that are here today are planning to attend college?  How many of you plan to drop out of college?  No one plans to drop out of college, but do you know that 40% of students that enroll in college do not graduate in 4 years?  The number drops when we look out over 6 years, but still about 30% do not graduate.  That means that about between 30-40% of those you in this room that plan to attend college will not make it.  Now, I know that you’re thinking that is not me…She’s not talking to the right crowd.  We’re all graduating from college.  We’re honors students from an elite preparatory school.  But, whether you want to believe or not, 30 to 40% of honor students do not make it through college.  Harvard…. the statistics hold for this university, one that is filled with students that excelled in school.

The question is then how do I succeed in college when so many before me have not?   I'm here to tell you that I know the secret…But before my big reveal I’m going to tell you a story.

This story is about my son, Solomon.  He’s 9 now.  This story takes place when he was in kindergarten.  He was just as strong-willed, determined, and tireless as he is today at nine.  He is driven, and always wants to win.  It was Field Day and he wanted me to attend, and if I couldn’t make it for the full day I had to be there in the afternoon when they would race to determine the fastest kindergartener. Well, he really wanted first place…he wanted it so badly that he had his grandparents from both sides come in from out of town, had my husband and I make sure to be there at the race time, and practiced every day on the playground for a month.  From these practices he learned there was only one kid he had to worry about.  There was only one kid that occasionally beat him. 

On Field Day they ran heats for the 5 kindergarten classes; the top three from each class were in the final race.  By the time that I arrived I learned of these results.  He was first in his class.  Race time arrived by late afternoon and the 15 kids lined up to take off at the sound of a whistle… and as it turns out my son took about 10 paces and fell down.  He came in second-to-last place.  As we walked back into the school I could see his anger: his fists were clenched, he wouldn’t let me touch him.  I struggled to figure out what to say to him.  I could have told him that I was disappointed, but really, what parent would do that (and how much really was at stake)?  I could tell him that he would do better next time, but that felt so shallow.  Instead, I asked him “What did you learn?” he turned to me and said “Nothing, what do you mean? I fell, I learned that I fell.”  And the conversation continued:

“Well, why do you think you fell?”  

“Because I tripped”

“Why do you think you tripped?”  

Luckily, I was privy to the photos that his grandfather took of him racing right before this conversation.  What I saw was that he ran this race looking sideways at the boy that he had to beat.  He fell because he was not looking forward.  He fell because he really really wanted to win. He, of course, did not realize (or believe) this until we showed him the photos (and at that point, he found them funny).  Ever since that day this has been a family motto: “What did you learn?” 

Now getting back to my secret. It is this: the secret to success is the ability to embrace failure and overcome setbacks.  It's ok to fail and to fail miserably.  It's just not ok not to learn from failure. 

Michael Jordan was once quoted:

I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

It turns out that successful people have one thing in common and that's that they have this ability to overcome failure, to learn from setbacks. You may think that honors students have nothing to worry about in college but the fact is that over-achieving students are sometimes at most risk.

I believe that intelligence is not something that we are born with.  I believe intelligence is something that comes from hard work. I recognize that some skills are easier to acquire than others and that some subjects in school will be harder than others. But I do not believe that there is any subject matter that cannot be learned.  I do not believe in the statement (or any similar) “I do not do math.” A problem can arise when over achieving students identify with achievement and then take a class in college that kicks their butt.  People with a fixed mindset are those that believe that intelligence is innate; that you're born with it or not.  People with this mindset are more likely to fail in life because they internalize setbacks and failures; these become reflections of who they are. “I failed and therefore I am a failure.”  On the other hand, people with a growth mindset are those that believe that talent, skills, and intelligence can only be acquired through hard work…by persevering through setbacks… and embracing failure. 

My message is therefore this… Expect college to be challenging and if you take a course that is more difficult than you expected, fail an exam, or wish to avoid a topic that is difficult just so that it will not impact your GPA; avoid the temptation to shrug it off, blame the instructors, or excuse away your setbacks.  Instead learn from them. Don’t just try hard, learn from these setbacks – and do something differently if you fail: reach out to faculty when you don't understand, get extra help when you need it and figure out ways to teach yourself how to learn.  And most of all, wish for setbacks. These wakeup calls are what have inspired the most successful people in life since the beginning of time.   

Tweeting for Healthier Social-Ecological Systems: Introducing #SocEcoSys

By Kai Chan
 
Can Twitter be a useful teaching tool? Can it advance social-ecological systems thinking, research, and practice? I think so (as I argued in "3 Ways Tweeting Will Improve Your Reach & Impact—In Any Communication"), but I'm about to put the question to the test.

We use the term 'social-ecological systems' to refer to interacting
social and ecological subsystems, but pinning down how such
systems behave can be harder than it might seem.

This semester, I'm teaching a graduate course called 'Towards Social-Ecological Systems' (RMES 510; 'towards' in that I'm not assuming that the systems view or the current SES literature captures all important dynamics). For the first time ever, I'm assigning grades based on student tweets. In so doing, I'm advancing one strong social-media trend, and fighting against another.

The continued advance is intentionally using Twitter for scholarship purposes, and making this scholarship 'actionable'. As far as I can tell, there's no hashtag for Social-Ecological Systems research and practice. Given that virtually no sustainability issue can be properly understood without a social-ecological lens, this is a tremendous shame. Accordingly, I hereby introduce #SocEcoSys, the hashtag for social-ecological systems research and practice.

The fight is against the trend that social media is only for what's new, even if what's old is far more important and insightful. RMES 510 students will be tweeting also with two additional hashtags: #OBG for oldie but goodie (already in use, but used in conjunction with #SocEcoSys to refer to classic papers illuminating key social-ecological dynamics); and #hiddengem for papers and other resources that seem to have gone unnoticed or unappreciated in SES thinking.

Have you used Twitter in courses? Please share your experiences in the comments below.

At the end of the semester (December) we'll take stock with a frank assessment of the educational value, and the vitality of the new conversation about social-ecological systems. Stay tuned!

P.S. If you see the value in #SocEcoSys, and in unearthing classic articles and key contributions (via #OBG and #hiddengem), please share this post using the social media buttons below.

3 Ways Tweeting Will Improve Your Reach & Impact—In Any Communication

By Kai Chan

When Berta Martín-López mentioned over a delicious Basque lunch that she used Google to find a colleague’s tweets on women in science, I couldn’t help myself. I burst out laughing, interrupting her story and our sumptuous meal for an extended digression on the unappreciated benefits of Twitter.

Berta using her smartphone, attached to an
external battery, in Vitoria.

For me, Berta’s harmless but retrogressive use of technology (searching the whole world-wide web to find single tweets) was akin to powering a 21^st Century smartphone using a bulky 20^th Century battery pack. Not so different from what Berta was forced to do when her smartphone’s internal battery went kaput.

“Why don’t you just use Twitter?” I blurted out, once I’d controlled my laughter. Berta answered that she didn’t have an interest in tweeting. But you don’t have to produce tweets to use Twitter and benefit easily from others’ tweets, I protested, and besides, there are three wildly unappreciated benefits of tweeting.

I assured her first that Twitter really was a superb tool for what most people see it as, rapidly and easily accessing tailored information about the world and various people of interest.

Networking:

Beyond the benefits of information consumption, Twitter offers a simple and straightforward way of connecting with people with related interests. In some ways it’s more powerful than and complementary to LinkedIn and other networking platforms. You don’t see people’s professional resumes, but you do see very quickly the kinds of things that interest a person, and the kinds of contributions she makes to the virtual world. You can tell quickly whether someone shares your interests, and whether they will lead you to nuggets of useful wisdom, or just mounds of rubbish.

Know Your Audience:

By all accounts, one of the keys to effective science communication is to ‘know thy audience’—in Steve Schneider’s words—and Twitter is magic with this. By seeing who follows you, you know who is interested in what you have to say. Based on their tweets and what they ‘favorite’ and re-tweet (including from your ‘stream’), you learn quickly which particular topics and styles interest each.

Practice Pithiness, with Feedback:

Apparently it takes some 10,000 hours of practice before we become expert, but expertise only comes from practice when we get rapid, repeated feedback about our performance. You tweeted a nugget you were sure would catch fire, only to be met by zero re-tweets of your gem and handfuls of re-tweets of someone else’s take of the same? Or, your tweet was modified by someone else and then re-tweeted plenty in its revised form? Chances are your topic was hot, and your wording not.

For those who think that messages of 144 characters are artificial, superficial, and instructive of nothing, I beg to differ. First, it’s neither artificial nor superficial. For me, a tweet is a hook or an arrow: it points (usually via a hotlink) to a blog post, academic paper, or news item of much greater depth. And you’d be surprised at how many people have mostly made up their minds—whether they know it or not—if they are interested in an article based on the first 144 characters. Next time you’re skimming a newspaper, go back and see how many articles you decided to read or not based only on the title. Ditto re: sifting through emails based on authors and subjects.

Moreover, whether or not you apply your Twitter learning to the first 144 characters of your article, you will undoubtedly apply it to distilling the crux of your message into fewer, punchier words.

Note that it doesn’t need to take much time. I almost never spend more than five minutes a day on Twitter, and I have connected with hundreds of interesting folks and learned loads.

I’m not saying that Twitter is the best thing since sliced bread, but it is a very useful tool, with a suite of critical but unappreciated benefits—much more than a source of pithy nuggets to be gleaned from the world-wide web.

@BertaML, when will you ditch the 20^th C tech & join me on Twitter? Masterful messaging awaits….
#scicomm

Addendum: I've now got my RMES 510 class tweeting for credit, and we're launching a new #SocEcoSys hashtag.

Internships in Grad School -- Time well spent?

Check out two new posts by Kai on the Leopold Leadership blog about the UBC biodiversity internship program, and the role of internships in graduate study. 

The first is here: Bridging the Leadership Gap: Investing in Graduate Training

The second is here: Bridging the Leadership Gap: Internships As Catalysts for Post-graduate Success

Learn more about the BRITE internship program at UBC here! And if you can contribute to this effort, please visit Biodiversity Internship Fund: Help our students help the Earth.

Two Streams of Advice ... into One River of Understanding: Co-Teaching

by Kai Chan

(Ed.: These thoughts were written November 20th, but they're equally applicable to today.)
 
Last night at 5:15pm, I sluggishly climbed the stairs to my office after another engaging but exhausting class, Toward Social-Ecological Systems (RMES 510), which I co-teach with Terre Satterfield. Despite having spent an hour talking, and more time writing, to harmonize our plans for this informal workshop-class, there were still moments of student confusion.

Two streams ... into one river. Creative Commons, via
www.onegeology.org

Terre--an interdisciplinary anthropologist--and I (an ecologist with an infusion of ethics and ecological economics) both wandered around the room, providing guidance on the student final projects, which are tackling 'small' issues like the Northern Gateway (Oilsand) Pipeline, Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) in B.C., Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking) in Nova Scotia. A few times, I gave advice, only to see a tell-tale wide-eyed look. "But- But, Terre said ....".

Truth is, Terre and I almost never really disagree. But in the context of advice on how to bound and target a massive topic into a useful contribution, sometimes it might seem that we do. And therein lies the learning.

All this pondering on a frigid ride home led to another exchange with Terre, and the below email to students:

Just a quick note to follow up on today's workshop: Terre and I certainly won't offer the same advice. We fully appreciate that it can be frustrating for you to receive advice that may pull you in different directions, so we do our best to iron out differences and provide a consistent and coherent message before class. But it will keep happening, and it's actually a reflection of very different ways of thinking about the same problem, or attention to different aspects/needs. And your real-time exposure to this is a very healthy tension that yields superb learning opportunities about this social-ecological space and diverse threads of academic inquiry into it, which you couldn't possibly get from one instructor alone.

All the best,
Kai (and Terre)

Long-live co-teaching, especially the interdisciplinary kind, and the learning it yields us all!

Can IPBES Make Ecosystem Service Assessments Useful? Yes (from Nicoya)—with A Few Key Tweaks

by Kai M. A. Chan
Part of a series of posts about IPBES (the UN's Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) and an inside look at its processes.

I stare mesmerized out the airplane window at the verdant green sharp hills, sinuous rivers, smooth beaches and glimmering oceans of Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula. As I stare, my mind wanders to my friends and colleagues flying into Turkey for the second plenary of the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES; which I blogged about here and here). Again and again, my mind returns to a central point: can IPBES help policymakers and practitioners—like those I sat with over the last two days in a sweaty Costa Rican university classroom—make and justify wise decisions to protect this 'pura vida' landscape from the downsides of the pressures that encroach?

Costa Rica’s west coast from the air—so mesmerizing
I almost missed my opportunity for a photo.

One might imagine, as many do, that Costa Rica is a well-protected paradise. It is. But it too is subject to immense pressures from a variety of economic, social, and political forces, and it too is desperately seeking insight about the social-ecological changes that loom on the horizon, and what might be done to steer the nation on a continued trajectory toward sustainable prosperity.
Back to the central question of the promise of IPBES. I vividly replay Ann Bartuska relating her experience of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) as a policymaker. One morning some thousand-plus pages were plopped down on her desk. The next week, a colleague of hers involved in the MA called her and inquired how it was going to change the decisions that federal agencies were going to make. She didn’t have the faintest clue, and while she didn’t quite say this, I got the impression that she’s still wondering.

It’s not that the MA wasn’t tremendously useful—it was. It put some core ideas (like the concept of ecosystem services, ES) on the map, and on the radar screen of countless researchers, policymakers and practitioners. But because it was so pioneering, it was too static and too coarse to inform many particular decisions. If IPBES is to build significantly on that groundwork, it must significantly advance the practice and use of ES research.

New tourist developments in the Nicoya Peninsula may be the
reason we foreigners visit, but they are also sucking water from
other uses, causing saltwater intrusions, and displacing local
people from their customary cultural uses of the shoreline.

With ES research, there is a surprising gap between understanding of nature’s contributions to people, and how that understanding is being applied by policymakers, corporations, and NGOs. To cut to the chase, my argument here is that IPBES can significantly help close that gap in three ways.

In Costa Rica, as in many cases, what's needed is an understanding of how what matters to people would be affected by change. In the case of our brand new project in the Nicoya Peninsula, we are focusing on climate change and associated hydroecological changes, but we’re also considering new tourist developments and changing agricultural practices.

Best practice for ES research gets at this directly. Conceptually, it's actually very simple. The research should involve:

The vast expansion of sugar cane
plantations changes the landscape,
both hydrologically (through irrigation)
and socially.

•    Understanding how the relevant components or processes in nature ('ecological endpoints') are likely to change due to the change in question (call it X).
•    Understanding how social change associated with X might change access and demand for these things. (This is a relatively new point, which I and others have been pushing hard in recent years—e.g., here.)
•    How much the resulting changes in diverse ES (including the above changes in supply, access, demand) matter to people, ‘valuated’ in terms that lend themselves to be integrated into decision-making.

It's puzzling: although the first and third points are well-established best practice from over a decade ago, they are not being taken up in research (as Terre Satterfield and I show in manuscript being revised) or in policy or practice. Instead, ES research is mostly either about the biology (often not the change) or about the value of whole ecosystem components or processes (not the value of how they are likely to change). It’s less surprising that the newer second point is not being taken up.

Policymakers and practitioners are no better. Furthermore, the poor progress in research is connected to the apparent demand for simplistic ES assessments. Environmental assessments, for example, seem to pay lip service (at best) to the idea of ES, and almost never include ES impacts, e.g., to compare with other costs and benefits. From my experience with NGOs of all sizes, citizen groups, and government agencies at all levels (from municipal to international), it seems that the vast majority of demand for ES research does not clearly target ES change. Accordingly, the result is often simple assessments of standing stocks—often ES valuation without underlying basis in social or ecological change.

I never thought I'd say this, but I think there's a golden opportunity for an intergovernmental body (IPBES) to leverage large-scale change through simple interventions.

IPBES is a major new effort that is poised to undertake some extremely important work. And I've seen firsthand the passion, intellect, and savvy of those involved (reported here).

At the moment however, IPBES seems to be fueling the fire of current demand for superficial ES science. How? In three unintended ways. By (1) considering biophysical assessment only separate from valuation assessment; (2) being apparently silent on the need to characterize the social changes in demand and access; and (3) treating non-monetary and monetary valuation options as separate alternatives.

Local people used to use the beaches—for their own purposes,
some key to their cultural identity—where foreign tourists now
have obvious priority. Now the local presence is for the pleasure
of selling beach-side massages.

Regarding (3), non-monetary and monetary valuation metrics are not alternative methods for valuating the same things. Instead, there are some changes (or aspects of changes) that can and should be valuated in monetary terms, such as the material property damage associated with floods. While there are real economic effects, we cannot pretend that the resulting monetary values also capture the emotional upheaval of dislocation or the spiritual losses associated with certain cherished things.

It would take but small changes to the current proposed IPBES docs to provide specific guidance about how to do ES valuation (of biophysical and social changes) as outlined above. It basically involves turning (1)-(3) on their heads, explicitly calling for and guiding the characterization of biophysical and social change and their integration with valuation, and also providing guidance on the integration

I have seen how such guidance from IPBES could make a tremendous difference. Not through the assessments, but rather through the recommendations for how agencies and organizations ought to do assessments for their own purposes is exactly what these agencies and organizations most look to IPBES to provide.

An interdisciplinary group (just a portion of the FuturAgua team
assembled by Tim McDaniels) assembles to strategise. From left
to right, Douw Steyn, Jennifer Romero, Silja Hund, Mark Johnson,
Raffaele Vignola, Cam Webster, and Paige Olmsted.

In my mind’s eye, we fast-forward three years. Paige Olmsted and I, with the rest of our research team, are presenting just such an assessment of ES change in the Nicoya Peninsula to the regional government officials, and representatives of various stakeholder groups with whom we are cultivating budding relationships. It may be wishful thinking, but I can see their bright eyes and excited nods as they imagine a half-dozen ways they can take this information and change policy and practice.

Sometimes Conservation Needs a Good Villain

Cathryn Clarke Murray, CHANS lab affiliate and Marine Science Officer at WWF Canada, recently posted a blog on the WWF website about her role in the Fishzilla incident in Vancouver last year. Read all about it here!