On receiving feedback

Years ago, I attended a seminar on Getting/Giving feedback, hoping to learn how to best receive feedback. To my chagrin, the seminar was really just on giving feedback, and although I got some useful tips on how to better offer feedback, I had really wanted to know how I could better solicit and integrate feedback to get better professionally.

Happily, there are now some resources available to offer this kind of advice. Although a lot of these resources focus on feedback in the corporate world, the tips are very relevant to researchers who receive feedback from colleagues or comments from grant reviewers.

Kevin Kruse for Forbes suggests that when you receive feedback, you should evaluate it slowly. After you put reviewer comments in the drawer for a few days to allow for the sting of a rejection to subside, then take them out and spend time poring over them. Be thoughtful and reflective both around what comments you think are good to accept and incorporate into your grant and those that you don't think are helpful. Just as you should not reject all the comments you get, nor should you accept them all at face value either.  Sometimes reviewers are spot on and sometimes they are off base.

Simply being aware of why it's difficult to take feedback can help us better prepare to accept and use good feedback. Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone in their Harvard Business Review article and book identify three triggers that make it difficult for people to accept feedback, described briefly below.

• Truth triggers: Stone and Heen suggest that people have a difficult time seeing, hearing, or reading themselves. So, although my grant might make sense to me, I have a more difficult time spotting the holes and flaws than an outside reader.
• Relationship triggers: I recently had someone explain something to me where I considered myself well-versed and I didn't think he knew what he was talking about. I found myself totally blocking him out until I realized what I was doing and thought there was no harm in trying to understand his perspective. This trigger causes us to ignore or reject feedback based on the source and our relationship with that person.
• Identity triggers: Identity triggers cause us to disregard feedback because it infringes on our accepted identity. For instance, I once had someone give me the feedback that I needed to work on my writing. For me, who had been a professional technical writer and taught graduate courses in writing and editing, the feedback giver might as well have slapped me in the face. Now, it turned out that she was talking about a specific piece I'd written, which did indeed need some work, but I had the hardest time hearing it after her first comment struck me in such a core piece of my identity.

The point here is if we can recognize what's being triggered in us that keeps us from hearing and understanding feedback, sometimes we can get past our frustration and use the feedback, even when it's poorly delivered, to get better.

Resources:
How to Receive Feedback and Criticism - Kevin Kruse (Forbes)
Get Better at Receiving Feedback - Sheila Heen (HBR)

The Power of Analogy in Your Proposal

What do you call a seagull flying through the bay? A bay gull (pronounced bagel). This little gem comes from my seven-year-old, who swears he made it up by himself, but he has been known to take credit for other's innovation, so I offer it with a grain of salt. I begin this blog about analogies with a silly joke because I think it speaks to the power of double meanings. Even as ridiculous as the joke is, it makes us think a moment and maybe smirk, because we find it clever or even sometimes engaging and intriguing the way we can use words or phrases to mean many things.

Conversely, there are many different ways and words to explain one phenomenon. Here I'm talking about analogies. I can explain a process to you by verbatim walking you through the steps of that exact process or I can find a similar process that you're already familiar with and use that description to explain something new to you.

For instance, I attended a talk by one of our Physics Professors, Dr. Amy Roberts, yesterday and she was describing how researchers are going about trying to detect dark matter. To do this she used a pool ball analogy. She said that since we cannot see dark matter, researchers theorize that we can only detect it when it bumps into molecules of regular matter that we can sense and see. She described that this bump is ever so slight, not a direct hit. She then went on to admit that she was not a good pool player and when she hits the cue ball toward a ball she wants to hit in a pocket, sadly she just skims the target ball with her cue ball and jostles it slightly. Such is the interaction with dark matter (the cue ball) and matter (the target ball). So, detecting dark matter is similar to trying to detect the jostling of the target ball (matter), which we can then assume was bumped slightly by the cue ball (dark matter).

Using this analogy, Dr. Roberts created a clear visual for her non-expert audience on how she does her work. This analogy gave us an overview of a complicated process using something familiar to us. It was more clear and engaging for her audience than if she'd just stuck to the verbatim explanation of dark matter detection. Other researchers have used military strategy to describe information security or plastic bags to describe cell membranes in their grant proposals. These paint a picture for the reviewers and engage them because you are inviting them to make the connection between the analogy and your research with you. A good analogy can give your audience a sense of discovery and excitement around your research.

So, how do you create a good analogy for your research?

1. Identify the attributes of your research problem and project: Whatever part of your research that you feel is quite complex and needs an analogy, start listing out attributes of how it works, what it does, barriers involved, etc.

2. Compare these attributes with other matching phenomena: As you are listing attributes, you'll likely have some analogous phenomena pop into your head. If, when you're finished listing attributes and you can't think of an analogy, go bug your neighbor or a student and brainstorm with them. Describe the attributes of your research to them and see if you or they can't come up with something in discussion.

3. Test your analogy against your research problem/project: Make sure that you then compare your research to the analogy and that the pieces you're trying to describe line up. If significant pieces of your analogy work differently than your research process, keep digging for a better analogy. As great as a solid analogy is at explaining something, it is confusing when it is not aligned with what you're trying to describe.

It's not simply coincidental that analogies are a strong teaching tool and an effective grant-writing tool. Bottom line is that an analogy is a sense-making tool that allows for more effective communication in whatever form.

Resources:
The Underused Writing Trick That Makes You More Powerful, Popular and Persuasive - Smartblogger
The Persuasive Power of Analogy - CopyBlogger

Structuring Your Project Overview

Grant reviewers report that they tend to know if a grant proposal will be any good or not after reading the Project Overview. If this is true, this means that your Project Overview, Specific Aims, or any opening summary or abstract is crucial to the success of your proposal. Your reviewer's feeling toward what you put in this crucial page will determine whether or not they are excited to turn the page.

If they're excited to turn the page, congrats! you've piqued their interest. They think the problem you're solving is important enough, your approach is innovative enough, and your work is interesting enough that they want to know how you're going to do it all. If they're not excited to turn the page, they probably still will do it out of obligation to the Program Officer and to their colleagues to whom they've committed to thoughtfully review your boring proposal. But, now, whereas you had some momentum if they were excited to turn the page, now you're fighting an uphill battle to turn it around and get them into your project. But, chances are this will not work.

Now, first off, it's essential that your project be great; there is no way to talk up a mediocre project in a proposal and fool reviewers. The point is that even when you have fantastic research, your Project Overview really can make or break your chance of getting funded, so what can you do to make sure your reviewers are excited to turn the page after they read it?

Create a hook
As with many types of writing, it's important to grab your reader's attention right off the bat. In a proposal, this is often done by showing how big and bad the problem is that you're trying to solve. What are the consequences of not doing this work? Often PIs assume people know why it's important to solve the problem, but don't assume. Spell out the problem and describe why it needs to be confronted or solved now.

Describe the cutting edge
In addition to knowing your problem inside and out, you are also steeped in the literature and research surrounding your topic. But, again, don't assume your reviewer is immersed in that same literature. Use your brief discussion to summarize the cutting edge research in your area and use this summary to build the case for why your project is the next best step in that cutting edge research.

Define the gap
Part of building your case with the current research is highlighting what is missing from it. Identify the gap in the research that you want to fill and make a case for why that gap needs to be filled now. What difference will it make?

Show how your research makes a difference
Until this point, you have been artfully building the case for your research. Now is the time to quickly show how your project is the answer to the large need in your area that everyone has been waiting for. Describe what you want to do briefly and how it will solve or contribute to solving your big problem.

Share the vision
Certainly, your project, amazing as it is, will not be the end all in research. So, end your Project Overview by laying out the vision for the research. What does this project allow us to do or what direction will it take us in and what's possible once we're there? Use the closing of your Project Overview to inspire your reviewers with your vision.

Resources:
Crafting a Sales Pitch for Your Grant Proposal - Robert Porter
The Anatomy of a Specific Aims Page - Bioscience Writers

What's in a name? Titling Your Grant Proposal

Pardon my cliché title, but since this is a blog, I just cannot help myself with some of my dubiously clever titles! However, I do think that this gives us an example of a title that makes sense for a blog, but the tone of which would not be appropriate for a grant proposal.

Here is why. As I consider my blog title(s), I first think about you, my audience. I assume that you are faculty researchers, mainly at the CU Denver and Anschutz Medical Campuses. I assume that you are busy and are looking for some strategies and tips to improve your grant development and/or honing your research projects to appeal to funders. When this title pops up in your RSS feed, I'm trying to communicate two things to you.

1. That this won't be a horribly boring or overly technical blog post through my initial overused Shakespearean pun.
2. That this blog is about grant titling through the latter half of the title

For those of you who would like "just the facts ma'am," and are not interested in the background information, you have likely skipped to the tips at the very bottom. For those of you who are reading the whole thing, I take you on my brief mental journey to illustrate the very process to use in creating a title for your grant proposal.

So, your grant and its title is for your peer reviewers. Who are they? What environment are they reading in? And, what is their goal in reading your grant application?

Who: Usually other faculty researchers, but not necessarily if you are applying to a private foundation

Environment: When they find a spare moment in the day or on the plane ride out to the review session they are trying to get through all the grants they have been assigned

Goal: Understand all the grants they have been assigned to make a decision on which to support

Now, as you see, entertainment or deeply contemplating new phraseology is not what reviewers are looking for, so we must develop titles that best facilitate the goals of our audience. Grant titles should be concise and descriptive. These two words might seem in opposition, but it really just means, every word has to count and we have to choose the title that best gives an understanding of what is most important in our grant.

In addition to always rooting yourself in your reader's needs and interests when making writing decisions, below are some quick tips for grant titling:

ORDE's Titling Tips:

• Review titles of funded projects by your sponsor (warning: do not assume these titles are the best, but consider your impression of the project based on the title)
• Be original and relevant (look up the hot language used by the sponsor and see if it fits with your concept)
• Be accurate and use agency-friendly keywords
• Use results/impact-driven words instead of describing a process
• Be authoritative (Questions, although they may seem intriguing can imply yours is an exploratory, risky, or questionable project)
• Only use abbreviations that are understood by the reader (e.g., DNA)
• Use active verbs (e.g., remodeling, reconstructing, creating, etc.)
• Use plain language (remember, get the point across clearly)
• Get feedback from colleagues and your program officer
• Proofread your title along with everything else
• Use the same title in resubmittals so your reviewers know to focus on your changes

These tips can help you sculpt your title into something that can grab your reviewers' attention and give them a crisp snapshot of your project. See below for more tips!

Resources:
Murder Most Foul: How Not to Kill a Grant Application
Research Paper Titles in Literature, Linguistics, and Science: Dimensions of Attraction