Thoughts on the Common Challenges of Knowledge Translation Practitioners
I teach two professional development courses directed at knowledge translation practitioners (KTPs), also commonly known as knowledge brokers. For the decade and a half since these courses launched, it has been interesting to see how the KT workforce has evolved. My workshops have engaged over 3,500 individuals and numerous organizations, and though some participants have been uniquely in research roles, many have direct responsibility for KT within their organization. There are many more formal KT positions across a range of organization types and sectors than there were a decade ago, yet this profession remains emergent as KT practitioners hone their skills and knowledge, and employers learn how to situate, integrate and realize value from KT work. In this post, I share some insights and potential solutions for optimizing the KT role within organizations from both the KTP and leadership perspectives.
New Kid on the Block
KTPs are often challenged with defining and clarifying their role and related expectations in organizations in which they are the only KT professional or one of a small few. This often involves carving out their territory while building alliances with more established departments, like communications. Organizations may have the vision to create a KT position but struggle with defining what the KTP will do or how they will know the work has yielded value. Thus, it’s often left to the KTP to establish clarity about how they will do their job, how they will interact with other departments, plan and manage expectations, and demonstrate value. This is a tough road, but it offers some degree of decision latitude that can be used to their advantage. It requires additional effort to educate colleagues and leaders while doing the work that is more outwardly focused.
What KTPs Can Do
You would be hard-pressed to find a KTP that has not faced this situation when newly hired. KTPs report this is a common and daunting challenge, and yet, it can be overcome (see our KT Casebook for ideas). I have watched many sole KT positions grow into KT programs with multiple workers and projects, innovations, and impacts (the Evidence-to-Care team at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehab comes to mind here). There are great models and mentors out there.
Networking internally is vital to finding your way and building alliances and integrated workflows with other departments. Take time to meet your colleagues, ask questions, and learn what they do. Tell them how you see your role. Share your KT program plan and look for alignment. Ask how you can support them and work through workflow and timing for these moments. Identify ways they can leverage your goals. Because workplaces are dynamic, internal networking isn’t a one-time occurrence and will require continued effort. Build this time into your workplan.
Networking outwardly is also central to the KTP role. Identify partners and stakeholders and reach out, meaningfully and often. Building relationships that lead to trust, insights, and knowledge will enable you to tap into opportunities for open collaboration (aka integrated KT) and improve your work.
Develop a program plan for how you will work and review it often with your manager and team. The plan should outline how you see your role and how its’ functions align with the organization’s strategic plan, the work of other departments, and the needs and expectations of internal and external partners and stakeholders. The program plan should reference your KT budget, something you should have established existed before you accepted the position. Think of this as the project management part of your job. The plan for how you will work should include evidence-informed KT methods, frameworks, tools, and resources for how you will approach planning and execution of dissemination and, possibly, implementation activities, although few KT programs extend beyond dissemination. Useful tools include the Knowledge Translation Planning Template, for instance. A great case example is the work of Renira Narrandes, a former KTPC* alum. Renira is now KTPC faculty and teaches a segment that showcases the KT program and evaluation framework she developed for the Cundhill Centre at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. She’s an innovator.
Develop a career plan that provides opportunities for growing your KT skills and your career within and beyond the organization. Be wary of employers who don’t have a vision for what KT means for their organization or don’t value how it can help them achieve their vision. Ensure there is opportunity for compensation growth over time; organizations that have a narrow or undervalued salary range and/or no opportunities for leadership positions will eventually leave you feeling stuck with nowhere to grow. Ensure there are education funds available to you so that you can cultivate your competencies and attend networking events like the Canadian Knowledge Mobilization Forum. Lastly, don’t underestimate the value of volunteering at KT organizations to help you get a start in the field; this has started some great careers.
Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate! Not only is the evaluation of KT activities essential to your success, but it is also the foundation for your career growth. Without evidence of what you have produced, how it has led to impact, and how these align with what your organization values, your manager will have little knowledge of what you do, why it’s important, and what it’s worth when they do your performance evaluation. They also won’t be able to amplify your successes. Failing to evaluate your work is shooting yourself in the foot. Let me stress here that capturing KT productivity – that is, the KT activities and outputs you produced – is only one of the things you should be doing, and sadly, it’s often the only thing KTPs do. There are countless missed opportunities for evaluating whether your KT activities and outputs met their intended target (Hey, SKTT and KTPC alums, remember the KT Goal?!). If you followed the core components of good KT planning, then you disseminated with purpose. Without intentional evaluation you cannot demonstrate that you achieved KT goals or that your KT activities and outputs had any impact on the intended audiences. Impacts are your KT stories and they provide a direct line to communicating your value and your contribution to the organization. Yes, your manager wants to know that you’ve been busy doing KT, but few will have the foresight to ask you to evaluate and demonstrate whether the KT activities have led to benefits for the knowledge users. KTPs must take the reins here and build evaluation into how they do the work, and then they must showcase their impacts. Yes, I’m saying you must KT your KT. Impacts translate to stories that resonate and to career opportunities and advancement. Good evaluation doesn’t happen as often as it should. Don’t ‘phone it in’.
Insert yourself in other work of the organization. It’s easy to develop myopia in any job. Cast your eyes and ears to what is going on in other parts of the organization and beyond. In particular, the strategic plan, the needs of the funder and key partners, the system, and people who are impacted by what you do. Volunteer for working groups, consult with researchers, be helpful. It’s reciprocal.
Manage up and build relationships with your manager and other leaders. This can offer important opportunities to build their understanding of KT, how you can support the organization, and what you have accomplished (impact stories). Look for opportunities to explore how the organization thinks about and values KT and impact. There are few organizations that don’t think about impact but many that don’t know how to capture it; you can do this for them. Check out and share tools that will help organizations assess their impact potential, like Emerald Publishing’s Real Impact Institutional Healthcheck Workbook developed by Dr David Phipps from York University in Toronto and Julie Bayley from the University of Lincoln in the UK. This is innovation in KT.
Identify important drivers for change that can help you build a business case for the value of KT in your organization. Four key drivers of KT relevance are top of mind. First, research funders often require KT plans within proposals. This is good leverage, so provide support for your research colleagues, if you have them. Second, universities now increasingly recognize KT and community engagement activities as bona fide scholarly criteria for promotion – check out Creative Professional Activity in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto promotion manual. Support your internal academics in this endeavor. Third, Ontario has instituted Performance Based Funding for Postsecondary Institutions. This means Ontario universities will now be assessed on their impacts in order to determine the level of support they receive from the province. Not a perfect set of metrics, but it’s a start. Lastly, all organizations want their work to be impactful and widely recognized. You can help them to shape this.
Check-in with reality. Your job is to promote and disseminate research evidence but those that produce it will always believe the buck ends with the discovery. We know they’re only partway to their destination and that discovery without dissemination and implementation is unfinished business. Be gentle but persistent in leading them along the path. Much of this job requires continuous capacity building from the inside.
Find your champions. You can and should build your career on the strengths of your own merits. But it doesn’t hurt to find leaders who will toot your horn and shine a light on your star. Work it. They can open doors and help you manage up.
Find your mentors. KT as a specialty and profession is old enough to have more senior experts who are often quite accessible. Seek them out in times of need. There is also a knowledgeable peer group in this profession – KTE Community of Practice.
Step out of your sandbox. Those who have taken my courses may recall that I’m a strong advocate for the power of open collaboration. Being great at what you do will require you to innovate, and to do that, you need to step outside your sandbox. Read and explore outside your profession and stretch into the boundaries of what others are learning and doing. Innovate and showcase your successes – write, talk, share.
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What Leaders Can Do
We include KTP supervisors in several ways in our KTPC workshop because they are crucial for how KTPs will enable the work and build a KT culture in the organization. Facilitative leadership is an important driver for change. Simply building skills is a useless endeavor unless the organizational conditions enable them to be applied and realized. Optimizing the value of the KTP role requires employers to consider several things ahead of the hire and ongoingly, in collaboration with the KTP.
How does KT align with the organization’s mission, vision, and strategic plan? More broadly, how does the organization think about impact and what impacts do they want to achieve? Emerald’s Impact Workbook, mentioned above, is a great exercise for the leadership team to do in collaboration with their KTPs.
Where should the KT program be relative to the rest of the organization in five- and ten-years time? How will leadership accommodate and promote that growth? What are the desired outcomes for the KT work and how do you carve a path to enable this?
Is there a KT program budget beyond the KTP salary, and is that salary sufficiently competitive that you can retain your KTPs? As in any other business, if your KTPs are really great at what they do, someone will poach them, and rightly so. Keep them growing.
Lastly, consider that if you’ve not enabled your KTP to succeed with KT that is intentional, explicit, and systematic, and this includes KT evaluation, then they will not be able to demonstrate their impacts. This means the organization as a whole will not be able to either. Impacts start with researchers, KTPs, and roll-up. When it comes time to showcase what you do, you can’t ask people for impact evidence they don’t have.
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My hope is that this blog post provides food for thought and some steppingstones for improving capacity for knowledge translation work and the KTP profession. We’ve come a long way, but the journey continues. Glad to be a part of it, and from where I sit, it’s been fascinating to meet and learn from these groundbreakers.
*Knowledge Translation Professional Certificate