Prioritize building your portfolio of practices before building your portfolio of products for scientific discovery
When is the last time you were “in the zone”, burning through a task with clarity?
When were you so focused that being self-conscious about things like “confidence”, “discipline”, or “rigor” would have felt silly?
You were just getting the task done. Not thinking about how to get it done.
Being able to get something done in science is driven by what I call our scientist’s repertoire. The bigger our repertoire the more we can get done.
Our repertoire impacts every aspect of our personal discovery potential and our discovery process. It’s what we use to navigate the science choices we make and the actions we take.
I see four themes that live in our internal repertoire or portfolio.
Mindset is how you think about your science and your actions.
Don’t dismiss this piece as just cheesy self-help mantras. There are some tough, core human challenges in this theme. Like being hampered by your own expertise (called the Einstellung effect) and tending to prefer additive solutions that complicate rather than simplify results. You’re not stuck with your mindset. You can change how you think to fit the needs of your science.
Activities are the tasks you know how to complete to get science done.
These are the things they teach you how to do in school, trainings, work experience, crash courses, and professional development. You can even pick these up off YouTube and TikTok. The basics for discovery? There are activities that let you communicate, synthesize, code, calculate, deconstruct, build, etc. Activities are the smallest unit of “know-how” that makes up your scientist’s repertoire. Our dynamic ability to learn means you can have hundreds of activities in your mental repertoire (or your digital one 😉 ).
Skills are the recipes you have for combining outcomes with actions.
Want to convince someone to give you money to pursue a discovery (outcome) through writing a pitch or proposal (action)? That’s a skill. Trying to create a systematic definition or metric (action) to pull insights (outcome) out of texts or terabytes of data? Also, a skill. You can learn and master skills through deliberate practice (the famous 10,000 hours rule).
Knowledge is what you know.
Knowledge is key for discovery because what you don’t know is exactly what you need to investigate. But to see your knowledge gaps you must be clear on your knowledge base.
When you have a solid plan, but still don’t make progress in your science it means you need to strengthen a weak part of your repertoire.
I am a university physics researcher (for now). So, when I started working on the science of scientific discovery my first thought was: “Publish a paper, win a grant, or the work won’t count.” I was only worried about how my repertoire would appear on my resume.
That mindset got me two years of spinning my wheels and no meaningful progress.
Why?
Because what I needed was skills to make a discovery, not skills to write a paper about other people’s discoveries.
I’m still not there yet. But now, with the architecture of discovery I have built a mental framework for troubleshooting. I can figure out where I am in discovery process. And I can create targeted techniques to help me get unstuck when my science ideas dead end.
Those are skills I learned while researching the science of scientific discovery. And I’ve added them to my repertoire.
The idea of a repertoire comes from music. A musician’s repertoire is the collection of songs, styles, and instruments they can play.
Like musicians, scientists also need a repertoire.
You need a bag of tricks and tools to pull from that contains your mastery of the art of scientific discovery.
Mindset, activities, skills, and knowledge are all part of our scientist’s repertoire. They are how we get science done. They transform us from dreamers into discoverers.
Without them in our portfolio first, we have no way to add discoveries too.
Simply put, prioritize building your portfolio of practices before building your portfolio of products to create space for scientific discovery to happen.
Reflection Question
What practices have you neglected, or avoided adding, to your own science repertoire?
Related Links
On The Insightful Scientist (InSci) website
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- Your attention is a camera, change lenses to boost your discovery ability
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Bulletproof Musician (performance psychology)
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How to cite this post
Bernadette K. Cogswell, “Prioritize building your portfolio of practices before building your portfolio of products for scientific discovery”, The Insightful Scientist Blog, September 25, 2020.
[Page feature photo: Photo by Lorenzo Spoleti on Unsplash.]