A mental picture of the scientific discovery cycle is your ultimate personal coach
In our ideal imagination someone would always be able to give us an exact game plan to achieve our dreams, full of steps we know exactly how to do.
That kind of recipe would be comforting and make us more confident.
I can’t give you that.
But what I can give you is a mental picture of the five key phases that make a scientific discovery happen. It’s just one of six core components of my scientific discovery framework (you can read about that here).
Equipped with a mental picture, it will be easier to see where you’re losing momentum and look for ways to fire up your progress.
Let’s dive into this “discovery cycle”.
The five evolution phases of scientific discovery, in order, are:
- Question. It all starts with having an unanswered question about the world that needs to be answered. Discovery always begins by actively asking an unanswered serious question. Serious questioning is about generating compelling questions and then choosing one to go out and answer.
- Ideation. Next you must form an idea about what might be the answer to your question. Productive ideas are ones that we can chip away at through real-world tests and investigations. Ideation is the process of generating productive ideas and narrowing it down to one idea you move forward on.
- Articulation. Productive ideas don’t investigate themselves. You’ve got to put it in a format that lets you determine your idea’s ability to correctly answer your serious question. Transforming something from an idea to a real-world process, procedure, gadget, or systematic concept is articulation.
- Evaluation. Now that you’ve articulated the idea you think might answer your question you need to put it to the test. Compare your concept against real examples. Observe and probe your data. Run your model and see if it breaks. That’s the heart of evaluation.
- Verification. If your idea survives your evaluation (and most of them won’t) then it’s time to open your idea to deep challenges from others. It’s not a scientific discovery until other people have independently confirmed that your idea answers your starting question and that the way you articulated the answer holds up. Personally, I think two separate independent verifications plus your initial investigation are ideal because good things come in threes.
And that’s the discovery cycle in a nutshell.
The scientific discovery cycle is a human learning algorithm for scientific discovery.
You may move back and forth between scientific discovery phases as you make mistakes and learn new things. That’s normal. But in the end, if you discover something new, you will have evolved through all the phases at some point in the process.
Talking with other scientists, I’ve learned that how long you’ve worked with science (not a project) affects which phase is more likely to trip you up.
People new to science tend to get stuck on the question phase.
They don’t know what a good science question looks like. If this fits you, learning more about creativity, filling your knowledge gaps, and becoming more skilled at asking deep questions and mining published papers can help.
People who have some experience working with science, but haven’t spent a whole career on it, often struggle with the articulation phase.
They’ve got ideas, but they don’t know how to put them in productive testable forms. If this sounds like you, reading up on rapid prototyping, building mental models, and techniques like work sprints can help.
People who have made a career out of working in or around science frequently run out of ideas and struggle with ideation.
They may feel like everything’s been done. Or that every idea is bound to fail (or get ignored) anyway. Sometimes they can’t imagine better solutions than the good solutions they already know. If this describes you, then looking into techniques to get around the Einstellung effect or how to think of more “subtractive solutions” might help.
Those are the three main phases where most individuals get stuck and lose momentum in the scientific discovery cycle: the question, ideation, and articulation phases.
Just to be thorough, if the evaluation phase is where you struggle try things like practicing Fermi questions, toy model techniques, or “why not?” counter-thinking. Verification problems are usually about convincing others to engage with your proposed discoveries enough to test your ideas in a public forum. Learning better communication skills can make the difference.
Most scientific discovery projects must pass through all five evolution stages—question, ideation, articulation, evaluation, and verification—to succeed.
Knowing which stage you’re stuck in can point you toward techniques to help you get past an obstacle.
And being clear on where you are in the discovery cycle can tell you what not to do, like getting lost in brainstorming hacks (ideation) when what you need are strategies to create a new metric to measure something (articulation).
Use this discovery cycle framework like a teacher who points out where you are in your project and what needs more work.
Simply put, a mental picture of the scientific discovery cycle is your ultimate personal coach.
Reflection Question
What phase are you in on a discovery project you are working on, or planning, and what’s keeping you from moving to the next stage?
Related Links
On The Insightful Scientist (InSci) website
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- Asking a serious questions moves your odds of making a scientific discovery from impossible to possible
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- When to overthink things to help yourself make a scientific discovery
- How a concept called “articulation” explains where your good science ideas die
- Why your wrong ideas and failed attempts move you toward making a scientific discovery
- How to know when you can finally claim (and celebrate) that you’ve made a scientific discovery
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How to cite this post
Bernadette K. Cogswell, “A mental picture of the scientific discovery cycle is your ultimate personal coach”, The Insightful Scientist Blog, September 24, 2021.
[Page feature photo: Photo by DeepMind on Unsplash.]