Why Team Science Trainings Don’t Work

And why we need to keep doing them anyway

I get hired regularly to deliver Team Science trainings to graduate students, post-docs, and early-career researchers. The people who hire me, from career development folks to post-docs offices to faculty development deans, are well intentioned. They think if only their constituents had a little more training, they’d be able to collaborate better.

To the best of my knowledge, there is absolutely no evidence that Team Science trainings lead to better scientific collaboration.

(If you know of any, please share in the comments!)

In part, I think that’s because, as we’ve discussed with other kinds of Team Science interventions, we rarely have defined, measurable outcomes that we can point to for our trainings. What, precisely, are we trying to change with the trainings? What does “better collaboration” even mean? Does it lead to more publications? Better publications? Happier teams? Greater retention of staff and faculty?

And how would we measure these things in a way that is reliable and replicable, that adjusts for the mountain of system-level factors impacting how people science together.

Because, from my perspective as a coach and consultant to struggling investigators and science teams, the barriers to effective and efficient collaboration are not truly with the individuals or even the teams.

The barriers are almost always, in essence, structural. Systemic.

And yet we focus on training individuals as though they exist and work in a environment where everything is under their control.

That PI who won’t return your emails? She’s just been given four new committee assignments and has to cover the teaching load of a colleague who’s unexpectedly on medical leave. The data manager on your staff who is surly and snarky is tired of fighting with the IT people to have systems that work.

Sure, some people are just glassbowls. But most people are truly trying to do their best.

The generalized culture of overwork and overcommitment of academic research leaves people burned out and… just done. The academic research environment is simply not conducive to collaboration. It’s just not.

Team Science training can’t change that.

But it can start to build awareness of the challenges and opportunities of collaborative science that can lead those we train to start noticing the barriers, finding ways around them, and pushing for real change.

Universities invest tons of money in recruiting and training students, post-docs, and faculty, while not providing the infrastructure and systemic support that could truly make people’s work lives better. By drawing attention to the disconnect, by focusing on the systems that make collaboration easier, better, more effective, I’m hopeful that universities will start to pay attention.

System change is always hard, but perhaps even harder in academia, where the people at the top seem super extra committed to keeping things the same. (Don’t get me started on how the people making tenure decisions got their own promotions with a couple of modest papers and a submitted grant proposal while requiring today’s faculty to have three R01s and 10 papers in Nature!)

The real strength, I think, of Team Science training is that, done right, it makes participants aware of the structural barriers in their way while giving them some skills and strategies to work around those barriers. And maybe some language for explaining to those in power how things could be tweaked just the teeny-tiniest bit to make collaboration easier.

That means the trainings need to take a systems-level perspective on how to enhance collaborative research. They need to help researchers build research support systems that make their work easier while helping them understand the academic system in a way few do. We do such a disservice to grad students and post-docs by not pulling back the curtain on how universities truly function.

So, let’s keep creating Team Science trainings that lay bare for the next generation of scientists what might get in their way, how they can maneuver around those things, and how they can make things better for those who come after them.