THE SUNSET – AND NEW BEGINNINGS
Dilip Soman
22 May 2024
The Behaviourally Informed Organizations (BI-Org) partnership that began in 2019 is now formally over. Several colleagues (in Canada and elsewhere) and I put together this partnership with the idea of creating a platform for people interested in embedding behavioural sciences in organizations to interact and to develop tools, research, and content that would help this community at large. In many ways, it is difficult to believe that the five years have ended - indeed, some around me were shocked to learn that the partnership can actually come to an end!
Given that BI-Org was an initiative funded by SSHRC and our many partners over a finite 5-year term, it has indeed come to an end (barring some loose ends that need to be closed out and reporting that needs to be completed), but I like to think of it as the beginning of a new era for applied behavioural science. The BEAR centre will continue to lead some of the work in this area.
There is much that BI-Org was able to do over the past five years, despite an unforeseen pandemic that threw most of our initial plans into complete disarray. The outputs from the partnership are all available on our web pages. In particular, I could point to the series of five edited books, a special magazine issue, about 21 white papers and reports, several op-ed pieces, a number of research initiatives that in some cases have already become journal articles and in many other cases will be submitted for publication, 32 webinars, and a number of conferences and events both online and in person. However, there are three outputs that I am particularly proud of.
The first of these three are the informal outcomes that the platform has been able to provide its members. Whether this took the form of visits to each other's organizations, lunch and learn sessions, the ability to pick up a phone and get advice from each other, or the sense of confidence that some of us got in knowing that others within the network supported our work, these valuable outcomes did not fall into the neat buckets defined by the funding agency. The second of the three are connections and community. We now have a core group of organizations and academic researchers that know and understand each other way better than they ever did before this formal partnership. This community will go on to grow and to include other members. We have already seen attempts to extend the work of this partnership both formally but also informally through the growth of other related initiatives like the Chief Behavioural Officers Summit, GAABS, and ABSA.
The third set of outputs relate to at least 150 people. These 150 came to the partnership as trainees - undergraduate students, graduate students, PhDs, postdoctoral researchers, full-time research associates, partnership managers, or knowledge translation specialists. In many cases, they came to the partnership knowing very little about the science or about how to embed it in organizations but have today gone on to get jobs in academia and in industry and are leaders in their own rights. The development of this pool of talent is perhaps the single biggest achievement that I am personally proud of.
In sum, have we been successful as a partnership? I believe we have. Have we done everything that we said we were going to do in our original proposal? No, absolutely not - a pandemic that we didn't know was around the corner made sure that we had to change plans quickly and adroitly. Did we do things that we said we were not going to do? Yes, we have, and these are things that I and all of us in the partnership are remarkably proud of.
I would like to thank everybody in the partnership for making the magic happen. In particular, I would like to thank everyone that has worked up “on the ninth floor” of the Rotman building (the nerve centre of the partnership), as well as our steering committee who tirelessly answered questions and showed us the way! In addition, our organizational partners, faculty and student collaborators and trainees were nothing short of spectacular. Many of these people will continue to work at BEAR. All these people have ensured that the partnership not only created magic during its five-year tenure but has provided fertile ground for more magic to happen in the years to come.
