What exactly do you want?

As I work with increasingly large teams of chemists, I’ve realised an inescapable fact: people often don’t want what they say they want. I don’t mean in interpersonal relationships where communication needs to be clear, but rather when people or groups with different skill sets get together on a project.

It can be hard to set expectations in those situations, because you don’t necessarily understand what is easy and what is hard in the other experts’ worlds. I’ve heard of a chemist who came up with a hare-brained scheme to use state-of-the-art image analysis to analyse their pictorial, human-readable output files, without having asked anyone familiar with programming. The eventual much easier, less intensive and more accurate solution was simply to use very basic scripting to pull out the numbers directly from the structured file the equipment also already produced.

Since I now work in diverse teams more than ever, I’ve learned to ask a lot of probing questions when being asked for something specific. Are they sure they need that input format? Did they know their existing technology can already do something similar? How will they determine when they have a successful outcome?

Sometimes people unknowingly ask for mountains when a molehill (and not of the Avogadro sort) would suffice. Someone recently told me that they wanted all the chemical structures from a tool to appear in ‘ChemDraw format’. That could have been relatively hard to do in a reliable way in this instance, proprietary format and all. But it turned out all they needed was anything that looked like a structure to a human reader. In fact, although it’s almost always best to employ methods that allow anyone to get back to the original data, here a simple image was the best format as the results would be passed through a regulatory process and so must never be edited.

All over the map

We do this in all kinds of ways: not just with programmers. I’ve talked before about inefficiencies in the way we work, and not understanding the ideal mechanisms to achieve our goals is a big culprit in wasting time. I attended an outstanding workshop at a conference this year, where the consultant showed a real workflow he had been called in to fix. The slides showed a ‘process map’: an invaluable tool used to show the detailed steps we follow, sometimes without thinking too hard about them, in our day-to-day. This depicted a tangle of interactions: looking up information but failing to record for the next person to track down again, an unnecessary multilayer approval process that repeated itself, and lots of printing physical documents that it turned out nobody actually wanted.

We laughed out loud as he described what would have been ludicrous decisions if they had been presented to the team as a neatly packaged proposal of how to perform this job. We put our hands up and shouted out the ‘obvious’ steps to take, and within a 90-minute session had reduced the process from days to just a few hours: removing pain, reducing stress and ultimately making drugs faster. But we had all worked with processes like this before. The monstrous workflow had come about by new iterations being piled on top of existing bloat, without reassessing whether the old ways still made sense – and it’s shockingly common.

The greatest chance to build success is by sharing with colleagues with different backgrounds to us

Part of this issue is the users not understanding exactly what they want, compared to what they think they want. A chemist meeting a new challenge might endeavour to find a way through as best they can, without considering the parts that only affect other people. Their new hack is a deceleration in big picture terms. When that happens a few times over from different people who never look at the overall landscape, these nonsensical leviathan processes develop.

Having an overall project or area lead is incredibly helpful to counteract this. When there is a person or stakeholder group whose function is always to look over the full project, unintended consequences of small changes can be avoided. And you don’t have to be in charge to increase your own communication with people with divergent skill sets – which will benefit you for future work, too.

Many chemists, myself included, are learning to accelerate their work by growing their own technological skill sets. However, it’s important to remember that the basics are a far cry from expert-level implementation by somebody who has spent their whole career in a field. Besides, even an external, inexpert pair of eyes can reveal opportunities. When we share successes and challenges, whether it’s in the form of internal ‘papers’, company social media posts or just chatting in the coffee area, the greatest chance to build success is by sharing with colleagues with different backgrounds to us.