Garth Paltridge Asks: Has the CSIRO Lost Its Way? (October 27, 2012)

In a ~2,300 word article published originally in the October 19. 2012 Australian Financial Review and updated on October 26 Dr Garth Paltridge a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, an emeritus professor at the University of Tasmania and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University cogently analyses the current management structure of CSIRO. 

He was also a chief research scientist with the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research and the chief executive of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Co-operative Research Centre.

Some excerpts from his AFR article.

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[CSIRO chiefs] became cogs in a machine, with much less ability to influence the scientific direction of their divisions, and much less inclination to question the views expressed by the organisation as a whole.
 

And what a machine! Nowadays the CSIRO operates under a matrix management system that runs into problems even in the engineering world for which it was originally designed. It is more or less bound to maximise both the scale of the management process and the number of its management personnel. Its major characteristic is a diffusion of the lines of responsibility. It has multiple reporting avenues that vastly increase the time a scientist spends on bureaucracy rather than research. Responding to formal reviews of one kind or another, preparing unreadable (and mostly unread) reports to stakeholders, and generally playing a survival game in a multi-boss environment – all of these occupations, while no doubt music to the ears of many a public service organisation, are not conducive to good and original research.

The bottom line is that research by the CSIRO has become very expensive. Small business is priced out of direct access to the CSIRO’s expertise, and business of any size is wary of interaction simply because of the CSIRO’s reputation for excessive bureaucracy and aversion to risk... generating money has become a significant responsibility of all CSIRO scientists, not just the administrators. The sources of such income in the case of the “public good” divisions inevitably boil down to other federal and state government departments.

[T]he pendulum of the CSIRO’s philosophy has swung from what was probably an overemphasis on the basic research of individual scientists to an extreme and debilitating concern with the mechanics of management. Perhaps the most significant of the many negative aspects of the new style is a reluctance of business in general, and small business in particular, to deal with the CSIRO at all. Its reputation for treating a collaborator as no more than a cash cow is not exactly attractive to private companies.

[CSIRO] needs to maintain a goodly fraction of high quality, even if only vaguely relevant, fundamental research capacity that can be diverted as required into whatever is the current field of interest. An emphasis on an ultimate advisory role suggests a deliberate cultivation of a research flexibility whereby scientists can expect to change field, and even discipline, every so often throughout their careers. The current system is not designed that way. The CSIRO tends to employ new and additional research staff whenever there is a change of direction towards a more fashionable problem. The result is an increase of its salary bill that forces a greater reliance upon external funds.

It is not to say either that the CSIRO should avoid involvement with industrial development. Agriculture, for instance, is a key example where Australia should carry out its own basic and applied research... [and] there should be a complete rethink of the mechanics of the organisation’s research management... Hopefully it could be shaped so as to reinstate an emphasis on the scientific role of the divisional chiefs.

[Finally] CSIRO needs to steer clear of the public service philosophy that politicians should be protected from conflicting advice. Science is, after all, about uncertainty. And politicians, after all, are paid precisely for the purpose of making decisions in the face of uncertainty and diverse opinion.