The multiple hardnesses of impact

Through one of those coincidences of timing, I've found myself thinking about (and talking about) impact quite a bit today - specifically how impact relates to engagement.  Is impact a subset of engagement, or vice versa?  Personally, I like to think that they are two complementary activities, but can you get one without the other? You could have impact without being involved in engagement yourself, but presumably there must be some way for the knowledge or learning to be shared - information doesn't travel in a vacuum*.  So it comes down to questions about direct and indirect channels for knowledge exchange.  You could engage without impact, unless you consider that every act produces a (possibly minute) impact. After all, you wouldn't do something if the consequence would be exactly the same as not doing it.  So it comes down to questions of tangible outputs and measurability.  It seems to me that impact and engagement are intrinsically linked.

Two other, potentially dangerous themes emerged from the conversations today. First was the idea that engagement is soft and fluffy whilst impact is hard - using the definition of hard that means resistant to changing shape.  Whilst I'm not keen on the choice of terminology**, I can see where people are coming from.  Impact is frequently considered to be quantifiable – from REF outputs to Key Performance Indicators.  Metrics are the ultimate goal of impact, even if they’re not always about the pound sign.  Engagement is a lot harder to put in such a nice neat box, partly because so many of the outcomes are qualitative, diverse and intangible.  But engagement is also as much about the process as it is the product – the journey matters, not just what is achieved at the end.

The second (and much more concerning) theme was that engagement is easy and impact is hard – using the definition of hard that suggests a level of difficulty.  Now this I do refute.  I can only presume it was meant along the lines of “well everyone can communicate so how hard can this engagement thing be anyway?”.  But genuinely good engagement is either the result of prodigious natural skill or huge amounts of practice and hard work (or most likely, both).  By comparison you could say we can all do research because we can potter around a lab or library and fiddle with some stuff.  Our leading researchers are in that position because they can harness the materials around them to create a masterpiece – the same is true of engagement.

When considering the effect that research has on society, it’s worrying to see impact being held up as the gold standard whilst engagement is damned with adjectives that suggest it’s not really for those who are serious about academia.  But maybe we’re trying too hard to cling to rigid and outdated definitions of impact and engagement.  They may have started out with different agendas, but realistically both now come under the banner of ensuring that our research has meaning in, and for, society.  Perhaps it’s time for some new terminology that encompasses both impact and engagement…

* Note to any science pedants reading this, this is a metaphorical expression not a technical one!   
** I’m trying really hard not to interpret soft and fluffy as a pejorative term - akin to tree-hugging, leftie idealist tropes. I can’t tell if that is the case and it would be the subject for a whole other post!