In the last ten years, a range of countries have invested in organisations designed to bridge the gap between researchers and policy makers. In the United Kingdom alone, we now have 12 What Works Centres, 30 Health Determinants Research Collaborations, three Local Policy Innovations Partnerships, several regional evidence centres, and dozens of policy engagement teams working in universities, businesses and charities.
The leadership of these evidence intermediaries is key to their effectiveness. But we know very little about their leaders – where they come, what they do, and what skills they need for the job. To help fill this gap, I conducted in-depth interviews with leaders of some of the UK’s most high-profile evidence intermediary organisations. Their stories provide fascinating ‘warts and all’ accounts of what it takes to lead an organisation that can overcome the formidable institutional barriers that often stand in the way of evidence-informed policy and practice.
Skillsets and mindsets
The leaders I interviewed were highly motivated individuals who were convinced that rigorous evidence can help improve policy decisions and service delivery. They came from a wide range of professional backgrounds and led very different organisations. But they gave strikingly similar accounts of the challenges they face and skills they need. They highlighted in particular the need to be:
- Highly attuned to policy makers’ and practitioners’ evidence needs;
- Credible to academic experts’
- Skilful strategists and effective communicators and;
- Effective people managers and accomplished fund raisers.
Alongside these key skillsets, they talked of the mindset needed to work in the informal spaces between academia and government. This mindset includes being:
- Able to cope with ambiguity;
- Agile enough to respond to the shifting sands of the political and policy contexts in which you work, and
- Highly resilient so that you can keep going, and keep up your teams going, when the evidence you provide is ignored by decision-makers.
What action should we take?
Of course, leaders of other types of organisations need many of the same attributes. But the task of leading an evidence intermediary calls for an unusual blend of boundary-spanning aptitudes and attitudes.
It is notable that none of the leaders I met had received any formal training for the role. They learned on the job and had made some blunders along the way. As Jonathan Breckon and his colleagues conclude in a recent report, the role of knowledge mobilisers remains ‘poorly understood and largely invisible’. And, as Matt Flinders has pointed out, it isn’t a job which traditional academic training equips you for. At present, there’s no established career path and we lack formal networks, training and professional bodies to connect leaders to each other and train up their successors.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We could do a lot more, at very little cost, to help current leaders of evidence intermediaries learn from and support each other. And we could draw on their experiences to establish programmes that equip the next generation of leaders for this unusual and important role. Government, universities and funders have invested heavily in evidence intermediaries, and they should all take an interest in maximising the return on this investment by putting in place a concerted and coherent approach to equipping their leaders.
This blogpost is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Leading research–policy engagement: an empirical analysis of the capabilities and characteristics of leaders of evidence intermediary organisations’.
Steve Martin is Emeritus Professor of Public Policy at Cardiff University and former Director of the Wales Centre for Public Policy.
Read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
Martin S.J. (2025). Leading research–policy engagement: an empirical analysis of the capabilities and characteristics of leaders of evidence intermediary organisations. Evidence & Policy. DOI: 10.1332/17442648Y2025D000000067. OPEN ACCESS