2.1 Examples of setbacks

Research setbacks take many forms. Recognising them and developing constructive responses can transform obstacles into opportunities for growth.You may encounter challenges such as:

In this video, Prof. Arosha Bandara explores how adopting a learning mindset can transform setbacks into opportunities for growth. He introduces the idea of the ‘power of yet’ and explains how reframing challenges can support long-term development and motivation in research.

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Transcript: Video 1: From setbacks to growth – learning, resilience, and the power of ‘yet’ in research.

Arosha Bandara

Hello, I’m Arosha Bhandara, a professor of software engineering at The Open University.

I’ve been an academic at The Open University since 2006, having completed my PhD at Imperial College London in 2005.

Today I’m going to talk about some of the research setbacks that I have experienced and some common research setbacks and how to overcome them.

The key thing I think I’ve learned through these setbacks is to see each of these events as an opportunity to learn and improve.

One recent example of one of these setbacks is in relation to a proposal I developed based on the idea of improving the socio-technical systems involved in healthcare.

I talked to lots of different people, including experts from other institutions and practitioners involved in providing care to others, and together we thought we had developed a really nice concept around what would be attractive to the funders.

We worked on it for many weeks and submitted our proposal and waited to hear back.

And three months later we heard that our proposal was not selected for further development and there wasn’t much feedback because there were too many proposals for the panel to give feedback on.

So this was really disappointing and I needed to take some time to accept this.

This was how things go sometimes.

But having accepted that, you know, disappointment was a natural reaction, I could then reflect on what was learned through the exercise and how those learnings could feed into my subsequent work.

In this case, it gave us a deeper understanding of the real world problems in the care sector, and ideas for other ways of engaging in the research that has potential to make a difference.

These types of experiences also taught me the importance of the power of yet.

You see, when I was unsuccessful in my research in some way, I would often internalise a feeling of inadequacy, which sometimes became the imposter phenomena, a sense of not feeling that I belonged in research.

But over time, I learned to appreciate the power of Yet not being successful in a research task wasn’t a permanent state.

And it’s not an indication that I’m incapable of doing something.

It just means that I haven’t been able to do it yet.

And this helped me engage my curiosity to reflect and learn and improve and increase my chances of success in the future.

Some common research setbacks that I’ve experienced, and many people do, include getting a bid rejected, a paper rejected, or missing a deadline.

When a paper gets rejected, consider the reviews feedback as dispassionately as possible.

Some comments may be invalid, but even when dismissing these, make sure to note the rationale for this decision.

Understanding why we think they’re invalid may actually open up some interesting lines of inquiry and improvement.

Other comments from reviewers will provide useful ideas on how to improve the work and resubmit it for consideration.

My experience is that being part of a team can be really helpful in this exercise because those other perspectives and interpretations help make sense of the reviewer’s comments more holistically and pick up things that otherwise would be missed.

If the initial paper was rejected from a conference, it’s worth considering submitting the revision to a journal instead, and that’s because there’s more opportunity for improving the paper further through interaction with reviewers before it’s accepted for publication.

When a bid gets rejected, this can be really hard because sometimes you don’t get a lot of feedback and bids always take a lot of effort to put together.

To overcome this lack of feedback, it can be useful to share the bid with colleagues in your wider professional network for comment and feedback directly.

This way you can get an independent view of how good your idea is and whether you’ve presented it effectively to convince reviewers and funders.

The key is to focus on what can be learned from the experience rather than the outcome itself.

It’s important to remember that these processes are highly competitive, and there are many other excellent researchers like you who would have also been unsuccessful.

Missing a deadline is more common than you might think.

Sometimes, despite my best efforts, I miss a deadline for a paper or a bid, and this is particularly hard when it involves other team members who also worked hard on achieving that same milestone.

In the moment of missing a deadline, there’s often some self doubt and perhaps even some blame about why we couldn’t hit our goal.

However, I make a point of reminding myself and others involved that we have still advanced our work and our thinking, and that there’ll be other opportunities to submit that bid or paper to another venue, hopefully in a more improved state and with a greater chance of success.

End transcript: Video 1: From setbacks to growth – learning, resilience, and the power of ‘yet’ in research.

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Video 1: From setbacks to growth – learning, resilience, and the power of ‘yet’ in research.