Transcriber: Aijia Yang Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
When I was a kid around eight, nine years old,
I really enjoyed going with my father at work.
He was repairing computers, what we called computers at that time.
There were huge machines that were doing some simple calculation, but they were,
for me, fascinating, what a machine could do.
And I was fascinated and I still remember the picture of
the instrument my father was using to measure current, to measure resistance,
to measure the frequencies -- in order to repair those computers.
And I was fascinated by the process he was using,
the methodology he was using to identify the mistakes and fixing it.
So since that time, I’ve been fascinated and intrigued by science and technology.
First, I was attracted by astronomy, the unknown of the universe,
the huge, unexplained mechanism that govern it.
Then I moves into civil engineering,
architecture and understanding how engineers can master
the law of physics,
and the properties of material to build such beautiful equipment
and buildings where we live in.
I then move to biology, understanding the beauty of nature discoveries,
the complexity of those systems and how those systems evolve over time
and self-repair as we learned this morning.
And I was then moving into science and I decided to study biology.
I wanted to become a scientist and lead discoveries.
And during my Ph.D. time,
I quickly realized that it’s not simply about science.
I observed brilliant scientists during the Ph.D.,
and those brilliant scientists were struggling to maximize their potential.
Either they had the wrong project, they had the wrong professor,
the wrong leaders, the wrong colleagues, the wrong environment,
the wrong moment in which they were doing the discoveries
and they were spiraling down into me both emotionally and professionally
as they were not able to maximize their potential.
So what I attempted to do at that time, I said,
how can I help them become a better scientist --
and have to say during my Ph.D. I was not successful at all.
I was not really able to help them improve their situation.
But it made me realize that rather than practicing science,
my mission in life,
what I wanted to do, was to enable science.
And what do I mean by enable science?
And it’s something that I want to talk about with you today.
Before doing that, I want to introduce you to Verena Mohoje.
She’s a logistics -- and you see the picture of her,
and I just got sick from the picture.
She’s a logistics chief of an Arctic mission
that in 2009 was organized.
The mission was called MOSAiC.
And it was about 300 multi-disciplinary scientists
that were going with an icebreaker ship towards the Arctic
for scientific discovery.
That ship then linked into a big chunk of ice,
and was floating with the ice in the Arctic for over a year.
And you can imagine that scientists are not really trained to leave
and to experiment in those environments.
So, you know, it’s very cold, it’s dark.
It’s pretty dangerous.
You may lose your instrument with the melting ice.
You may have a polar bear sniffing around you
while you’re doing your experiment.
And whereas this was not the expertise of this scientist were on the boat,
it’s the expertise of Verena Mohoje.
And she ensured over the course of the year
the safety of those people.
She trained them on how to handle difficult situations.
She ensured that the psychological status
was properly met and at times as well,
she was ensuring that the polar bear
were not approaching and getting closer to the scientists.
So her work allowed those 300 scientists to do generate
an unprecedented amount of scientific data about global warming,
about how our atmosphere is evolving,
and no wonder that she was recognized by Nature
as one of the 10 most influential people that contributed to science in 2020.
So going back to myself, I think that scientists
and group of scientists are in a similar situation,
like when you are in the Arctic, you are facing challenges, you’re facing risks,
you're facing adversities.
And the job that they have been doing over the last 27 years
has been leading science, and leading scientific groups.
And as Verena was providing safety to the scientists,
my attempt was to provide safety to those group of scientists,
whether they can perform at their best.
And it has been an extremely rewarding experience,
a difficult one because I was not successful all the time, far from there.
But it’s a rewarding experience because you get the results at the end of the day,
and you see the people maximizing their potential.
They’re developing, they’re becoming great scientists,
they're becoming great leaders.
And that’s really what is rewarding for me in leading scientific groups.
It’s about people management, but it’s more than people management.
It’s about enabling and putting the right conditions
so that science can succeed
and can be turned into scientific discoveries.
And I think there are a number of examples this morning of how
if those conditions are not met,
if they are not properly managed, the science is not happening.
We have to fight it through with your stick, basically.
And that’s what I think having an enabling science leader
is going to make a difference in driving and science in the future.
So what is my recipe to enabling science leadership, as we can call it?
And there are three major buckets.
The first one is about people and leadership, equally the x factor.
The second one is about the environment and the thinking model.
Is it impact multiplying factor?
And the third one is around tools and skills and know-how,
which is also known as a process.
Let me go one by one throughout them.
First, one of the most important of them,
if not the most important, is about people and about leadership.
It's about placing the right skills,
the right people with the right mindset at the right time in the right project
in the right context.
And that’s easily said, but very difficult to do.
And as I said before, I've not been always successful in doing this.
But you need to do that while providing the right context
and the right setting that enables that scientist to succeed.
And I still remember the example of it during my career of a project manager
that was doing an extremely good job as a project manager,
but he wanted to evolve, the scientist wanted to do more.
He wanted to contribute more.
So then he made an MBA and he tried to do more science and business
with limited success until the moment we decided to put him
in a project in a fully breakthrough innovation type of project
with a blank sheet of paper with a problem to solve; and here you go.
And it was just amazing how that scientist transformed into
a brilliant discoverer, brilliant creative person
whose creativity just got exposed and deployed,
and he became one of the major inventor of
a critical scientific discovery we were performing in that team.
So and again, make no mistake, I did not much, just put that person in --
I give him that challenge.
It was himself that made this happen.
It was his willingness to do it, his courage to take the risk,
his energy and drive to make this happen.
So it’s really the human potential, what they call the human potential,
that made that difference.
And you can be in whatever universities around the world.
It’s the human potential that matters
when it comes to enabling or being a good scientist.
And, I came to Armenia for the first time,
four or five years ago, and the human potential
was the factor that was most impressive for me.
The level of human potential that you have in this country is just impressive.
And that made us decide jointly with the scientific background
and the historical credibility that your country’s having,
to put an R&D center in this country
so that we can maximize the use of these human potentials
and also benefit the society at the same time.
The second area is what I say, an environment,
or the impact multiplier factor,
because that this is not sufficient to put the scientist there,
it needs to be in the right environment.
So what is the right environment?
Yes, you need the infrastructure, the physical infrastructure.
But what I mean here, it's more the different thinking,
the mix of thinking that you need to have in a team to be successful.
You need the creative people, but you need to have the pragmatist.
You need to have the Black Hat.
You need to have the people that make the connection
that enable projects that they are under
and that mix of the scientist, the mindset and the ways of thinking, is the one
that enables then the scientific discovery to happen.
But it’s not sufficient the diversity.
They need to be in a safe environment.
And why it’s so important to be safe?
Because you want the idea to flow, to come out.
The scientist needs to be at ease to do that.
You want the conflicts, but constructive conflict,
scientific constructive conflict to happen.
And you can only have that if you’re safe and you want the scientists --
which are known to be introverted, many of the scientists are introverted --
You want them to express their ideas because they don't express ideas.
And frequently, that’s the scientist that have the best ideas
and they have the truth.
If you don’t have the safe environment,
those introverted people will never express their idea.
So it’s really critical to have the right diversity,
a safe environment and the third,
you need to be having a stable environment because science takes time
and you cannot change constantly directions.
So you need to provide the right direction
and maintain the stability in the direction.
You need to provide the time for that science to happen.
The third factor I mentioned before, it’s about the tools and the know-how,
so you need to have the diversity of knowledge in a multidisciplinary [team],
that's an obvious one, and then you need to have the proper communication tools,
knowledge management tools, processes -- because science
it's about the discipline to make things happen in the right order,
with the right factors, looking at the right things in the sequence.
And that’s critical to be combined with the human factor,
and with the right environment.
And many times in organizations and institutes,
we think that just changing the process of a new innovation or methodology
you can implement it, it’s going to work.
We’re having a new organizational structure, it will make the change.
Don’t be fooled, if you don’t have the right human, the right people
at the right moment and with the right mindset,
then there is not going to happen.
So at the end of the day, the message is that
for science to be turned into discovery, into innovation,
you need a multitude of elements.
You need skills, you need diversity of people, you need the right environment,
you need to have the right challenges.
You need to have tools, but it’s only by orchestrating those factors
in the proper way --
And that’s the job of the enabling science leader,
that you can achieve the result that you want.
So through an enabling science leader, you can maximize the human potential.
You can leverage on the diversity of the people.
You provide the safety, the stability,
that enables great scientific discovery to happen.
You provide the processes and the tools so that is done
in an efficient manner.
So they’re to become an enabling scientist, they’re to enable science.
Thank you.