HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK

National Research Priorities Strategic Forum

The Shine Dome, Canberra, 26-27 June 2002

CSIRO's Big Hairy Audacious Goals
by Graham Harris

Graham Harris is Chair of CSIRO Flagship Programs and is an eminent ecologist and freshwater and marine biologist. He was formerly Chief, CSIRO Land and Water; Manager, CSIRO Environmental Projects Office and Director, CSIRO Office of Space Science and Applications. In 2002 he was elected a Member of the International Water Academy. He has an international reputation for work in aquatic and terrestrial ecology, freshwater biology, pollution monitoring, biological oceanography and remote sensing, publishing more than 100 papers and four books. He has also done leading work in fisheries dynamics and the effects of climate variability.

First let me look at the external environment. I really want to give a big plug to Bruce Hobbs, because he started this process of thinking about the future with his Brodie Hall lecture a couple of years ago, back in 2000, and started to look at the external environment. This included:

• Ageing population, population growth ceases around 2040
• Move to services dominated economy – globalisation, low $
• Liquid fuels crunch – energy – Greenhouse, climate change
• Minerals exploration, resource depletion
• Environmental degradation, salinity, water, biodiversity
• Economic growth threatened by environmental degradation?

I heard the minister talking at the dinner last night about what is the national vision, what are the national policy imperatives. Some of them are clearly covered in here, in that if we want to maintain high GDP growth, if we want to continue to be a wealthy nation, there are some interesting constraints as we roll forward.

Secondly I want to make the point that society around us as a group of scientists is changing quite dramatically with major changes in society:

• Requirement for high GDP growth, global competitiveness
• Major socio-economic changes post 1972 – also last 10 yrs
• Post-modernism, power, trust, ethics – more people centric
• Subsidiarity, gender, other voices – other ways of knowing
• Reduced respect for institutions, 'national icons' at risk

There is a real need for science to be involved. Science, as we have heard, needs to demonstrate that it can make a difference, and the social context is critical. I think for too long the science community has tended to feel that it could operate as a monastic society where magical things went on inside old stone buildings. That has totally changed, and at CSIRO one of Geoff Garrett's actions is to look out – with about three exclamation marks behind it.

As a result of the above, the nature of science in CSIRO is changing very quickly. We have moved away from what Peter Cullen would call the 'slip the cheque under the door' mode of doing science, the mode 1 of the lone boffin in the lab, to a much more context-sensitive, much more involved mode of doing science. I like to think that we have even got past the academics and the science policy research units and gone into mode 3: we are actually out there talking to people, influencing the market for what we do.

We have got a very strong outcome orientation, we are very much involved in adoption strategies and how do you get from go to whoa, how do you make a difference? Most of the opportunities that we have identified now are very complex transdisciplinary science opportunities. We need to manage the synergies between the disciplines that we have in CSIRO and with our partners. We need to synthesise and integrate. We have to have partners in order to do this. And you start to see words in my presentation like 'values', 'ethics' and 'integrity'. These are absolutely critical for the way we operate.

We are moving rapidly in CSIRO from a research institution which somebody wittily said to me the other day was actually a franchise, to a much more unified enterprise which we are driving now to have some global reach. The changes inside CSIRO are a piece of interesting social science research in themselves, I think, at the moment.

CSIRO's role itself is changing into a level of much more complexity and great uncertainty; much more fluidity in relationships; as I said, much more emphasis on trust and ethics; and relationships before money. Isn't that a change in the way CSIRO operates! We are dealing with society in the values domain. It is a real organisational challenge for us. Bruce has talked about the change to an investor/performer relationship, he talked a bit about the fact that we have done a lot of benefit-cost ratios to demonstrate that we can perform, generate value. Overall, what this is for CSIRO – the biophysical challenge, the socio-economic challenge, the social challenge of managing a billion-dollar corporation, which is what we will be this year – is a very interesting and rapid evolution. The BHAGs (the Big Hairy Audacious Goals that we set ourselves) and the Flagship Programs which I chair, which are the delivery mechanism, are really a demonstration of a very new and inclusive modus operandi for CSIRO.

We have turned the spectrum around. We used to operate from the bottom left upwards – this change is not complete, I might say; it is still happening – when you tend to find scientists saying, 'I've got this trick. I've got this piece of kit. I've got this piece of engineering. Somebody must want to fund me to do something with it.' That is how we got the '2,000 lb gorilla with dollar signs behind the eyes' reputation. What we are now doing is turning it around and going up to the top end and saying, 'What are the issues, guys? What are the visions? What do you need? What are the requirements?' and then reflecting that back down through a series of issues and priorities which we can actually add some value to, in partnership and in alliance with other research and other providers to define a set of research requirements. And, by the way, this stops rebadging. If you run a bottom-up selection process, rebadging is a fine and arcane art which is alive and well in the academic community. It is alive and well in CSIRO. But if, in fact, you set out with some commissioned requirements, you can stop that. So we are not rebadging in CSIRO. We are defining what we need, who we need to work with us in order to deliver it, and we take a make-or-buy decision right across the organisation and indeed in other research providers, other organisations. I do not rule out spending CSIRO's money, say, in a university somewhere.

So we need to define: what are the issues, what are the priorities, where are we going, how do science and other disciplines make a difference, how do we put the package together?

We have got a really fascinating challenge on our hands, firstly to integrate inside CSIRO – and do not underestimate the complexity and magnitude of that task – and, having done that or at the same time, integrate throughout other universities, other research providers, across all the jurisdictions. I was fascinated listening to the Canadian story this morning. I have spent my entire life in Canada and Australia, two countries that the Poms set up with the most crazy constitutions. We deal with these every day of the week, in various combinations, through the jurisdictions and then into community and society.

This has got to be adaptive, it has got to be context-sensitive, it has got to be recursive, if we are to all come to an agreed position. But remember, science is only 10 to 20 per cent of that package. If you are trying to set up a company, if you are trying to get a farmer to change the way he manages his land, all kinds of things including tax policy and incentives have to be in place. So when we are setting national priorities for research, my challenge to the Chief Scientist is to go engineer the other 80 per cent of the game so we are successful – please. I think that's your responsibility.

One of the reasons it is difficult is that we are playing time scales and purposes here. We know that science and culture is a long-term game. We know that it takes, what, 20 years, to go from high smelt, from one end to the other, to commercial. But we are obliged to get our money from price-to-earnings ratios of 35, and markets where three months is a long time. We therefore need partnerships and alliances and various other kinds of mechanisms for bridging those time scales. I think we are getting quite good at it, but don't underestimate the difficulty and complexity of what we are trying to do. We really need to have a series of defined partnerships, alliances, mechanisms, incentives, all to make this happen.

So, Big Hairy Goals. Geoff Garrett arrived 18 months ago and said, 'What are the big issues? I've just arrived in this country. Where is science really going to make a difference? Where is CSIRO going?' Over the last 18 months, led by Bruce Hobbs and others, we have put it through a whole series of discussions and fora which have looked at a number of options, based around Healthy, wealthy and wise, based around our old, fairly well-tried and true attractiveness and feasibility format which we have been using since the Stocker era.

We have put a lot of grunt into the attractiveness – with the Centre for International Economics process, – and we are able to demonstrate that we are a place where you can invest to generate some value. The feasibility side of it I think is now driven by the 'partner or perish' mantra, the 'focus, focus, focus' mantra. That is, if we don't have the skills, if you really want to capture benefits, you need critical mass. If we don't have them, we go partner with somebody who does.

So what CSIRO has been trying to do here is to put together a one-CSIRO, one-Australia, inclusive, whole-of-chain approach. We are working this through, and we want our goals to be everybody else's goals. Indeed, we really think we have succeeded when somebody stands up and reflects our own words back to us. We don't care who takes credit on this; we are seeding these in to the process.

A BHAG, then, a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, is a thematic national priority. It is about an issue, it is a stretching goal to do with healthier old age, restoring the Murray, saving the Reef, energy beyond Kyoto, whatever. They are designed to be exciting, inspiring and aligning, and they are working. We are now getting people coming to us; they want to be on board. It is a vehicle to link us together and with the outside, and to channel effort in an integrated way and to build some long-term capacity. You can go up into the world of fashion and get some short-term money, but we need to build some long-term capacity. And we know we have got to have short-term and long-term deliverables.

The Flagship Programs, then, are the means of delivering on the goals. They are about differentiating CSIRO. We are a billion-dollar corporation. We can move horse-power. And, as I will show you, we are shifting significant chunks of budget here. We are assembling programs which we hope will help scale, scope and impact, and we are doing both post and ex ante benefit-cost analyses. Before we start we are doing the kind of analysis that Bruce Hobbs was talking about. We want both a one-CSIRO and a one-Australia approach, we want critical mass, we want to generate value – frankly, we should have done this years ago. We have been on it now for about 12 months, a bit more.

By the end of the triennium, around three or four years away, we want 30 to 40 per cent of our appropriation budget moved into these initiatives. Now, anybody that runs a research organisation and knows what flexibility is about will know the kind of pain and suffering that that is going to cause, but we have already set off down that track and we will get there. We are looking for maximum synergy between our emerging science areas and our Flagship Programs too. It is all about time scales and investment here. We are trying to invest in order to produce some real, different outcomes.

The planning framework is pretty standard. We have gone through the process of selecting some alternatives, generating those and thinking about which ones might be the best, and we are still developing project plans. We are trying to figure out where a focused investment in science is really going to make a difference at the national level. Once we have figured that out, we will take some investment decisions. We will then execute in a very determined, project managed way, and deliver and stop it. These are not designed to last forever. There was quite a bit of political judgment went into the choice, and quite a bit of forward looking in terms of: what's the probability of success and impact here? We have done some of the Centre for International Economics analyses.

So, at the moment, there are the seven themes that we are taking options on:

• Energy
• Healthy country, which is around water and salinity
• Preventative health
• Light metals, because of its importance to the national economy – magnesium just coming on stream, aluminium a major driver of the Australia economy (we are the world's biggest alumina exporter)
• Agri-Food
• E-Australia
• Oceans.

Some may not make it. If we can't put together a partnership, really make a difference, we will not do it. And of course we are involved in and aligned with and supportive of all the priorities processes that are going on at the Commonwealth and state level at the moment. There are a few states doing the same kind of thing.

What are the kinds of goals? I like to use the term 'ethical wealth'. Ethics means a sense of the other, and a sense of shared responsibility. It is about staying wealthy because we have got to manage the continent. We all want to be wealthy, but it is also about sustainability, it is about health, about wisdom. There are synergies between these goals. These are not yet the definitive goals but they are:

• Healthier old people and reduced health costs
• A new minerals (Titanium) industry, export revenue
• Increased value-added food exports
• Smart Towns, high bandwidth for the Bush
• Sustainable energy, making Kyoto irrelevant
• Sustainable landscapes, water for all.for ever
• Exploring the ocean realm – sustainable development

Just one or two examples: one is Preventative health, something that Richard Head will step down as Chief of Health Sciences and Nutrition to lead over the next few weeks. It is about reducing the burden, reducing the cost, capturing real opportunities across an enormous spread of disciplines. We have got the task of putting together opportunities from information science, health database networks, through the genetics, the population studies, right through to the proteomics and genomics on the other end. This is about horizontal integration and it is an opportunity which we think is a unique one at this time, and we are working closely with people like NHMRC and others to develop this. This is not just the CSIRO push, this is a one-Australia push. It links directly into turning Australia into a top-five global exporter for things like quality and functional foods – again we are looking at the whole value chain, from new crops grown in new ways, genomics right through to delivery to customers, successful global businesses. It is a whole-of-chain approach to the problem that we are trying to put together here.

Another example is Light metals. We are massively the world's largest exporter of alumina – we have just set up and started the Australian Magnesium Corporation, we want to get into titanium. So here we are carrying a range of outcomes. We are using internationally accepted road maps here to define what the bankable research opportunities are. We have got a range of risks, from low risk to a high payoff in the aluminum area, right through to some really speculative high-risk stuff in the titanium area: can we really cut the cost of manufacturing titanium in half? If we can do that, it will suddenly become a very common metal. At the same time there are fascinating synergies with the whole energy-greenhouse problem, because not only is this one of the biggest energy consumers, it is one of the biggest greenhouse gas producers as well. So if we can do it sustainably, if we can do it more cheaply, we can lead the world in this area.

E-Australia, Smart towns, Rural services, E-health: can we deliver health care to rural communities over high bandwidth links? Can we produce, therefore, improved care, reduced costs and all kinds of knowledge export services and so on? Can we turn on city-quality services in regional Australia?

In Energy transformed we are trying to make some real paradigm shifts. We are trying to dramatically increase the efficiency of motor vehicles by going to hybrid technologies. In terms of electricity generation, we are really trying to again jump the paradigm and the efficiency gap from reasonably efficient turbines up to much more efficient distributed and various solar value-added fuels. We have already demonstrated the E-Commodore, which is a unique vehicle. Indeed, I understand one of the reasons it is not on the road, other than the finance, is that it has got such phenomenal acceleration, with its electric drive train, that it is probably not legal.  And again there are all the synergies with titanium and light metals and all the other things that you would want to build in there.

So, all sorts of opportunities to capture benefit in a whole variety of ways, from spin-out companies right through to the triple bottom line and greenhouse. These are the kinds of synergies that we want to see also in Healthy country. It is about revitalising landscapes – innovative solutions are required; considerable cost to the economy; and in terms of subsidiarity, the biggest challenge that we face, because the Prime Minister's national action plan has empowered 21 catchment groups around the country, which we and others as research providers now must deal with. We are not used, in CSIRO, to dealing with regional catchment groups, but these guys now have the resources, so we have got to change the way we do business and deal with the community face to face on their own turf.

Finally, Wealth from oceans. We need to know the consequences of failing to understand the collective impact on that environment. We want to develop the marine realm but we don't want to make the kind of mistakes that we have made in the terrestrial environment, and we want to put the seascape back together, if you like, in places where we have done it and we want to avoid making mistakes.

Let me conclude, then, with two comments. There are some very significant management challenges here in terms of capturing both what CSIRO is doing and the nation's activities in terms of the triple bottom line. There are obvious synergies between the BHAGs, the national research priorities – whatever they turn out to be – and also the areas of ARC and CSIRO's hot science investments. We have got to capture those synergies, and I think that is one of the national challenges. Not only is CSIRO working together and operating as a corporation, but now we have got the challenge of putting it together at the national level. That is a significant management challenge.

The policy linkages, the socio-economic integration, the links to the other Academies, are critical because there is a social environment and science can only make a difference if those other incentives are right. Science is only 10 to 20 per cent of the action when you are trying to make a difference at the national and international level. The challenge is to get a lot of the other action together now we have set off down this path.

Finally, there are the meta-BHAGs, which are the linkages between what we are trying to set up here – the fact that landscapes influence the oceans, energy involves biomass fuels but also involves health impacts. One of my most stimulating tasks is to really draw out those synergies and manage them effectively. Then, listed around the outside, are some of the policy initiatives that we have on the go at the moment, which of course these play into as well. And once we get into the national priorities agenda, there will be some very important national policy synergies that we have to work on.

So we have just embarked upon a whole new level of complexity in the way science engages not only with itself and the rest of the academic community but with the nation and with the rest of the world. I think this is one of the most stimulating and exciting challenges that we as a community have faced in probably a decade or more.

Session 7 discussion