Competition vs. cooperation: We hear this debate a lot at Gemini. We have our scientists and vendors asking for more cooperation while our funders and over-seers are asking for more competition. It can even sometimes be a bit ironic when we want to buy something (or at least consider buying something) from another nationally funded institution that is legally prohibited from selling products in an open competition while Gemini’s governing rules prohibit us from buying things without an open competition. Other than the occasional procurement issue, though, what is the fuss really about?
Gemini believes that competition is the best way to drive down costs and increase scientific creativity. At a very fundamental level, Gemini is an international institute whose basic operating principles have open competitions at their core. Competition forces bidders to carefully consider what they want versus how much it ultimately costs. Competition forces bidders to focus on the key elements of their proposal in order to constrain costs and schedule. It forces them to drill down to the essence of their project- distilling their plan to meet their core goals without adding un-necessary features that don’t contribute to the primary mission. Some would argue that this approach disallows serendipitous discovery, but I would contend the best serendipitous discoveries come from instruments designed to do specific tasks extremely well, not from multi-purpose instruments that lacked a true focus. A focused project is one that usually survives the inevitable unexpected hurdles that get thrown in its way, while maintaining its core elements.
Gemini does not issue research grants; it issues contracts for finished products. While there may be some technological development in the process, we are usually in it for the finished product. Without a constraint on cost imposed by trying to win a competitive selection, instrument teams would be tempted to propose riskier and more complicated projects that could more easily end up spiralling out of control. Remember, we’re not talking a few hundred thousand dollar instruments any more, or even a few million. We’re talking tens of millions of dollars. At these cost levels, focus on maintaining the core elements while working to contain cost and schedule are critical for a project’s success.
The same philosophy as for instrumentation is also employed for science at Gemini. New instrument proposals are competed not only based on the instrument design, costs, and capabilities, but on the associated scientific plan of how the instrument would be used. Astronomer instrumentalists can often accept the competitive approach for these large instruments, but the science teams have more trouble. Can’t we all just get along and work together? We’d have a better team if you didn’t force us into separate camps that don’t talk to each other and share our results. I have some sympathy for these concerns, but even so, as in the hardware case, competition forces a scientific focus that often reveals more clever ways to get the same science done with fewer resources than was thought before. Once the scientific case (be it part of an instrument procurement, or an independent long-term instrument campaign) is chosen, Gemini believes in allowing the selected team to open up and bring in broadening participation from the community, even including scientists in the teams that weren’t selected. Competition with cooperation.
Scientists often complain that this competitive, selective approach is not how they are used to working and that Gemini should be a uniter, not a divider. Yet, these same scientists compete openly for telescope time and research grants. Aren’t these activities equally competitive and divisive at their core? Why do we have telescope allocation committees and not just distribute the number of available nights evenly to our entire community of observational astronomers? The answer is, of course, obvious: we hold competitions for telescope time because telescope time is a limited resource and we want to make the most of it by allocating it to only the projects most likely to return the greatest scientific yield. Holding a science competition for an instrument or a long term campaign, then, is really no different.
So what’s the real issue here? Is the sentiment really that competition is unfair and against the scientific norm? Clearly not. Is it that Gemini’s approach divides the community rather than unifies it? Well, there could be something here, but how different is it than an NSF or NASA grant or instrument proposal? One thing Gemini has to ensure, though, is that the opportunities to compete are open to all in our community and that after the competition has been settled, there is a mechanism, and maybe even an encouragement or requirement, to open up and allow more participation by those presumably locked out after the competition.
No, the real problem here, I think, is an issue that astronomy simply has not yet comes to terms with: how do we manage our large projects? Do we adopt the formal ways of commercial project management, or do we rely on the heroics of the talented few individuals who have the scientific acumen combined with the technological know-how and the tireless work ethic to individually (or with a small core team) see a project through to success? Astronomy was founded on the tireless and incredible efforts of this latter class of amazing people, yet as projects get bigger and more numerous, I think it becomes harder and harder, eventually impossible, to find individuals who can handle these projects the way they did smaller ones. No, it’s clear, 8-figure (in $US) projects are too big to be run by these amazing individuals. With multiple institutes spread across the world, often bound together by complex federal-level agreements each with different circumstances and bureaucracies, astronomy must adopt some set of formal management processes and structures. There is no choice.
I believe we must, however, still maintain some sense of that earlier spirit of super-astronomer can-do-it-all. We aren’t building a widget we can mass-produce and sell to zillions of consumers all over the world. We are building unique, focused instruments and facilities to answer new and relevant questions about our Universe and our place within it. If a project comes in on time and on budget, yet the science has passed it by, the project is a failure. We therefore need professional managers who also thoroughly understand modern astronomy, but since very few business school graduates took anything beyond Astronomy 101 in college, we also need professional astronomers who thoroughly understand modern management practices. Hence my quest for astronomers to take management seriously, to develop a career path which recognizes and values management when operating hand in hand with scientific purpose, and to train our managers to really learn and practice solid management techniques. We can’t just take our bright astronomers who are a little less socially awkward than the rest of us, make them managers, and expect our projects to succeed. No, we have to crossover and combine our astronomical sense of purpose with a dedication to realizing them through purposeful management of people and projects who often have no desire to be managed.
Scot was one who thought he never needed to be managed and that astronomy didn’t need “bureaucratic” management. That is, until he looked around at his fellow graduate students in his group and realized all their dissertation projects were important pieces of a larger puzzle. They clearly followed from the work of students past and together, visibly broke new ground in understanding their field. This coordination of topics didn’t happen by chance; it was carefully orchestrated by his professors who would have sworn they, too, had no room for managers. Scot was being managed, whether he knew it then, or not.