Weβre Investing in Brain Research. But Not in the Brains Doing the Research.
Every year, organizations invest heavily in R&D by recruiting talented scientists and engineers, funding studies, and building research infrastructure. The implicit assumption is that if the science is strong, the investment will pay off.
That’s only half the equation.
Scientific insight has to travel. It moves from a researcher’s mind through a technical report, a cross-functional meeting, an executive briefing, and ultimately a budget decision. At every one of those points, it can stall, get misread, or simply fail to land with the people who have the authority to act on it. When that happens, the investment in the science goes with it.
This is not a hypothetical risk. It is a pattern that plays out routinely in research organizations. Consider the basic math of federal grant funding: the overall success rate for NIH R01-equivalent grants was 22% in 2023 — down from 32% in the late 1990s — meaning roughly four out of five applications don’t make it. [1] Some of those rejections reflect scientific merit. But a significant number reflect something more correctable: a researcher who couldn’t make the case compellingly enough, in the language the reviewers needed to hear, within the constraints of the format. The science was there; the communication around it was not.
Grant writing is a form of science communication that is essential for research to function and benefit society, and yet institutional support for developing these capabilities, particularly for early career researchers, remains limited. [2] Organizations continue to build elaborate funding pipelines while investing minimally in the communication capacity of the people who have to navigate them.
This gap extends well beyond grant writing. Most technical professionals receive virtually no substantive development in the cognitive and communication capacities that determine whether their expertise shapes decisions. Presentation skills workshops don’t cover this, onboarding programs don’t cover this, and annual performance reviews flag it as a concern but rarely point toward anything more specific than generic feedback. As a result, the pattern persists — not because organizations don’t care, but because they haven’t recognized it as the specific, solvable problem it is.
The capacity to translate complex information in ways that reduce cognitive load for the listener, to hold composure under the pressure of a high-stakes conversation, and to read a room well enough to know when the approach needs to shift are not personality traits. They are trainable capabilities, grounded in how the brain actually works, that directly determine whether a researcher’s work reaches its potential impact.
Think of it as the last mile of the research investment. You can build the lab, hire the talent, and fund the study. But if the insight can’t complete the journey from the researcher’s expertise to an organizational decision, the return on all of that investment is incomplete.
The organizations getting the most from their technical talent aren’t just the ones with the best scientists. They’re the ones who’ve invested in their scientists’ capacity to translate what they know into decisions that move.
Citations
[1] American Society of Hematology Clinical News. “A Nickel Ain’t Worth a Dime Anymore.” August 2024. Reports NIH-wide R01-equivalent grant success rate of 22% in FY2023, down from 32% in the late 1990s. Source: NIH RePORT data.
[2] Robson et al. “Building Blocks of Virtuous Science Communication: Grant Funding, Policy Making, and Public Engagement.” PMC / Frontiers in Communication, 2022. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8787701/