Shortly after I was laid off in November of last year, I was invited to join the Alliance for Policy Research. It’s a startup think tank with a slate of world-class experts on public health, mathematical modeling, urban planning, and of course disasters and emergency management. Part of it being a startup is that we need to nail down and articulate fundamental principles, like our rates, code of conduct, and quality standards. As Quality Assurance Manager, I’ve been meeting with two of my colleagues the past couple of weeks to get our quality standards laid out.

A fair number of us at APR are ex-RAND, which has really well-articulated quality standards. All of us have at least an inchoate instinct that research should be done right, with good methods and facts and findings that come from facts and not the desires of the sponsor. We want to find and contribute to truth and knowledge in the world and make it better – hit the “healthier, wealthier, happier” goals that are our tagline. But the challenge is articulating that clearly, concretely, and concisely as a set of standards.

Part of what inspired this post is that we were workshopping and one of the things that we had come up with is we want our research to be credible. But then one revisits dictionary definitions of things to make sure that they are precisely and accurately what one means. And what we found for credible was:

• able to be believed or trusted
• possessing the quality of being trustworthy

The secondary definition gave us pause. Because yes, we want to produce research that people can believe, trust, and rely on. And we want to be considered trustworthy. But we want those things to be based on observable and actionable things – on our utility, not just the impression we give.

Though I pointed out, and this is some of why I’m posting, that we do also need to give the impression. It’s important, because it’s how we convince people to pay us to do the research where we can prove it. We need the aesthetics in order to get the chance to prove our underlying ethics. But for people who deal in facts and policy and want to save the world the need for deliberate focus on the aesthetics feels antithetical.

So we’re taking this weekend to think about how we want to break down the idea of credibility into principles and keywords that we feel are more accurate, precise, and representative. I’m also taking the weekend to write things up as a demonstration of how now that we’re writing in a less constrained environment we also need to think about how we incorporate aesthetics into our external quality standards vs our internal code of conduct vs how we talk about these processes and how transparent we want to be. It’s fun!

In the meantime if you work for an organization that needs data or policy analysis done by a group of world-class analysts you should hire us.