Many research culture and environment action plans are well-designed. They listen to the voices of marginalised groups, identify problems, and set out clear pathways for improvement.
Yet a significant number fail at the point of delivery, usually for one of three reasons:
- There is too much work and not enough resources to deliver it
- Buy-in from senior leaders does not translate into action
- Work is met with resistance from colleagues within the organisation
From there, we tend to see predictable outcomes: delivery risk increases, priorities become unclear, relationships begin to fracture, and the burden of delivery falls unevenly. In many cases, this leads to burnout among environment leads and those already marginalised.
So, what is driving these failures?
Too much work: a failure of prioritisation and alignment
When we take an action-plan approach, looking across the organisation and asking which problems need to be solved, it becomes difficult to prioritise what actually needs to be done.
This is especially the case when the frame of reference is people’s experience alone, rather than organisational need and strategic value. The result is not just more work, but a lack of constraint around what matters most. The issue is not building strategy on experiences, but the lack of translation into organisationally aligned priorities.
Over time, this creates an expanding set of priorities with no clear hierarchy. Everything becomes important, which in practice means that nothing is prioritised effectively. Work accumulates, delivery slows, and responsibility becomes diffuse.
The impact is not neutral. The burden of this work often sits with those already closest to the issues, increasing the likelihood of burnout and disengagement.
Buy in without action: a problem of incentives and risk
Buy-in from senior leaders is often described as present but ineffective. Leaders express support for improving research culture, yet this does not consistently translate into action.
This is not simply a failure of commitment. It is a structural issue.
Leaders operate within systems of reward, accountability, and progression. If research culture work is not clearly aligned with what they are expected to deliver, whether that is REF performance, funding, or institutional priorities, then acting on it becomes difficult to justify.
In some cases, it can also introduce risk. Supporting work that sits outside recognised priorities can be difficult to defend, particularly when it competes with established measures of success.
Without a clear link between research culture and organisational value, buy-in is likely to remain rhetorical rather than operational.
Resistance: a predictable response to perceived unfairness
As we have discussed in earlier blogs on fairness, when people perceive their organisation as unfair, they are more likely to resist EDI and research culture work.
This resistance is often interpreted as a lack of understanding or unwillingness to engage. In practice, it is more often a response to how change is experienced.
If work is perceived to redistribute opportunity, recognition, or workload in ways that feel unclear or unjustified, resistance should be expected. It is not an anomaly, but a predictable outcome.
This does not mean that we should stop doing EDI or research culture work. It means we need to consider how that work is organised, positioned, and communicated within its context.
What matters is not the intervention, but how the work is organised
Across all three challenges, a consistent pattern emerges.
The issue is not the absence of good ideas or well-designed interventions. It is how that work is structured, prioritised, and positioned within the organisation.
If these conditions are not addressed, research culture work is likely to continue generating activity without a consistent or measurable impact.
What needs to change
To overcome these challenges, three areas become critical: strategic alignment, governance, and communication.
Strategic alignment ensures that research culture work is clearly connected to what the organisation values and is measured against. This makes it possible to prioritise effectively and justify investment.
Governance provides clarity on ownership, accountability, and decision-making. It formalises support and ensures that progress can be tracked and used to inform future action.
Communication shapes how the work is understood and experienced. When grounded in context, it can reduce resistance, clarify intent, and position the work to align with the organisation’s current environment.
However, as with the challenges outlined above, it is not enough to simply have these elements in place.
Without a clear understanding of value, context, and co-production, strategies can become disconnected, governance can become performative, and communication can reinforce rather than reduce resistance.
Where next
If this reflects your experience, the next step is not to add more activity, but to reconsider how the work is structured.
For those at an early stage, developing a clearer understanding of context and value-led approaches through our Masterclasses can help create a more focused and deliverable plan.
For those ready to move further, FIELDS is designed to support the development of a value-led, context-driven, and co-produced research culture strategy. It brings together strategy, governance, and communication into a single framework, with clear outputs and accountability.
It is based on over 20 years of research and practice, with a focus on ensuring that research culture work can be delivered, not just designed.
As ever, we use Fairness, Inclusion and Equity (FIE) in our practice because we are clear on what each term means and why they need to be applied in that order. We use EDI terminology here as it is more widely recognised.
