While this post offers insights for researchers seeking to thoughtfully improve their research processes, it is primarily written for research managers, as they are especially well positioned to drive the structured setting and delivery of research goal Over the past three years as an AI governance researcher, I’ve encountered each of these six pitfalls to varying degrees. I have a great deal of sympathy for those who struggle with them; in fact it often requires a good deal of patient and deliberate thought to avoid these pitfalls—something that can be difficult to find whilst you're rushing around completing research tasks or getting to grips with new topics.
In each section, I draw on my personal experiences of research and research management, and draw on insights from several relevant books. Many of these ideas also have their origin in conversations with fellow researchers and research managers, as well as from published reports and forum posts. Where possible, I’ve included links to attribute ideas to their original sources. The list of pitfalls included in this post is not intended to be exhaustive.
| Pitfall | Description | How to Mitigate |
| Undefined Responsibility and Ownership | When roles and responsibilities are unclear, tasks are often duplicated, delayed, or overlooked. Undefined authorship can leave no one accountable for critical tasks, risking missed deadlines and compromised research quality. | Clarify roles and assign a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for each task using frameworks like Areas of Responsibility (AOR) and MOCHA. Ensure responsibility aligns with authorship to motivate team members and encourage ownership. |
| Lack of Research Audience and Publication Strategy | Failing to identify an audience and publication strategy can lead to missed opportunities and dampened impact. | Identify a core audience and publication forums at the start of the project. Track submission deadlines and use structured project planning documents to ensure that research outputs remain directed. |
| Poor Task Prioritization and Management | Ineffective task prioritization and management disrupts progress, undermines project cohesion and risks lower quality outputs. | Use clear strategic goals to drive task prioritization. Employ task management tools like Trello or Asana to track progress and maintain transparency. Establish a structured process for resolving disagreements. |
| Failure to Validate Critical Assumptions | Critical assumptions may go untested, jeopardizing research validity and wasting time if issues are only identified late in the process. | Break the research into simple claims and identify assumptions critical to each claim. Validate these assumptions early through expert consultation. Research managers should assist this process by facilitating expert input. |
| Poorly Scoped Time or Resource Requirements | Underestimating time and resource requirements (the “planning fallacy”) can lead to cascading delays, reduced research quality, or project abandonment. | Apply reference class forecasting to improve resource estimation by analyzing similar past projects. Build flexibility into your research plan by developing contingency strategies for potential setbacks, such as scaling back the project scope or adjusting deadlines. Regularly review progress and adjust plans as needed. |
| Ineffective Dissemination of Research Findings | Without effective dissemination, even the best research can fail to reach its intended audience. | Prioritize reaching your target audience with accessible summaries, such as executive briefs and memos. Use visual aids like charts and diagrams to enhance clarity. Actively seek dissemination opportunities, such as conferences or responding to Request for Comment (RFC) periods, to maximize impact. |
Overview and consequences
Achieving success in a research project requires the careful management of research-based and administrative tasks. When roles and responsibilities are not clearly defined in collaborative projects, tasks can be duplicated, overlooked, or delayed. This risk is heightened when ownership is undefined or widely distributed, because no individual team member is held responsible for the completion of important or urgent tasks. The consequences of undefined responsibility can be significant: a finished research report might fail to meet submission deadlines or miss other publication opportunities due to neglected administrative steps. Similarly, a lack of ownership can result in the failure to perform critical accuracy checks, compromising the quality and credibility of the research.
Mitigation strategies
Research managers play a critical role in ensuring that research-based and administrative tasks are completed on deadline and to a high standard. The Areas of Responsibility (AoR) framework offers a structured way to execute this function, preventing gaps and redundancies in the completion of tasks. AoRs designate a single Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for each task or function, in turn ensuring that every aspect of a project is overseen by someone who is fully accountable. You can find an example of an AOR chart in this section of Alex Maccaw’s The Manager’s Handbook.
For complex projects, the MOCHA framework provides an additional layer of clarity. MOCHA defines roles as Manager (who assigns tasks and ensures progress), Owner (the individual responsible for task completion), Consultant (offering expertise), Helper (available to support with certain task components), and Approver (giving final sign-off). This system ensures tasks are executed with the necessary support and oversight. The MOCHA framework first appeared in Alison Green and Jerry Hauser’s Managing to Change the World. You can find Peter Wildeford’s excellent summary of this book here.
Further, to ensure that project participants remain engaged, it is important to ensure that responsibility for different tasks aligns with authorship and recognition in the final research output. A fair distribution of credit encourages team members to ensure that their individual contributions are strong. By integrating these practices, research managers can reduce delays, improve collaboration, and enhance the likelihood of a successful research project.
Overview and consequences
Imagine this: you’ve identified a novel approach to answering an important question. You put in considerable effort collecting sources, refining arguments, and perfecting your presentation. Finally, after months of hard work, your research report is complete. But now what? You realize there was a perfect research conference where your work could have been presented—except the submission deadline passed two weeks ago. Or, you discover that your report doesn’t align with the needs of any current audience, meaning you’ll need to spend additional time reworking it or waiting for the next opportunity.
This somewhat contrived example highlights an easy-to-forget lesson: it’s not enough for research to be accurate and well-crafted. To have an impact, it needs to be directed at a specific audience and, ideally, tied to decisions they’re currently making. Without a clear strategy for publication and dissemination, even excellent research risks being overlooked.
Mitigation strategies
Here, the important work should happen well before the substantive writing begins. After identifying an important topic area, it can be valuable to speak to researchers or practitioners working on similar issues. At best, these preliminary conversations can: highlight ongoing decision-making processes where your research input would be valuable, help you refine your questions, highlight relevant conferences or publication forums, and identify possible collaborators or complementary work. Research managers can support this process by arranging meetings with experts, and helping junior researchers prepare thoughtful questions to maximize the usefulness of each conversation. As with any outreach, it is important to ensure that you are respectful of the busy person’s time, and that you can make good use of it–see this document from Michael Aird.
Research managers can also help researchers think through a project’s path to impact in a structured way. Ideally the early stages of any research project should begin with the filling out of a plan document, with categories like: project outline, research timeline, collaborators, publication forum, audience–see this template made by Renan Araujo. It can also be valuable to track submission deadlines in a structured way. I’ve put together a spreadsheet listing some AI governance and safety related conferences happening in 2025; consider using an LLM to quickly do the same for your field, verify the information, and then share widely.
Overview and consequences
The success of a research project depends on the execution of many administrative and research-based tasks. For small projects which are completed in a single sitting, it may be possible to hold these tasks in your working memory, and intuitively prioritise between them. However, as projects become more complex and span weeks or months, this approach quickly breaks down. When the success of the project depends on effective collaboration between several, or many different stakeholders, the level of complexity increases further.
What is seen as important or pressing may vary widely among team members, because each individual interacts only with a subsection of the overall project. Even for individual researchers, daily task priorities can shift unpredictably based on external triggers, such as an email from a contact. Worse still, our actions may not be influenced by the relative importance or urgency of a task at all; we might just do whatever we feel like doing in the moment. The consequences of poor task prioritization and management can be severe: missed deadlines, duplicated work, and even contradictory research conclusions. These failures can erode the project’s coherence, credibility, and impact.
Mitigation strategies
Research managers play a crucial role in aligning administrative and research-based tasks with clear strategic goals, which in turn drive the successful completion of the research project. The SMART framework, introduced by George T. Doran, is a valuable tool for structuring these goals. SMART objectives are specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time-bound. This framework is especially helpful in the planning process, where it can inform the design of a research timeline consisting of small tasks which feed into broader objectives. Regular meetings between researchers and research managers serve as checkpoints to evaluate whether tasks align with these strategic objectives and whether progress is on track. If a project is not on track, these meetings provide an opportunity to identify necessary strategic adjustments.
In complex research projects, research managers are often best positioned to assess the relative importance and urgency of various tasks. They must ensure that the execution of tasks reflects these priorities and contributes to the project’s overall goals. The approach to task prioritization—whether consensus-driven or top-down—should be tailored to the team size, collaborators’ working styles, and their understanding of the project’s broader objectives. Regardless of the approach, it is critical to establish a clear decision-making process for resolving disagreements, such as voting or allowing a manager or expert to make the final call after gathering relevant input.
Using task management tools, like Trello or Asana, is good practice for all large or collaborative research projects. These tools help track task progress, increase transparency, and ensure all team members and stakeholders stay informed about key developments and responsibilities. Gantt charts can also be used to visualise project timelines–you can access one of my templates here. Clear procedures, transparent tracking of tasks, and a strategic focus on SMART goals can prevent inefficiencies in task execution.
Overview and consequences
Making assumptions is a useful, and often necessary, part of executing complex research projects. They simplify decisions and allow work to progress without getting bogged down in excessive detail. For example, you might assume that the data from a widely cited academic journal is reliable without verifying its sources each time. However, failing to identify and rigorously test the assumptions most critical to your research can jeopardize the validity of your conclusions. If a key assumption proves false, the entire research effort may be undermined, leading to inaccurate or irrelevant findings that harm the credibility and impact of the work. Further, neglecting this step can result in significant wasted time, as issues may only surface late in the process when corrections are costly.
Mitigation strategies
One useful approach, inspired by analytic philosophy, involves breaking down a completed research plan into simple, sequential claims that directly support the conclusions or recommendations. This exercise should take place after drafting a detailed outline, but before substantive writing begins. By examining whether these claims logically support the conclusions, you can identify gaps or weaknesses in your reasoning.
To identify assumptions, start by asking questions like: What needs to be true for this claim to hold? and What would undermine this claim if proven false? Focus on assumptions that, if incorrect, would significantly weaken the argument or invalidate the conclusion. A useful way to prioritise assumptions is by categorising them into 'critical' (those essential for the argument) and 'supporting' (those that add nuance but aren't fundamental).
It's important to avoid trying to substantiate every assumption. Junior researchers, in particular, can fall into the trap of over-analysing assumptions of minimal importance. To help with this, research managers can encourage researchers to evaluate the impact of each assumption on the overall argument. If an assumption has minimal influence on the project's conclusions, it may not warrant further investigation.
For critical assumptions, methods for validation might include expert interviews, literature reviews, or quick back-of-the-envelope calculations. Research managers can play a critical role by helping researchers identify assumptions, connecting them with experts, or suggesting other ways to test assumptions. By addressing critical assumptions early, you avoid wasted effort and reduce the risk of flawed conclusions.
Overview and consequences
Several mid-size studies (i.e. see here, and here) show that individuals and groups consistently underestimate the time required to complete tasks in many domains. The delivery of research projects is no exception to this finding, which is sometimes referred to as ‘the planning fallacy.’ If a resource project exceeds its allocated timeline, cascading delays often follow, because resources are reallocated to other pressing priorities. Similarly, failing to accurately scope and secure other essential resources, such as funding, equipment, or expert input, can cause significant disruptions. In extreme cases, these oversights may lead to the erosion of trust with stakeholders, a reduction of the quality of research outputs, or abandonment of otherwise valuable projects. Properly estimating and allocating both time and other resources is critical to ensuring the successful completion of any research project.
Mitigation strategies
In some domains, reference class forecasting—using data from similar past projects to predict the time and resources needed for new ones—has proven effective in improving project estimates (see here). The lesson for researchers and research managers: you can develop a better forecast of your project’s requirements by identifying similar projects (those within the same reference class) and benchmarking against their actual resource requirements. Researchers generally won’t add this information to their final research output, but they will often be willing to provide it when asked in a polite email.
To mitigate the worst outcomes, such as project abandonment or disappointing important stakeholders, it is also important to build flexibility and resilience into your research plan. During the planning stage, you should consider plausible scenarios (see here)—such as a key team member being reassigned to another project—and develop contingency strategies. For instance, identify less ambitious publication venues or scale back the project scope to align with available resources and time constraints. Research managers should hold regular progress review meetings to monitor the project’s progress and recommend adjustments as needed. Notably, tools which mitigate against the risks of ‘undefined responsibility and ownership,’ such as AoR and MOCHA, can also help teams meet deadlines, by ensuring that there is at least one individual responsible for the delivery of every task. These proactive steps can help keep the project on track and mitigate risks of substantial overruns.
Overview and consequences
Imagine this scenario: you’ve meticulously crafted a research plan, dedicated significant effort to producing an excellent output, and even identified a clear audience and publication strategy. Despite all this, your research project can still fall short of achieving its intended impact. Researchers and practitioners have much more reading material than time. Policymakers with power over important decisions have very little spare time indeed. They certainly don’t have time to read your new 70 page report, full of beautifully-formed, well-researched arguments. And so, without the careful and strategic promotion of your research findings, you will likely fail to influence any decisions at all.
Mitigation strategies
The successful completion of a research project should be followed by a deliberate and strategic effort, by both researcher and research manager, to disseminate the findings effectively. While sharing the research with a broad audience—such as other researchers via LinkedIn, X, and email—can be valuable, the highest priority should be given to reaching the pre-defined target audience. This might include policymakers or practitioners making decisions directly related to your research conclusions or recommendations.
When direct engagement with these stakeholders is not feasible, ensure that your findings are publicly accessible and easy to understand. Writing concise summaries, such as two-page executive briefs or short memos, is an effective way to communicate key insights. Complement these with clear and well-designed summary figures, such as diagrams or charts, to further enhance clarity and accessibility. Additionally, stay alert for opportunities to present your findings, such as responding to Request for Comment (RFC) periods from public institutions or participating in conferences. These channels can provide valuable platforms to share your work and amplify its impact. This pitfall also highlights the importance of identifying a ‘research audience and publication strategy’ during the planning stage of each project.
