At a mezzo level, the way your institution handles delicate matters such as the distribution of funding, or the management of mental health and wellbeing of the community, can condition your ability to manage failure and stress (even more during a pandemic year). At a macro level, the way society is constructed, the national cultural representations and the welfare model play a crucial if elusive role in influencing how an organization will decide to deal with a specific situation. In this issue of Method Pliant, we seamlessly move across these scales in conversation with: Ben Meuleman, statistician and post-doc representative at CISA; Cristina Soriano, Doctoral coordinator at CISA; Maria Törnroos, the freshly-appointed psychologist for doctoral students at Aalto University; and Matteo Tarantino assistant professor at the Università Cattolica in Milan and lecturer at the University of Geneva.