Changing Academic Life

Bethany Wilinski (Part 2) on Designing Your Intentional Sabbatical (CAL141, S8E6)

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0200

Designing Your Intentional Sabbatical: Purpose, boundaries and career sustainability.

This is Part 2 of my conversation with Bethany Wilinski, an associate professor of teacher education at Michigan State University. Building from Part 1, where Bethany described her own sabbatical experience, here the the focus is on how to more intentionally design your sabbatical (also relevant for any leave) by starting with purpose, priorities, and desired feelings rather than a to-do list. Bethany outlines practical boundary management strategies to protect your time amid ongoing responsibilities while on sabbatical. These include clarifying expectations in advance, shifting cognitive load to students, and batching meetings into limited windows. She makes a great case for how we can use sabbaticals as a chance to test systems and carry changes forward: balancing structure versus unscheduled time, normalizing rest and reading as productive, and using sabbatical (and other types of leave) to reset habits around health, work rhythms, and scarcity-driven opportunity-taking. Bethany also also reflects more generally on academia’s lack of positive reinforcement, her sabbatical-planning coaching business, and the need for sustainable career choices and incremental culture change.

0:29 Introduction

03:55 Starting With Purpose and Priorities Before Tasks

07:34 Mapping Obligations And Boundaries, Setting Boundaries

12:31 Reducing Cognitive Load, Taking Control of Scheduling

14:51 Structure Rest And Reading

18:25 Mid Career Reset And Scarcity

22:01 Career Choices In Uncertain Times

24:12 Lessons From Parental Leave

26:22 The To Do List Never Ends

29:35 Validation And Sustainable Culture

35:58 Starting A Coaching Business

39:21 Changing Academia From Within

41:18 Outro

Related Links:

Bethany’s Michigan State Uni webpage

Bethany Wilinski Sabbatical Coaching

Bethany on LinkedIn

Bethany Wilinski (Part 1) on sabbatical, burnout and choosing rest (CAL140, S8E5)

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0200

Bethany Wilinski is an associate professor of teacher education at Michigan State University and a sabbatical coach. In Part 1 of our conversation, she describes her own sabbatical experience. She talks about how earning tenure in 2022 after the pandemic, young children, and family losses left her burned out and questioning her work’s impact. Initially she planned an “expected” research sabbatical in Tanzania and applied for a competitive yearlong Fulbright, but soon felt unease about starting a major new project and disrupting family life. After seeing a colleague’s Florence sabbatical report, she reframed sabbatical as restoration and family reconnection, chose Bordeaux France for one semester, and returned reenergized and eager to reengage without resuming frenetic pace. She discusses shifting identity beyond career, setting boundaries, pausing before saying yes, focusing on finishing work, and unlearning academia’s hidden curriculum of constant striving.

00:29 Introduction

04:09 Burnout After Tenure and Initial Sabbatical Plans

09:14 Navigating Doubts After Submitting and Expectations

14:03 Post Tenure Pressure

18:18 Slowing Down For Family

24:19 A Different Sabbatical Vision

30:14 Restoration Mindset Shift and Choosing Bordeaux France

33:16 Returning Reenergized

35:59 Identity Beyond Academia

37:52 Boundaries and Saying No

41:26 Essentialism and Finishing

43:19 Hidden Curriculum Unlearning

48:37 Support Systems and Guardrails

52:09 Designing Your Sabbatical

52:33 Outro

Related Links:

Bethany’s Michigan State Uni webpage

Bethany Wilinski Sabbatical Coaching

Bethany on LinkedIn

[Book] Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Crown Currency 2014.

Academic Rebels: From Bureaucracy to Trust, Teams, and New Leadership (CAL139, S8E4)

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0200

What if a corporatisation approach could actually make academic life better? Looking across the episodes so far this year I see three themes: shifting from “I” to “we” by treating research as a team sport; developing a new kind of leadership focused on enabling others through self-awareness, humility, authenticity, kindness, and clear roles; and adopting new ways of working that reduce bureaucratic hierarchies. These point to new ways of working. Drawing on Masud Husain’s 2025 editorial on corporatization and “bullshit jobs”, and Jayne Price’s discussion of holacracy and Corporate Rebels, I remind us, as if we need reminding, of how our current arbitrary and onerous bureaucratic processes take us away from our core work. I then explore what we could learn from holocratic approaches that move from bureaucracy and control to trust and self organised teams, as captured in Corporate Rebels’ eight trends (purpose over metrics, networks of teams, supportive leadership, adaptation, freedom with accountable trust, distributed decisions, transparency, and talents/mastery). I invite us to experiment with being academic rebels exploring new ways of working with new forms of leadership. There might actually be forms of corporatisation that could be useful for our sector.

00:29 Reflecting on Conversations so Far in 2026

02:08 Theme 1: Mindset shift from I to We

02:55 Theme 2: Critical Role of Leadership

05:09 Theme 3: Needing New Ways of Working

07:19 The Rise of Corporatisation and 'Bullshit Jobs' in the Academic Sector

10:17 Learning from New Approaches in the Corporate Sector?

13:31 Exploring the Arbitrariness and Impact of Bureaucracy and Heirarchies

14:13 Example: Different Approaches to Bureaucracy around Teaching

16:39 Example: Different Approaches to Booking Holidays

17:48 Example: Booking Work Related Travel

20:05 Example: Bureaucracy and Control of Funding Bodies

22:39 Example: Bureaucracy, Micromanagement in Professional Organizations

25:15 Better Ways from Holocracy and Coporate Rebels?

29:33 Requires New Forms of Leadership

34:09 Eight Trends in This New Coporate Way

39:16 What Can You Imagine for Your Situation?

Jayne Price on making work work better (CAL137, S8E2)

Jen Heemstra on Accidental Leadership (CAL 138, S8E3)

Strengths as Superpowers - Replay (CAL123, S6 E17)

Masud Husain, On the responsibilities of intellectuals and the rise of bullshit jobs in universities, Brain, Volume 148, Issue 3, March 2025, Pages 687–688.

Brian Robertson, Holocracy

Corporate Rebels

Diederick Janse & Marco Bogers, Getting Started With Holacracy: Upgrading Your Team's Productivity, 2020, AbeBooks

Jen Heemstra on Accidental Leadership (CAL 138, S8E3)

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 08:00:00 +0200

Prof. Jen Heemstra from Washington University in St. Louis in the US shares her journey from a research-focused bimolecular engineer to accidental leader and now author of the insightful book 'Lab Work to Leadership.' Jen speaks about the challenges faced by academics moving into leadership, recognisning that we are often untrained and unprepared for these roles. She shares insights from her book focusing on self-leadership, leading others, and coaching future leaders. Jen talks about the importance of building trust, creating a positive lab culture, giving and seeking feedback, and the significance of modeling behavior for emerging leaders. Jen also reflects on her personal experiences, including her struggles to get tenure and maintaining a work-life balance.

00:29 Introduction and Welcome

03:09 The Birth of 'Lab Work to Leadership'

05:43 Navigating Academic Challenges

08:29 The Worst Day: Tenure Rejection

12:14 People Showing Up and Getting Tenure

15:49 Embracing Leadership in Academia That We Are Not Trained For

21:26 Building a Collaborative Lab Culture

30:35 The Importance of Self-Leadership and Self-Awareness

33:27 The Role of Coaches and Mentors

35:02 The Importance of Feedback

37:01 Challenges in Giving and Receiving Feedback

38:46 Understanding Individual Needs in a Lab Environment

43:59 Building Trust and Psychological Safety

49:37 Coaching Future Leaders

56:50 Balancing Professional and Personal Life

58:11 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

58:56 Outro

Related Links:

About Jen:

Heemstra Lab at Washington Univ in St. Louis

Jen’s webpage and LinkedIn Profile

Book:

Jen Heemstra, Labwork to leadership: a concise guide to thriving in the science job you weren’t trained for, 2025, Harvard University Press

People:

Troy Champ

Resources:

Edwin Catmull and Amy Wallace, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, 2014, Penguin.

Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown, Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, 2010, Harper Collins.

Birkman Personality Inventory

Jayne Price on making work work better (CAL137, S8E2)

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:00:00 +0200

Jayne Price is all about making work work better. She is the Transformation Director and Head of Continuous Improvement at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Jayne discusses her journey to her current role in UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and the strategies she employs to foster human-centered, purpose-led change in the organization. She emphasizes the importance of leadership that is grounded in trust, accountability, and psychological safety, and the role of experimental and agile approaches in driving systemic transformation. Jayne also shares practical examples, including the implementation of Holacracy and continuous improvement initiatives. The conversation highlights the challenges and successes in transforming our traditionally bureaucratic research culture into a more effective and innovative environment. Jayne offers valuable insights for leaders at all levels and showcases the value of empowering teams to do their best work.

00:29 Introduction to the Episode

03:41 Introducing Jayne and her Career Journey

06:52 Understanding Project versus Program Management

07:59 From Change to Transformation

12:14 Implementing Experiments and Measuring Change

14:10 Challenges in the Academic and Research Sector

19:54 Innovative Approaches to Leadership and Management

27:21 Designing Alternative Promotion Routes

29:21 Challenges to Identity and Developing Leaders

35:50 Moving from 'I' to 'We' as a Leader

37:53 The Mindset to Move to 'We'

40:13 Humility, Vulnerability and Authenticity in Leadership

43:26 Shadow Sides, Blind Spots and Experimenting with Different Approaches

47:31 Starting to See the Benefits

50:53 Creating Workplaces For People to Flourish

53:04 The Holacracy Experiment - Creating Clarity

55:42 Doing Meetings Differently

59:22 Empowerment and Autonomy with Accountability

01:01:47 Corporate Rebels and Other Inspirational Resources

01:06:31 The Critical Importance of Leadership Buy-In

01:08:01 Everyone Can Choose Leadership Behaviours at Any Level

01:09:51 Encouragement for Change Agents

01:11:39 Outro

About Jayne:

Jayne Price https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayne-price71/

UKRI https://www.ukri.org

STFC https://www.ukri.org/councils/stfc/

Related links:

Cynefin framework for making sense of complexity

Corporate Rebels

Diederick Janse and Marc-Peter Pijper from Corporate Rebels supported the Holocracy Trials

GlassFrog: “the cutting-edge self-management platform that empowers teams with clarity and autonomy”

Tuff Leadership Training

Books:

Aaron Dignan, Brave New Work, Portfolio, 2019

Daniel Pink, Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us, Riverhead Books, 2011

Joost Minnaar and Pim de Morree, Corporate Rebels: Make Work More Fun, 2020

Jon Alexander, Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us, Simon and Schuster, 2023

Diederick Janse & Marco Bogers, Getting Started With Holacracy: Upgrading Your Team's Productivity, 2020, AbeBooks

Robin Sharma, The Leader Who Had No Title, Free Press, 2010.

Harvard Business Review

Related CAL Podcasts:

Fostering psychological safety in research environments 30 Oct 24

Elizabeth Churchill on creating culture, leading teams, loving challenges - she talks about Cynefin Framework ~6:30 mins

Sarah McLusky on diverse careers, purposeful events and effective communication (CAL135, S8E1)

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 08:00:00 +0200

Dr. Sarah McLusky, is an advocate and role model for research-adjacent careers. As an advocate Sarah hosts the 'Research Adjacent' podcast, which showcases career opportunities beyond traditional academic and industry roles. She talks about why started the podcast and also talks about her four main categories of research adjacent roles, emphasising the importance of recognising the many contributors to successful research. As a role model, Sarah shares her own experiences moving into a research adjacent role post-PhD, now working as a freelancer who supports research organisations through events and communications. Some of her key insights are around how to prepare participants for meaningful engagement at events and the value of effective research communication. She encourages us to rethink career possibilities and the significance of culture in research environments.

00:29 Intro to the Episode

02:49 Introducing Sarah McLusky

04:33 The Concept of Research Adjacent

08:00 Research As a Team Sport

12:02 Career Paths Beyond Academia

20:10 Four Main Categories of Research Adjacent Roles

24:22 Sarah McLusky's Journey to a Research Adjacent Role

29:36 Balancing Passion and Pragmatism

33:17 Navigating Freelance Work

34:51 The Importance of Gathering with Purpose

45:54 Supporting the Communication of Great Research

48:49 Final Thoughts and Resources

51:25 Outro

Related Links:

About Sarah and her work

Website https://sarahmclusky.com/

Newsletter https://sarahmclusky.com/gathering-with-purpose

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahmclusky/

Research Adjacent Podcast

https://researchadjacent.com/podcast/

https://pod.link/1663857550

LP Replay - Reflect, Celebrate, Dream (CAL135, S7E8)

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 08:00:00 +0200

For this last episode of the year I revisit the Long Play (LP) template, inspired by vinyl records, as a way to intentionally reflect on and celebrate this past year and to be more intentional about how we move into our new year. The Ps of the template are personal, people, play, and projects and we use the Ls to reflect across there: what did you land, love, labor on, and learn this past year review, and what do you want to look forward to, let go, let grow, and let be for the next year. You can download a template to create your own personalised reflections and plans, individually or within groups, to help you shape your good academic life.

Overview:

00:29 Setting up the LP

03:34 LP Replay

05:05 Introducing the LP Table Template

08:59 Taking Time to Savour and Celebrate

12:06 Looking forward to the 2026 LP

16:12 Wrapping Up and Summary

19:09 Final Pointers

19:49 Outro

You can download your LP template here. Feel free to tailor it to what works best for you! And I'd love to hear back how you used it and evolved it.

Infertility, Career Choices, and Compassion (CAL 134, S7E7)

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 19:02:00 +0200

In this very personal solo episode, I share my journey through infertility and the impact it had on my academic and personal life. Inspired by Susan Dray's story, I decided to share our challenges of trying to start a family while managing a career in academia. I discusses the physical and emotional toll of infertility treatments, the loneliness of not sharing my struggles with colleagues, and the moral dilemmas we faced. Mine is just one story, and we can be sure that many of the people we work with are dealing with their own challenges or carrying their own sadnesses so this is a call for more empathy, kindness, and support in academic environments, emphasizing the importance of recognizing the human side of our lives. I conclude with a message of support for those facing similar challenges and a reflection on how my career path, though unintended, brought its own form of fulfillment.

00:29 Introduction: A Personal Journey

01:05 The Inspiration Behind This Episode

03:58 Opening Up About Women's Health Issues

07:23 The Struggles of Infertility

12:15 Navigating the Moral Dilemmas

14:51 Navigating Our Journey

17:43 Navigating Career and Personal Life

22:44 Moving On and Finding New Paths

26:48 Things Coming Together in the Move to London

30:13 Reflecting on an Academic Career Without Children

33:53 Final Reflections

Susan Dray (Part 2) on listening, mentoring, and adversity (CAL133, S7E6)

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 08:00:00 +0200

In Part 2 of our conversation, Susan Dray continues to share deep insights about the importance of self-awareness and authenticity, empathy and listening with heart, and dealing with professional discomfort and personal adversity. She discusses her mentoring style, centred around being empathetic and supportive. And she talks about the importance of service and community, as well as the current challenges faced by early career researchers.

Susan also shares deeply personal challenges and losses, and the accompanying emotional journey of accepting and learning from setbacks, the value of honouring people's experiences, and the importance of collaborative support. She reminds us, paraphrased here, that few people understand how special they are, and that what really matters is who you are. Because this is going to mean that what you do is important and makes a difference. Susan has certainly made a difference.

Overview:

00:29 Introduction to Part Two with Susan Dray

02:18 Navigating Discomfort and Deep Learning

05:47 Mentoring and Community Support

08:51 HCI in Africa and Global Recognition

13:28 Supporting Early Career Researchers

19:12 Mentoring and the Joy of Service

22:11 Reflections on Mentoring and Authenticity

26:08 Evolving Roles, Willingness to be a Beginner

29:40 Postscript - Personal Reflections and Adversities

30:55 Lessons from Sailing

32:21 Coping with Loss and Finding Positivity

35:08 Final Reflections on Life and Legacy

36:50 Wrap up

38:27 End

Related Links:

Susan Dray's webpage and LinkedIn profile

Susan Dray (Part 1) on navigating interstices: academia, industry and global consulting (CAL132, S7E5)

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0200

The wonderful Dr Susan Dray shares her journey from obtaining a PhD in experimental and physiological psychology at UCLA to becoming a pivotal figure in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Susan recounts her transition from academia to industry, including roles at Honeywell and American Express, and her eventual shift to independent consulting. She discusses the evolution of HCI and human factors, the significance of ethnographic studies, and the importance of listening with one's heart in diverse cultural contexts. Susan also reflects on the birth of SIGCHI, organizational challenges, and her expansive international work. Her insights provide a rich, historical perspective on the ongoing interplay between technology, human behavior, and organizational dynamics, and on the contextual and cultural nuances in technology adoption. She also demonstrates the power of curiosity, self reflection and a service mindset.

Overview

00:29 Episode Introduction

02:49 Susan's Background

03:52 Transition from Academia to Industry

05:37 Early Challenges at Honeywell

06:56 Gaithersburg Conference and SIGCHI Formation

10:15 Human Factors and Computing Systems

13:34 Human Technology Impacts at Honeywell

16:40 The Mindset of a Scientist

22:59 Mentorship and Career Advice

26:30 Career Transitions and Reflections

28:06 Early Challenges in Consulting

30:12 Setting Up a Consulting Business

31:59 International Projects and Usability Studies

38:22 Navigating Cultural Differences and Lessons in Challenges

45:24 Innovative Research in Korea and South Africa

49:26 Embracing Discomfort Curiousity and Self Reflection

52:17 Wrap up

Related Links

Susan Dray webpage and LinkedIn

ACM SIGCHI Special Interest Group On Computer-Human Interaction

On the art, heart and science of 1-1 meetings (CAL131, S7E4)

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 12:36:00 +0200

Building on the last episode’s topic of meetings, the focus here is on our one-on-one meetings. In his book, 'Glad We Met: The Art and Science of One-to-One Meetings,' Steven Rogelberg discusses how these meetings can be practical, personal, and developmental. We can also think of these as the four Ps of care—process, progress, product, and person. Drawing on insights from Rogelberg’s book, along with some timely recent posts, I draw attention to the role of empathy, authentic communication, and regular, intentional meetings in supporting PhD students, postdocs, and research assistants. Practical tips include setting regular meeting cadences, being attentive and present, and ensuring a respectful and effective meeting environment. These are all skills we can work on to better support the practical, personal and developmental in our 1-1 meetings.

Overview:

00:29 Introduction to Effective Meetings

01:55 The Importance of One-on-One Meetings

03:25 The Four Ps of Care in Meetings

04:14 Practical Aspects of Supervisory Meetings

05:06 Caring for the Person in Meetings

05:35 Skills for Effective Meetings

09:12 Student Contributions to Meetings

11:01 Preparation and Presence in Meetings

12:18 Time Management and Respect in Meetings

13:23 Listening and Asking Good Questions

14:25 The Cadence of Meetings

17:55 Practical Suggestions for Meeting Environments

19:14 Career Conversations and Resources

20:20 Conclusion: The Art, Heart, and Science of Meetings

24:02 End

Related links:

Steven Rogelberg's webpage, LinkedIn profile, and Meeting resources and previous CAL episode on Transforming Academic Meetings

Book: Rogelberg, S. G. (2024). Glad We Met: The Art and Science of 1: 1 Meetings. Oxford University Press.

Recent posts mentioned:

#116 - 6 Communication Strategies to Get What You Need From Your PhD Advisor (Without Being Annoying), Emmanuel Tsekleves , PhDtoProf Newsletter 1 Oct 2025

A toolkit to foster great career conversations, Rachel Chin and Rachel Herries, Auditorium Blog, 7 Oct 2025

Related Changing Academic Life episodes:

Oscar Trimboli (Part 1) on being better listeners

Oscar Trimboli (Part 2) on how to listen deeply

Michael Bungay Stanier on the power of curiosity and taming the advice monster

RW (solo) Asking good questions, empowering good people

Steven Rogelberg on Transforming Academic Meetings (CAL130, S7E3)

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0200

Dr. Steven Rogelberg, an organisational psychologist from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, draws on his extensive research on workplace meetings to share how we might make acadmic meetings better. We discuss the inefficiencies of academic meetings, with Steven suggesting academics suffer from particularly ineffective meeting practices. He offers practical advice on improving meeting productivity, particularly for Faculty meetings, such as using targeted agendas and smaller group discussions, and stresses the value of bringing scientific rigour to meeting management. He also critiques the hybrid meeting format, advocating instead for fully virtual or in-person meetings. If you are looking for more insights about evidence-based meeting practices, I can highly recommend his books 'The Surprising Science of Meetings' and 'Glad We Met: The Art and Science of One-to-One Meetings' .

Overview:

00:29 Introduction: The Meeting Dilemma

01:42 Introducing Dr. Steven Rogelberg

03:56 The Academic Meeting Problem

09:23 Common Mistakes in Leading Meetings

11:06 Strategies for Effective Meetings

13:12 Having a Meeting About Meetings

14:34 The Importance of Feedback and Audits

15:55 The Faculty Meeting

18:15 Challenges of Large and Hybrid Meetings

19:21 More Inclusive Alternatives to Large Meetings

22:20 Hybrid Meetings and Virtual Meetings

23:54 Final Takeaways and Resources

25:46 Postscript

30:16 End

Related links:

Steven's web page, LinkedIn page and online meeting resources

https://www.stevenrogelberg.com

Steven's books:

Rogelberg, S. G. (2019). The surprising science of meetings: How you can lead your team to peak performance. Oxford University Press.

Rogelberg, S. G. (2024). Glad We Met: The Art and Science of 1: 1 Meetings. Oxford University Press.

And his academic publications, for example the two we mentioned:

Rogelberg, S., Kreamer, L. M., & Gray, J. (2025). Thirty Years of Meeting Science: Lessons Learned and the Road Ahead. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 13.

Rogelberg, S. G., King, E. B., & Alonso, A. (2022). How we can bring IO psychology science and evidence-based practices to the public. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 15(2), 259-272.

And here is a template to help you reflect on your meetings.

Deborah Boehm-Davis on career paths, leadership, and change (CAL129, S7E2)

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0200

Professor Emeritus Deborah Boehm Davis, George Mason University in the US, is one of the pioneers of the CHI conference. Deborah discusses her varied career building from her psychology background and spanning roles in human factors at Bell Labs, NASA, and General Electric. She then talks about her extensive tenure at George Mason University in both faculty and administrative/leadership roles, eventually becoming the dean of a college. Deborah shares reflections on career transitions, the importance of making a difference, effective leadership, the significance of collaborative work, and the challenges and strategies for navigating academic leadership, as well as managing academic responsibilities alongside family life. She also talks about her last industry role at Oculus Research and offers insights into the skills and approaches necessary for effective academic and industry leadership. The conversation also touches on the importance of interdisciplinary work and mentorship in academia.

Overview:

00:00 Introduction

00:29 Deborah Boehm-Davis: Career Overview

03:24 Early Career and Human Factors

04:54 Transition to Academia, Balancing Faculty and Administration Roles

09:38 Reflections on Career and Impact

17:39 Navigating Academic Leadership

25:14 Collaborations, Interdisciplinary Work and Collegiality

28:18 Interdisciplinarity and Being Strategic

32:57 Transitioning to Leadership Roles, Developing Leadership Skills

33:53 Handling Difficult Conversations

36:39 Balancing Decisions and Stakeholder Concerns

40:29 Engaging Faculty and Effective Communication

44:51 Leadership in Industry vs. Academia

46:54 Mentorship and Support Systems

50:24 Proudest Achievements and Work Skills Course

56:28 Reflections on Women in Academia

59:37 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

01:00:46 End

Related links:

Video of a 2024 talk to the Uni of Virginia HFES Student Chapter: “A Career in Human Factors: A Lifetime of Change” [40:51 mins]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deborah-boehm-davis-05b50

Website: https://psychology.gmu.edu/people/dbdavis

Season 7 Kickoff: Fresh Starts and Being Intentional (CAL128 S7E1)

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0200

In the first episode of season seven, the 10th year the Changing Academic Life podcast, I invite us to reflect on the theme of being intentional about what we want for ourselves at the beginning of this new academic year for many of us in the northern hemisphere, or for any temporal landmark that is relevant for you.

As example and inspiration, Anna Cox from UCL shortly shares her strategies for setting clear priorities, maintaining work-life balance, and managing her remaining 'available time to promise', recognising every yes entails a no to something else. This is a great example of the 'fresh start effect', using the temporal landmark of a new academic year, as talked about by Katy Milkman and colleagues, and reminds us of the importance of creating pauses for reflection.

So how will you be more intentional about your fresh start?

00:34 Introduction

01:27 Starting With Intention

05:28 Anna's Fresh Start

07:05 Thinking About Priorities

09:01 Available Time to Promise

10:56 Creating Pauses to Think

12:20 Re-iterating Anna's Key Questions

16:29 Wrapping Up

17:57 Pointers to Other Related Episodes

19:24 Wrapping up

20:31 End

Related links:

eWorkResearch group at UCL and Anna’s webpage and WLB definition

Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., & Riis, J. (2014). The fresh start effect: Temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior. Management Science, 60(10), 2563-2582.

Loleen Berdahl, How to quit promising time and energy you don’t have

See www.changingacademiclife.com for an easy search for the related podcasts: Anna Cox, Marta Cecchinato, Johanna Stadlbauer, Amy Ko, Carmen Neustaedter, Katherine Isbister, Vikki Wright

Season Reflections: Cultivating a Good Academic Life (CAL127, S6, E21)

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 14:49:00 +0200

In this final episode of the 2024-2025 season, I reflect on key themes emerging from the past 20 episodes of 'Changing Academic Life.' These are around creating supportive and inclusive cultures in academia, the role of leadership, career transitions, wellbeing and self-care, and the importance of community. It reminds us to engage in reflection, value our own and others' wellbeing, and contribute to positive changes in academic environments. Cultivating a good academic life for all is a collective effort.

00:00 CAL127 Season reflections

02:44 Supportive cultures

06:35 Career transitions, choices

11:39 Wellbeing & self care

13:56 Community

16:00 Closing

18:29 End

Creating Peer Support Groups (CAL126, S6, E20)

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0200

If you are curious about how to set up your own peer support group, inspired by what Johanna Stadlbauer shared about what Uni Graz are doing, then this episode might get you started. I walk through some of the ‘things to think about’ when setting up peer groups such as the group’s purpose, the focus, and who that would involve, also the group size, meeting frequency and commitment, and choosing between structured or informal formats and related roles. I then walk through two examples of more structured formats: action learning sets which take more of a coaching approach, and peer mentoring models that take more of a consulting or advising approach. I also give some examples of more informal peer groups. Regardless of approach, good listening, confidentiality and a commitment to genuine participation are key. I also refer to some resources and links for further reading and more detailed overview of steps, as well as some related podcasts. Whether you're looking for mutual support, expert guidance, or simply a sense of belonging, there's a group format that can work for you. Give it a try!

00:00 CAL126 Exploring Peer Group Support Models

00:29 Introduction

01:36 Purpose

03:03 Focus

05:03 How Many

06:17 How Often

07:45 Format

08:24 Roles

09:44 Critical Ingredients

11:38 Walking Through Some Examples

12:35 Example: Peer Coaching Groups - Action Learning Set

20:39 Example: Peer Mentoring Groups

25:04 Example: Informal Peer Support Groups

28:23 Recap

30:07 Do What Works for You - Suggestions

33:07 Closing Call and Pointers

36:36 End

Related Links

Action Learning Sets guidance by Caroline Doherty via the UK NHS Action Learning Sets page

Action Learning Sets at Uni of St Andrews as example in an academic context

Graz Call for participation in their Collegial Development Programme

Kollegiale Beratung in sechs Phasen (Collegial Advising in 6 Phases)

Descriptive Consultancy with protocol description

Balint Group Method

The No Club book and No Club Guidance

Related Podcasts

Michael Bungay Stanier on the power of curiosity and taming your advice monster

Asking good questions, empowering good people (Solo 'Related Work' episode)

Oscar Trimboli (Part 1) on being better listeners

Oscar Trimboli (Part 2) on how to listen deeply

Johanna Stadlbauer on boundaries, agency and community building

Johanna Stadlbauer on boundaries, agency, and community building (CAL125, S6 E19)

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0200

Johanna Stadlbauer is an anthropologist working in researcher development at the University of Graz, recently made Head of Research Careers Campus Graz. Her mission is a more fun and kind academia. Johanna shares the experiences and challenges of her journey from a PhD to quitting a postdoc in anthropology, to doing NGO work part-time, and then coming back to academia for a researcher development role. Her work now is focused on creating a supportive and kind academic environment, with the aim to improve researcher well-being and foster a sense of community. She discusses establishing structures for postdoctoral researchers' support and community, and highlights initiatives like the writing retreat, Fiasco Fest, and peer mentoring, which aim to improve researcher well-being and foster a sense of community. Johanna is a role model for how to navigate a career path and your work role on your own terms. She is really clear on her own boundaries, and what she needs to feed herself and look after her work-life balance. She also reminds us the value of peer support, of telling people their contributions matter, and of taking the time to savour the good. She reminds us of the significance of agency, community support, and the need for transparency and understanding in academia.

00:00 CAL125 Johanna Stadlbauer

03:03 Introduction and Guest Background

03:56 Journey from Anthropology to Research Development

06:18 Postdoc Experience and Challenges

07:42 Deciding to Quit the PostDoc

12:05 Transition to NGO Work

15:57 Finding Balance and Setting Boundaries

19:47 Messaging in Academia

23:35 Permanent Contract and Current Role

29:27 Towards a Fun and Kind Academia and Experiences of Power Abuse

31:26 Finding Solutions and Positive Structures

33:31 Balancing Critique and Support in Academia

35:58 Empowering Postdocs and Addressing Structural Issues

40:12 The Importance of Community, Peer Support and Mentoring

49:39 Promoting Good Working Environments for Researcher Wellbeing

52:03 Personal Reflections and Final Thoughts

56:53 End

Related Links

Johanna's web page (English version)

Head of Research Careers Campus Graz

Researcher Development in Graz Blog

LinkedIn pages for Johanna, the PostDoc Office, and Research Careers Campus Graz

The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA)

Max Planck PhD Net

Balint Group Method

Tina Persson on career pivots, recruitment and coaching for career security (CAL124, S6 E18)

Wed, 21 May 2025 08:00:00 +0200

Tina Persson shares her journey from chemistry and nearly 20 years in academia, to recruiting and then career coaching. Tina discusses the challenges she faced in academia, including struggles with energy-draining tasks and political landscapes, and how she pivoted to a career in recruitment and coaching. She emphasizes the importance of understanding natural talents, emotional intelligence, and honest communication in career development. The conversation covers valuable tips for professors on recruiting and supporting early-career researchers, the impact of AI on career skills, and the cultural differences in career transitions. Tina also highlights the significance of lifelong learning and being open to unseen opportunities, offering practical advice for academics, those seeking an academic position, and those considering a career pivot.

Overview:

00:29 Episode Introduction

03:02 Introducing Tina and her Academic Journey

10:18 Transition to Industry

12:24 Becoming a PhD Recruiter

15:25 Coaching and Career Development

25:24 Recruitment Tips for Professors

36:00 Startup Mentality in Academia

38:43 Evaluating Candidates Beyond Technical Skills

40:35 Innovative Interview Techniques

43:09 Filtering Candidates Efficiently

50:57 Cultural Differences in Recruitment

52:50 The Role of AI in Recruitment

54:25 Human-Centric Skills in Academia

01:00:13 Building a Supportive Academic Culture

01:03:23 The Importance of Career Pivoting

01:05:52 Conclusion and Contact Information

Related links

PhD Career Stories Podcast and upcoming book

People: Sarah Blackford , Fritz Eckstein

Holland’s Theory of Career Choice

Strengths as Superpowers - Replay (CAL123, S6 E17)

Wed, 07 May 2025 08:00:00 +0200

This is a replay of an episode about our strengths as our superpowers and it is a useful precursor to the next podcast discussion where my guest will talk about them as natural talents. This replay episode was triggered by two interactions that made me think more about the importance of knowing our own unique superpowers (as Aaron Quigley discussed), ie our strengths, and also our kryptonite (thanks Lewis Chuang), and how this can help us work out what is our good academic life. And to recognise that we can all have different superpowers. Before getting to the replay I also report on some lovely feedback from the episodes with Graham McAllister.

00:29 Introduction

01:39 Update from episodes with Graham McAllister

05:21 Replay - Strengths as Superpowers

06:49 Kyrptonite and Superpowers

08:19 What are your superpowers?

14:29 Other notes about strengths as superpowers

17:21 Summary and pointer to ways to explore strengths

19:25 Additional Pointers

22:05 Outro

Aaron Quigley podcast conversation

Mike Twidale podcast conversation

VIA Character Strengths Survey

Strengthscope Strengths assessment tools

Related Work:

Michelle McQuaid, 2014, Ten Reasons to Focus on Your Strengths No matter what your job description says, Psychology Today.

Jeremy Sutton, 2021, Cultivating Strengths at Work: 10+ Examples and Ideas, PositivePsychology.com.

Ryan M. Niemiec, 2020, Coronavirus Coping: 6 Ways Your Strengths Will Help You Turn to your best qualities for prevention, safety, and health. Psychology Today.

Graham McAllister (Part 3) on the art and craft of writing (CAL122, S6E16)

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0200

”Writing is thinking, I love thinking, I love working on problems, I love thinking through the problems…. So the whole writing thing is a thinking thing.” says Graham McAllister in this final part of our conversation. His foray into writing a book on Games Usability after he sold his company was also a foray into exploring the process of writing, asking himself questions like "How do you write a book? What's my voice? How do I write? What fits in with my life?”

Graham unpacks his experiences about the art and craft of writing that worked for him in answer to these questions. He starts with reflections on publishing challenges in academia and his commitment to making knowledge freely accessible. He also talks about the process of discovering his writing voice, the iterative writing process, setting up a writing routine and setting achievable goals. Graham also reflects on the broader implications of his work within academia and industry, the pursuit of clear communication for your audience, and his future aspirations in writing and consulting. The conversation highlights themes of personal growth, the importance of thoughtful work-life integration, and the impact of past mentors and opportunities.

Overview

00:00 Introduction

02:50 Introduction to the Book Writing Journey

03:28 The Philosophy of Free Knowledge

04:51 The Writing Process and Idea Generation

07:12 Structuring and Refining the Book

10:08 Finding Your Voice and Writing Routine

11:51 Future Writing Projects and Reflections

20:09 Balancing Work and Personal Fulfillment

26:04 Final Reflections and Gratitude

Related Links:

Graham’s Home page and LinkedIn Profile and his books

CAL120 Part 1 episode with Graham on his previous career pivots

CAL121 Part 2 episode with Graham on team vision alignment

Graham McAllister (Part 2) on aligning team vision (CAL121, S6E15)

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0200

In this second part of my conversation with Graham McAllister, we explore Graham's next pivot to studying organizational psychology at the London School of Economics. After selling his startup, Graham decided to do an MSc to help him answer what he now saw as the core problem in game development teams and that was lack of a unified vision. He shares his insights into shared mental models, vision alignment, shared values, diversity in hiring, and building resilient teams. He also discusses how these principles can be applied to other creative and research collaborations. Keep an eye out for the final episode in this series with Graham where he shares practical tips on the art and practice of writing.

Overview:

00:00 Intro

00:29 Episode Introduction

02:30 The Turning Point: Leaving the Company and Writing a Book

04:54 Discovering Organizational Psychology

05:44 The Journey to London School of Economics

07:16 The All-Consuming Feeling of Vision

11:07 The Importance of Education and Luck

16:26 Reflections on Lifelong Learning

19:22 Applying Mental Models Beyond Games

20:42 Understanding Alignment and Values in Organizations

23:39 Rethinking Hiring Practices and Leadership

26:46 Setting a Vision and Mission

29:01 Building a Mental Model

32:19 Operationalizing Shared Values

36:26 Detecting and Addressing Cultural Beliefs

38:15 Preview of Part 3 on Writing

40:38 End

Related Links:

Graham’s Home page and LinkedIn Profile

CAL120 Part 1 episode with Graham on his previous career pivots

Kotter’s Change Model https://www.kotterinc.com/methodology/8-steps/

Edgar Schein’s three layer of organizational culture - see various

discussions:

Graham McAllister (Part 1) on career pivots: academia to industry to startup (CAL120, S6E14)

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0200

Graham McAllister reflects on his various career pivots, starting with a PhD in computer graphics in Belfast, transitioning through roles in academia and industry and then forming and later selling his games usability start-up. In the process Graham provides a masterclass on how to navigate and negotiate career pivots, how to articulate clear problems and solutions. The conversation highlights the value of bridging practical and theoretical domains, the role of luck and other people, and the need for continuous learning, reflection and adaptation in your career journey while being very clear about the strengths and passions that underpin this.

Overview:

00:00 Episode Introduction

03:01 Welcoming Graham

03:43 Early Career and PhD Journey

04:49 Transition to Industry

06:01 Straddling Academia and Industry

07:54 Return to Academia and Music Technology

13:34 Influence of Gary Marsden

17:41 Joining University of Sussex

21:18 Starting a Spin-Out Company

21:52 Balancing Academia and Startup

25:24 Challenges and Reflections

31:37 Academic vs. Industry Conferences

32:32 Critical Thinking in Video Game Development

33:28 Startup Challenges and Team Building

34:32 Marketing Through Education

40:56 Leadership Reflections and Authenticity

48:35 Selling the Company and Moving Forward

56:20 End

Related Links:

Graham’s Home page

and LinkedIn page

People he mentions: Ricardo Climent and Gary Marsden

Oana and Matt (Part 2) on mental health, teaching path and reflective practice (CAL119 S6E13)

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 08:00:00 +0200

This is Part 2 of my discussion with Matthew Barr and Oana Andrei who work together in the Education and Practice Section in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. Oana and Matt each share their personal experiences with mental health challenges. Oana shares her journey from postdoctoral research to becoming a lecturer, highlighting how she dealt with burnout by taking up Taekwondo. Matthew discusses his long-term management of depression and the importance of normalizing such conversations in academic settings. We also talk about their learning, teaching and scholarship career paths, the significance of reflective practice and how it has been integrated into their teaching methods. They also discuss their commitment to inclusion and diversity in education, alongside their passion for teaching and the innovative graduate apprenticeship degree program they have implemented that widens access by enabling work-based learning and student support. The episode offers valuable insights into the importance of personal wellbeing, the role of supportive workplace environments, and what a teaching-focussed path can involve.

Overview

00:29 Episode Introduction

02:00 Picking up on the question about mental health

02:46 Oana Shares Her Experiences With Burnout

08:05 Matt Shares His Experiences With Depression

12:45 Choosing Teaching Focussed Career Paths

16:36 Oana Moving From Research To Teaching Track

19:06 Promotion Criteria in a Learning, Teaching and Scholarship Track

24:14 Apprenticeship Degree Program

31:50 Doing a Master in Education

34:39 A Framework for Reflection

38:52 Wrapping Up

39:18 Revisiting Belonging

44:09 Thanks For The Podcast

46:27 End

Related Links

Oana Andrei, Lecturer (Ass Prof) Uni of Glasgow webpage and LinkedIn profile

Matthew Barr (Senior Lecturer) Uni of Glasgow webpage and LinkedIn profile

The reflective writing resources Matt mentioned:

Manchester’s Academic Phrasebank: http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/
The guidance here on Portsmouth’s website: https://myport.port.ac.uk/study-skills/written-assignments/reflective-writing-introduction

Their paper on how the apprenticeship degree program might widen access to HE:

M. Barr, O. Andrei and M. Kallia, "Widening Access to Higher Education through Degree-level Apprenticeships in Software Engineering," 2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), College Station, TX, USA, 2023, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10343199.

Oana and Matt (Part 1) on leadership, belonging, and micro-actions making a difference (CAL118 S6E12)

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 08:00:00 +0200

This is part 1 of my discussion with Matthew Barr and Oana Andrei who work together in the Education and Practice Section in the School of computing science at the University of Glasgow. It was the experiences of Matt as head of Section that led Oana to suggest he would be good to talk to. Together they share their experiences of what makes for good academic leadership and change, including the psychological safety and sense of belonging of members, the impact of everyday micro-interactions, and fostering a supportive environment. Matt discusses his approach in leadership, such as seeking feedback for self-improvement and actively supporting staff promotions. Oana also shares her perspective on the importance of belonging and mentorship in academic settings and the experience of good leadership. Their insights provide a meaningful look at how we can transform academic work culture for the better.

Overview:

00:29 Episode Introduction

01:52 Welcome

02:28 Oana's Journey and Career

03:46 Matt's Journey and Career

06:13 Leadership and Management Insights

10:00 Creating a Supportive Work Environment

13:29 Supporting Promotion for a Learning, Teaching and Scholarship Track

21:23 Micro Actions That Can Make All The Difference

25:16 Being a Role Model in How We Handle Bad Days

28:45 Learning From Experience What Not To Do

36:44 Taking Care For Belonging

41:20 Linking to Part 2

43:14 End

Related Links

Oana Andrei, Lecturer (Ass Prof) Uni of Glasgow webpage and LinkedIn profile

Matthew Barr (Senior Lecturer) Uni of Glasgow webpage and LinkedIn profile

Role modelling paper mentioned by Matt:

Virginia Grande, Päivi Kinnunen, Anne-Kathrin Peters, Matthew Barr, Åsa Cajander, Mats Daniels, Amari N. Lewis, Mihaela Sabin, Matilde Sánchez-Peña, and Neena Thota. 2022. Role Modeling as a Computing Educator in Higher Education: A Focus on Care, Emotions and Professional Competencies. In Proceedings of the 2022 Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE-WGR '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 37–63. https://doi.org/10.1145/3571785.3574122

Sharing my story with Nutan Limaye (CAL117, S6E11)

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 08:00:00 +0200

In this episode the tables are turned and I'm being interviewed by Nutan Limaye who hosts the ‘Life of a Researcher’ podcast. Nutan is an Assoc. Professor at the IT University Copenhagen. We met when she was a participant in one of our residential academic leadership development courses in 2024.

We talk about my unconventional career path starting in social work, moving into nursing and midwifery, then finding myself in computer science and human-computer interaction, and now doing more leadership and academic development work. As with many career stories, serendipity figures a lot, along with a strong people-centred red thread that weaves through all the various turns.

Nutan also asks about how the academic leadership development courses came about, and how we facilitate learning experiences on hard topics like challenging conversations. And we talk about themes that have arisen in the podcast. Along the way we also touch on interdisciplinarity, and academic mobility and what is home. This is a slightly edited conversation from the version she released end of June 2024, shared with her permission.

I'm releasing this now as a complement to my careers article in the Feb 25 edition of Communications of the ACM

Overview

00:29 Introduction

02:41 Nutan's Introduction to the Podcast

05:09 An Unconventional Career Path

07:34 Transition to Computer Science

11:08 Shaping Interests around People-Centred Perspectives

14:21 How Research Evolved as Technology Evolved

17:14 Reflections on Changing Paths

23:12 The Challenges of Interdisciplinary Research

28:03 Supervision Serendipity

34:21 Leadership and People-Centred Academia

42:21 Designing Learning Experiences about Challenging People and Conversations

48:23 Insights from the Session

50:06 Motivation and Themes of the Changing Academic Life Podcast

55:41 Academic Mobility and the Concept of Home

01:05:13 Non-Rapid Fire Questions and Reflections

01:14:11 Outro

01:15:00 End

Related Links:

Nutan Limaye

Life of a Researcher podcast and episode A conversation with Geraldine Fitzpatrick

Nutan’s LinkedIn profile

My CACM article:

Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Fit for People, Fit for Purpose: Designing Tech that Matters, CACM, Feb 2025 Issue, Vol. 68No. 2, Page 7.

Other CAL Episodes mentioned:

Sarah Davies - two parts:

Neha Kumar: On choices, authenticity and the power of the collective

Karen Stroobants: On changing research culture and reforming research assessment

Vikki Wright on career transitions, ADHD, and learning to manage yourself (CAL116, S6E10)

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 08:00:00 +0200

Vikki Wright is the director of PhD Life Coach and offers professional coaching and training for PhD students and academics. She also hosts the PhD Life Coach podcast. Up until 2022 though Vikki was a full professor of Higher Education at the University of Birmingham in the UK, with a research background Sport and Exercise Sciences, then shifting to more of a teaching focus.

Vikki shares her interesting journey from full professor to becoming a life coach. The conversation covers her career transitions, dealing with ADHD, the importance of self-awareness, along with self-compassion, curiosity and having realistic ambitions. She also shares role-based time blocking as an approach for effective self-management. These practical tools and mindset changes can be useful for us all to help us take more control of our lives and careers. Vikki also offers insights into her programs and coaching approaches for PhD students and academics.

Overview

00:00 Intro

00:29 Episode Introduction

03:10 Guest Introduction

03:27 Academic Journey and Career Transitions

03:56 Challenges in Research and Shift to Teaching

07:29 The Teaching Path to Full Professor...and Pandemic Reflections

11:27 Discovering Coaching and Personal Growth

17:37 Understanding ADHD and Coaching Transformation

26:35 Balancing Ambitions and Realistic Goals

30:58 Self Understanding and Being Her Own Best Boss

37:25 Recognising and Addressing Student Challenges

41:24 The Role of Self-Understanding in Supervision

45:31 Self-Compassion

49:37 Curiosity

51:35 Balancing Ambition and Realism

01:00:04 Role-Based Time Blocking

01:09:52 Final Thoughts and Resources

01:11:36 Outro

01:12.24 End

Related Links

More about Vikki’s offerings:

‘The PhD Life Coach’ podcast

‘Be your own best boss’ course

Vikki’s podcast episode on ‘How to use role based time blocking’

The PhD Lifecoach ‘The Membership’ - sign up Jan 2025

Vikki's LinkedIn page

People:

Dr Alex Conner

Other podcasts:

‘I have ADHD’ podcast, Kristen Carder

The Life Coach School, Brooke Castillo

Your LP Reflections - Looking back, Looking forward (CAL115 S6E9)

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 17:54:00 +0200

As we leave 2024 and embark on the new year, I want to share the reflective template I used for myself, playing with the LP (long play) record concept. I introduce the table structure of the personal, people, play, and projects (Ps) categories, paired with reflective components like land, love, labor, and learn (Ls) for the past year review, and look forward, let go, let grow, and let be (Ls) for the next year. I share some illustrative examples from my own reflections of 2024, including milestones, achievements, and lessons learned. And I share some of the feedback from you that helps make the work of this podcast worthwhile – thank you! I hope this encourage you too to reflect on your LP last year, celebrate your accomplishments, and be more intentional on how you approach the coming year.

You can download the LP template here.

00:29 Episode Introduction

02:29 Introducing the LP Table Template

06:27 Reflecting on my 2024 Landings

16:10 What I Loved and What Feels Like Labour

19:13 What I Learned

23:21 Taking Time to Savour and Celebrate

25:06 Celebrating Feedback on the Podcast

31:42 Looking forward to the 2025 LP

36:44 Wrapping Up and Summary

39:48 Final Pointers

41:01 Outro

41:50 End

Related Links

Past Episodes:

Remembering Volkmar Pipek - on being curious, being you

Liam Bannon (Part 1) on a career outside the box – April 2024

Liam Bannon (Part 2) on values & what matters – Sept 2024

On research identity, meaningful work and funding (solo) - Jan 2024

RW9 Progress and praise – July 2021

Evan Peck on considered choices and career moves: from liberals arts to a research uni (CAL114, S6E8)

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 11:17:00 +0200

Evan Peck returns to discuss his career evolution since our last conversation in 2017. The focus is on his initial choice to join a liberal arts college post-PhD, emphasizing the balance between teaching and research, how his research evolved, and on his career goals then. Evan then talks through his move to the University of Colorado Boulder, detailing his motivations and the strategic thinking behind the transition. He reflects on the impact of his work in responsible computing and data visualization and the importance he places on aligning career choices with personal values and goals. Evan also discussed the nuances of working in different academic environments and how he continues to prioritize student mentorship and educational impact.

Overview

00:00 Intro

03:21 Welcome Back, Evan!

04:33 The Appeal of Liberal Arts Colleges

06:26 Making Academic Paths Visible

09:31 Balancing Teaching and Research

13:21 Shifting Research Interests

22:40 The Move to Colorado

24:40 Integrating Ethics in Computing and Wanting More External Impact

33:50 Reflecting on Post-Tenure Decisions

37:16 Exploring New Opportunities

40:46 The Unexpected Offer

43:34 Transitioning to a Research Institution

47:26 Adapting to a Larger Institution

53:18 Balancing Work and Family

54:30 Reflecting on Career Choices

01:00:16 Final Thoughts and Advice

01:03:05 End

Related Links:

Evan's CU Boulder web page and his personal web page and LinkedIn profile

2017 podcast episode with Evan and his blog post

Özge Subașı on values, choices and care (CAL113, S6E7)

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 11:11:00 +0200

Özge Subaşı is the Director of Futurewell: CoCreation and Wellbeing Group in the Media and Visual Arts Department at Koç University in Turkey. In this episode, Özge shares a journey from industrial design to interaction design, with a focus on diversity, inclusion, and justice. The work with visually impaired children and older people significantly influenced Özge's transition into human-centered design. Özge's story reflects a life of multiple relocations—whether moving schools as a child, transitioning disciplines, or navigating new countries and cultures. Özge describes “always coming from somewhere and not being in the system.”

The episode emphasizes the importance of holding true to core values, such as listening without prejudgment, fostering open communication, and caring for both the individual and the community. Özge's practical examples illustrate how these values influence research and teaching choices, as well as navigating trade-offs, particularly while completing an evaluation document. The discussion also addresses challenges with Özge's depression during the academic journey and strategies for maintaining personal wellbeing. Additionally, the episode highlights some difficulties faced by academics in Türkiye, including engaging with the international community and managing issues related to travel and visas.

Özge's commitment to personal values, to trying different ways of being an academic researcher, and to fostering an empathetic and inclusive work culture is really inspiring.

Overview

00:00 Intro

00:29 Episode Introduction

03:37 Introduction and Background

04:39 Early Career and Education

08:10 Transition to Interaction Design

11:50 Values and Philosophy

14:15 Challenges in Academia

18:07 Building a Collaborative Culture

26:37 Balancing Academic Expectations

34:42 Navigating Academic Trade-offs

36:04 Embracing Personal Values

38:36 Prioritizing Mental Health

42:26 Building Supportive Environments

47:00 Challenges in Academia

53:45 International Collaboration and Travel

01:02:22 Concluding Thoughts

01:04:36 End

Related Links:

Futurewell: CoCreation and Wellbeing Group, Media and Visual Arts Department, Koç University

Özge’s LinkedIn page

Özge on Instagram @allthefooldays (personal page on food & family) and @sozges on X

Creating Positive Cultures: Stories from the archive

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 17:25:00 +0200

Continuing our culture theme, I revisit past podcast conversations that explore how to foster positive research environments and cultures. We hear from people such as Elizabeth Adams, Tanita Casci, Jolanta Burke, Janet Reed, Alex Taylor, Kia Hook, and Lindsay Oades, who share their experiences and insights on creating a sense of belonging and collegiality within academic settings. Their stories emphasize recognizing individual strengths, promoting transparency, celebrating achievements, and the importance of supportive management practices for bringing out the best in people. Hopefully you will take away practical ideas and inspiration, and recognise the importance of both micro-actions and collective efforts in creating supportive, transparent, and inclusive cultures.

00:00 Intro

00:29 Episode introduction - fostering good cultures

03:48 Glasgow Uni's Research Culture Awards

07:51 Jolanta Burke on positive organisations

09:53 Janet Read on flexibility and supporting people with young families

11:47 Janet Read on know your team

12:32 Janet Read on bringing out the best in people

16:14 Alex Taylor on the power of the collective

22:25 Kia Höök on Fika

25:50 Lindsay Oades on autonomy, rationales and leeting people they are valued

29:58 Wrapping up

33:18 Outro

34:05 Repeating what Lindsay said

Related Links

Past episodes used in this curated episode:

Tanita Casci and Elizabeth Adams on supporting, rewarding and celebrating a positive collegial research culture (from May 2021)

Jolanta Burke on burnout, harmonious passion, positive workplaces & helping others (from Nov 2017)

Janet Read on charm bracelets, finish tape & the work to be a complete academic (from May 2018)

Alex Taylor on research at the boundaries, moving from industry to academia, the labour of academia & the power of the collective (from July 2019)

Kia Höök on challenges of success & value of slowing down and re-connecting (from Feb 2017)

Lindsay Oades on academic wellbeing, connecting to strengths, meaning and purpose, and not taking the system too seriously (from Sept 2018)

And others you can search for on Changing Academic Life who also talk about culture (among many others): Sarah Davies (part 2), Mark Reed, Karen Stroobants, Elizabeth Churchill.

Fostering psychological safety in research environments [solo]

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 16:17:00 +0200

Continuing the theme of great research environments, I explore how to contribute to creating great research cultures with a focus on the concept of psychological safety. I contrast the prize winning example we heard about in the last episode with examples of experiences with poor research environments. This leads to a discussion of the value of psychological safety as defined by Amy Edmondson, and others for enabling creativity, collaboration, and innovation. Psychological safety is about creating conditions where people feel safe speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns and mistakes and that foster a learning culture. I discuss practical strategies for leaders through their everyday interactions for fostering such an environment and enabling innovation, collaboration and personal growth and wellbeing. And I finish up with an invitation for all of us to reflect on our role in cultivating a supportive and inclusive academic culture.

00:00 Intro

00:29 Introduction to Creating Great Research Cultures

00:52 Recap of Prize-Winning Research Environment

02:38 Understanding Psychological Safety

03:40 Examples of Poor Research Environments

10:37 Defining Psychological Safety

12:21 Historical Context of Psychological Safety

15:42 Research on Psychological Safety

21:31 Psychological safety as key factor in Google's great teams

23:03 Leadership and Psychological Safety

24:15 Role Modeling and Self-Awareness

26:46 Fostering Belonging, Inclusion and Learning

29:18 Co-Creating Research Culture through our Actions

31:20 Conclusion and Reflection

Related links:

Previous podcast episode with Line, Nicklas, and Nina on Danis Young Academy prize research environments

Amy Edmondson web page

Amy C. Edmondson and Shike Lei, Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an Interpersonal Construct. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior. Vol 1:23-43, 2014.

Amy C. Edmondson. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley. 2019.

Pat Thomson, Blog article - Felling like an imposter?

Pat Thomson, feeling like an imposter?

Google’s Project Aristotle

Royal Society, Research Culture Embedding inclusive excellence: Insights on the future culture of research. (Tom Welton quote on culture p6)

Creating better research cultures together

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0200

What are the ingredients for creating a supportive, inclusive research culture? Nina Molin Høyland-Kroghsbo from the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences , Microbial Ecology and Biotechnology at the University of Copenhagen discusses the Research Environment Prize established three years ago by the Danish Young Academy to promote and celebrate good research environments, as experienced by early career researchers in those environments.

We are joined here by the 2024 prize winners, PhD students Line Maj Sternberg and Nicklas Stott Venzel who nominated their Research Unit in Psychology of Sport, Excellence and Health at the University of Southern Denmark. They share what makes their environment great, and how the group translates their research on what makes a great sports environment into what makes a great research environment. In particular, they talk about encouragement for taking initiative, a focus on long-term development, open communication, psychological safety, promoting mental health, and a sense of belonging, as key factors. Nina also reflects on the common themes that the awarding panel has seen across over a hundred nominations, such as belonging, collaboration, creative practices, and celebrating both successes and failures.

Overview:

00:34 Episode Introduction

03:26 Meet the guests

06:44 The Danish Young Academy and the Research Environment Prize

11:51 Line and Nicklas on applying sports research to academia

18:38 Building trust and open communication

22:34 Support for long term development and wellbeing

25:55 Psychological safety in research

26:55 Creative methods for sensitive topics

29:56 Common themes from nominated research environments

34:47 More examples of good practices

38:41 Having clear values

44:03 Learning from failures, celebrating successes

45:56 Value of good research culture for scientific integrity

49:51 Wrapping up, final thoughts

53:48 End

Related links:

SDU Prize announcement

Prize announcement by the Young Academy on LinkedIn

LinkedIn profiles for Nina and Line

On reframing networking: connections and impact

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0200

In this solo episode (S6 E3) I invite us to rethink the concept of networking within academia, inspired by what the late Liam Bannon shared with us in our recent conversation and the evident relational impact he had on people. I encourage us, myself included, to view networking as being about the other person, not about us, and see it as an opportunity for forming meaningful impactful social connections.

I offer some practical ideas for making networking about giving and helping others, based on the value of generosity, curiosity, and everyday interactions. In the end our real impact and success in academia are measured by the quality of relationships and the human connections we build, not by the titles or metrics we collect.

Overview

00:00 Introduction to Changing Academic Life

00:29 The Challenges of Networking

01:33 Rethinking Networking: Social Connections

01:48 Tribute to Liam Bannon

02:43 Personal Relations in Academic Careers

03:44 The Importance of Human Connections

10:16 Networking for Others

10:50 Practical Networking Strategies

17:17 Maintaining Connections

21:38 Conclusion and Call to Action

22:58 End

Related links:

Recent episode with Liam Bannon

Gopinaath Kannabiran

Adam Grant, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Liam Bannon (Part 2) on values & what matters

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0200

Update 22 Sept 2024: It is with deep sadness that I share Liam passed away this morning. May we honour his memory and his generosity in sharing his reflections by always reminding ourselves about what and who is really important.

Liam Bannon is a Professor Emeritus and founder and director of the Interaction Design Centre at the University of Limerick in Ireland. In April 2024 I released a conversation with Liam Bannon recorded in 2017 about his career, ending with a hint about some health issues.

This is a follow up conversation with Liam from Sept 2024 where he shares his profound reflections on life, health, and academia, amid dealing with terminal cancer. Recorded from his hospital bed, Liam shares his journey since his 2015 stage-four lung cancer diagnosis and subsequent health challenges, including a brain tumour. Emphasising the importance of appreciating life, paying attention to how and with whom we spend it, and maintaining meaningful relationships, Liam offers invaluable insights on managing career pressures, the costs of neglecting personal connections, and the significance of staying true to one's values. Despite audio quality issues, this deeply personal and reflective conversation is a poignant reminder to reassess our priorities and strive for a life balanced between professional aspirations and personal well-being, and prioritising relationships.

Here is a pdf file of the transcript. There is also a transcript embedded with the audio that you can follow along with.

Overview:

00:29 Episode introduction

07:25 Liam’s health journey

12:11 Reflections on professional connections & relationships

21:22 Being reflective about

25:37 Contributions & tradeoffs

31:04 Asking what do you want to do with your life

33:48 Prioritising people & relationships

38:50 Taking stock, taking holidays, being true to yourself

44:32 Wrapping up

46:16 End

S6E1 Welcome to the new season

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0200

Introducing the new season of Changing Academic Life.

Reflecting on my recent transitions. And thanks to the HCI group for support.

CAL106 On STOP - the purposeful pause (solo)

Wed, 22 May 2024 08:00:00 +0200

In this short solo episode a share a simple yet powerful technique, S.T.O.P., for taking a purposeful pause throughout your every day. Stop, Take a breath, Observe, Proceed.

00:29 Motivating STOP

01:50 What is STOP

04:37 Using STOP

11:19 Towards making STOP a habit

13:58 End

Remembering Volkmar Pipek - on being curious, being you

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0200

Volkmar Pipek was a highly influential researcher from Uni of Siegen who sadly passed away in Jan 2024 after a long illness. This short episode draws from a written interview he gave to Mateusz Dolata on the occasion of his 2023 EUSSET-ISSI Lifetime Achievement Award. I read an extract where he shares his advice about becoming and being a researcher: Be curious. Be who you are. Be curious who you are. Wise advice for all of us.

Read the full interview with Volkmar Pipek

Interview conducted by Mateusz Dolata, University of Zurich

Text accompanying the EUSSET-ISSI Lifetime Achievement Award 2023 to Volkmar Pipek

EUSSET: European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies

ISSI: Institute for Social Informatics

Volkmar Pipek, University of Siegen and Volkmar’s publications

Liam Bannon (Part 1) on a career outside the box

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0200

Liam Bannon is a Professor Emeritus and founder and director of the Interaction Design Centre at the University of Limerick in Ireland.

Liam has been a hugely influential thinker writer and researcher since the 1980s, along with various collaborators, in shaping work around technology and design.

Recorded in-person in 2017, he reflects on his interdisciplinary journey and contributions, covering areas such as AI, HCI, CSCW, human-centered design, and collaboration. Liam’s experiences exemplify the challenges and rewards of crafting a unique academic career largely outside the box, grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration and a commitment to improving human-technology interactions, while also highlighting the importance of personal fulfilment and being able to think broadly.

Related Links:

Liam at the Interaction Design Centre, Uni of Limerick

Some of the people & papers he mentions:

George Miller

Zenon Pylyshyn, (1973). What the mind's eye tells the mind's brain: A critique of mental imagery. Psychological Bulletin, 80(1), 1–24.

H. Rudy Ramsey and Michael E Attwood (1979) Human Factors in Computer Systems: A Review of the Literature, Technical Report SAI-79-111DEN

James Jenkins, Uni of Minnesota

Don Norman, Human Centered Design, UCSD. See also https://jnd.org

Kjeld Schmidt

Lucy Suchman

Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics

Susanne Bødker, Aarhus Uni; see also our 2023 podcast conversation

Mike Cooley, Engineer Lucas Aerospace

Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition, A New Foundation for Design, 1987, Addison-Wesley.

Bannon, L. & Bødker, S. (1991) Beyond the Interface: Encountering Artifacts in Use. Book Chapter in J.M. Carroll (Ed.) (1991) Designing Interaction: Psychology at the Human-Computer Interface, pp.227-253. (New York: Cambridge University Press) (See also an earlier version)

Bud Mehan, UCSD

Pelle Ehn, Morten Kyng and Participatory Design e.g., see this paper

Rank Xerox Cambridge EuroPARC e.g., see overview articles 'What is EuroPARC?' and 'Rank Xerox Cambridge EuroPARC'

Liam J. Bannon (2006) Forgetting as a feature, not a bug: the duality of memory and implications for ubiquitous computing, CoDesign, 2:1, 3-15

Liam J. Bannon (2012) Interactions

Schmidt, K., Bannon, L., Four characters in search of a context

Schmidt, K., Bannon, L. Taking CSCW seriously. Comput Supported Coop Work 1, 7–40 (1992).

The Google Scholar listing of all of Liam’s publications

Jean Paul (Part 2) on leading virtual transdisciplinary teams and stakeholder engagement

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 16:28:00 +0200

Jean Paul is a senior scientist at the Medical University of Innsbruck. In part 2 of our conversation, Jean discusses her experience leading an impact-led transcdisciplinary research project focused on supporting families with mental health issues. She highlights the challenges of stakeholder engagement, distributed team management, and transdisciplinary research. Jean emphasizes the importance of community engagement, virtual team collaboration, and fostering diversity in academia. She also reflects on the skills she brings to this role and the importance of investing in the team set up from the very beginning.

Overview

[00:29] Introducing Part 2

[02:23] Recap from Part 1

[07:27] Working with stakeholders

[13:35] Leading a distributed international interdisciplinay project team

[14:59] Learning leadership from diverse experiences

[18:25] The transferrable skills – listening and learning

[20:04] Supporting diverse career paths

[25:16] Insights for parents in academia

[29:22] Leadership, organisational design and virtual team management

[34:33] Making virtual collaboration work

[39:08] Future directions and reflections

[41:57] End

Related links:

Ludwig Boltzmann Institute/Gesellschaft

The sandpit-funded project – The Village Project

The Healthy Minds project

Dr Ghislaine Caulat – consultant on virtual leadership development

Simon Martin – consultant for their organisational design in a transdisciplinary project with stakeholder involvement

Project Design principles:

The design principles that came out of the oganisational design workshops:

Effectively coordinate and involve a wide (but manageable!) network of stakeholders
Be clear on expectations, results and deliverables within the team
Keep momentum, trust and energy going across the project timeline for the core team and wider stakeholders
Make sure that the perspectives of people with lived experience are heard clearly throughout the project (capturing the voices of people impacted by perinatal mental illness and those who are treating and working with the affected person and their families)
Enact high ethical standards in our research (especially when listening to personal stories of mental illness and challenges)
Demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary research partnerships with stakeholders, and challenge the landscape of traditional research and methods
Effectively lobby and influence (local and national policy makers), and raise awareness in society / politics through making our topics and results visible.

Jean Paul (Part 1) on Sandpit funding & impact-focussed research

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +0200

Jean Paul is a Senior Scientist at the Medical University of Innsbruck in Austria. Jean discusses her involvement in a unique research funding process called a sandpit or an ideas factory. Having then taken on the leadership of the project, she provides insights into the challenges and benefits of transdisciplinary research, stakeholder engagement, and arguing for their impact-focused approach. Jean also shares her academic background in social science, health and genomics research work in Australia.

Overview:

[00:29] Introduction

[03:03] Jean's PhD, Post-Doc Journey & Backup Plan

[11:23] From Australia to Austria: Applying for research funding sandpit

[18:00] The Sandpit Experience

[27:47] Getting Funded, Becoming a Team

[32:08] Leading the Project and Ongoing Project Support

[40:20] Transdisciplinary Research

[48:29] Wrapping up Part 1

[49:36] More on Jean's PhD and Post Doc Projects

[56:40] Final Wrapping Up

[57:47] End

Related links:

Ludwig Boltzmann Institute/Gesellschaft

The sandpit-funded project – The Village Project

Funding & Research Culture (podcast extract)

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 21:18:00 +0200

This episode is an edited extract from a ‘Beyond Phrenology’ podcast episode where Dr Madhur Mangalam chatted with me about the impacts of research funding challenges on academic culture and individual well-being. The conversation addresses the need for a shift towards more supportive and diverse cultures, the complexities of academic career paths, and the importance of leadership, mentorship and job crafting. We also discuss the implications of international academic norms on individual career choices.

Overview:

[00:00:43] Research Funding Challenges and the Unsustainability of Current Models

[00:04:57] Promoting Emotional Intelligence and Leadership in Academia

[00:15:14] Navigating Career Paths Across Contexts

[00:24:38] On Privileged Positions and Playing the Game

[00:29:02] Wrapping up

[00:30:53] End

Related Links:

Madhur Mangalam, University of Nebraska at Omaha

BeyondPhrenology (YouTube)

BeyondPhrenology (Spotify)

Daniel Goleman – Emotional Intelligence

CAL99 episode: On research identity, meaningful work and funding

TEDx talk from 2016: The craziness of research funding. It costs us all.

Online Academic Leadership Development Course – sign up by March 7 2024!

Celebrating 100!

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 08:00:00 +0200

Taking this time to celebrate CAL100 – the 100th episode for the Changing Academic Life podcast series (actually 109th episode if we count the nine related work episodes) and thanks to all the people who have been part of making it happen.

To update and correct the information about Dr Paddy Barrett who inspired this podcast:

His original podcast was called 'The Doctor Paradox'. He is a preventive cardiologist not an anaesthetist as I stated. And he is now working in Ireland not the US!

On research identity, meaningful work and funding (solo)

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 08:00:00 +0200

Triggered by a comment from Katta Spiel in an earlier podcast, in this solo episode I explore the tensions between the autonomy and freedom we have to shape our research identities and do meaningful work, and the systemic constraints from funding and promotion opportunities. The tensions particularly arise when research interests don’t align well with institutional expectations or funding trends. I explore various ways to navigate these tensions, such as, adjusting research focus to align with strategic priorities, reframing research proposals while keeping the core agenda unchanged, or continuing passion projects outside of formal funded frameworks. I also reflect on potential trade-offs and the importance of maintaining personal connection and motivation in our research work. At the end I suggest some strategies for self-reflection and staying in tune with what 'lights you up' as a researcher.

This episode also connects with prior podcast guests Mark Reed and Stuart Reeves.

Overview:

00:29 Introduction and Reflection on Academic Freedom

01:54 Replay from Katta Spiel Part 1

02:37 Mark Reed's principle for engagement and impact

05:22 The Tension Between Personal Values, Identity and Systemic Expectations

07:05 The Reality of Funding Proposals and Strategic Game

08:40 The Impact of Funding Conditions on Research

10:27 The Dilemma of Playing the Funding Game

13:08 Choices for How to Play the Game

19:59 Choosing Not to Play the Game

21:54 Reframing Research Identity

26:55 End

Related links:

Katta podcast Part 1 episode

Mark Reed podcast episode

Stuart Reeves podcast episode

Mark Reed, What is good practice engagement and impact? Dec 5 2023

Katta Spiel (Part 2) on neurodivergence & different ways of being and knowing

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 08:00:00 +0200

Dr Katta Spiel is an Assistant Professor at TU Wien, a recent ERC Starting Grant recipient, and a good colleague of mine. In part two of our conversation, Katta discusses being neurodivergent, and experiences with ADHD, and being an activist for change with an example of how gender is dealt with in research, and about 'epistemic plurality and the importance of making space for different ways of being and knowing. They conclude by advocating for respectful curiosity about individual experiences and allowing others space to perform their best work. They also argue for a lab culture where personal needs can be discussed and respected, suggesting this encourages more open dialogue and a supportive environment.

This conversation picks up from Part one where Katta shared their experiences on topics like career uncertainty, proposal rejections, coming out as queer, chronic health issues, being successful, and notions of normativity.

Overview:

[00:00:00] Introduction

[00:01:56] Personal Journey with Neurodivergence

[00:06:42] Strategies for Navigating Neurodivergence

[00:10:05] Dealing with a world not made for Neurodivergence

[00:15:39] Creating a Supportive Environment for Neurodivergence

[00:20:12] The Intersection of Neurodivergence and Activism

[00:26:19] Embracing different ways of being and knowing

[00:33:27] Final Thoughts on Neurodivergence and Inclusivity

[00:35:44] My final reflections

[00:38:06] End

Related links:

Katta's personal web page, TU Wien web page, LinkedIn page, and announcement about their ERC Starting Grant

Gender paper: Katta Spiel, Oliver L. Haimson, and Danielle Lottridge. 2019. How to do better with gender on surveys: a guide for HCI researchers. interactions 26, 4 (July-August 2019), 62–65. https://doi.org/10.1145/3338283

Hanne de Jaegher https://hannedejaegher.net

Reflecting on 2023

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 16:13:00 +0200

In this short episode I reflect on the podcast season so far and on my own year of transitions. And I offer some prompt questions to help us reflect on what we have achieved and learnt this past year and encourage us to take some time to savour and celebrate it.

Overview:

00:05 Introduction

01:32 Podcast highlights

05:50 Transitioning to a new phase

7:35 Reflection prompts

10:17 Gratitude & looking forward

13:26 End

Katta Spiel (Part 1) on career uncertainties, gender identity and health issues

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 08:00:00 +0200

Dr Katta Spiel is an Assistant Professor at TU Wien, a recent ERC Starting Grant recipient, and a good colleague of mine.

In the first part of this two-part conversation Katta shares their experiences on a range of topics like career uncertainty, rejection of proposals, coming out as queer, having a formal gender change, dealing with chronic health issues, and being successful in receiving a prestigious research council grant. Dr. Spiel's struggles and successes reflect their unyielding effort to change academic life for the better. An emphasis is also placed on the importance of authenticity and uncompromised approach when applying for grants. Part two of the conversation with Katta will delve deeper into the topic of neurodivergence and their ADHD experiences.

Overview:

0:00 Introduction

02:42 Navigating Identity and Academia

07:06 Exploring Alternative Career Paths

09:37 The Journey to Recognition and Success

10:34 Challenges and Triumphs in Grant Applications

23:07 Understanding the Difference Between Access and Accessibility

25:48 Personal Journey of Gender Identity and Health

33:58 Experiences with Chronic Health Issues

38:10 The Impact of Body Shape on Medical Treatment

40:16 The Role of Technology in Access and Inclusion

43:23 End

Related Links:

Katta's personal web page, TU Wien web page, LinkedIn page, and announcement about their ERC Starting Grant

People: Raja Kushalnager, Christian Vogler , Abraham Glasser

Revisiting Irina part 2

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 08:00:00 +0200

There were some technical hiccups in Part 2 of my conversation with Irina Shklovski, making the original audio I released very choppy (a lesson in not relying on smart tools!). I’ve uploaded new audio version that is much easier to listen to and doesn't chop off words. So this is an encouragement to you to listen to this now as it is such an important raw honest conversation and Irina shares so many useful ideas about coming back from burnout and learning to be enough, do enough. I include a clip from that conversation as a teaser.

Overview:

00:00 Intro

00:29 Addressing Technical Issues on Irina Part 2

01:52 Revisiting Irina's Conversation

02:35 Snippet from Irina's Conversation

04:13 Encouragement to Listen to Part Two

04:30 Outro

05:25 End

Episode: Irina Shklovski Part 2

On Self Compassion

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 16:02:00 +0200

In this short episode I pick on the notion of self-compassion from the discussion with Mark Reed last week, and go back to Kristin Neff’s work and other related self-compassion researcher to unpack the three components of self-compassion and some practices for cultivating self-compassion and also point to some of the research evidence base for the benefits of self-compassion. I also share my own experience in needing to apply self-compassion this week.

Overview:

00:29 Introduction

01:27 Replaying Mark Reed on self-compassion

02:26 An overview of self-compassion

06:37 Examples of self-compassion practices

08:24 My self-compassion experience

11:25 Example research evidence base

17:45 Back to Mark

20:24 End

For atranscript to follow automatically with the audio: https://share.descript.com/view/JxbMM1C5ZIZ

Related Links:

The podcast conversation with Mark Reed

Kristin Neff’s Self-Compassion web page

Neff, K., Hsieh, Y. & Dejitterat, K. Self-compassion, Achievement Goals, and Coping with Academic Failure. Self and Identity, 4, 263-287, 2005. DOI: 10.1080/13576500444000317

Zessin, U., Dickhäuser, O. & Garbade, S. The Relationship Between Self-Compassion and Well-Being: A Meta-Analysis. Health and Well-Being, 7(3), 340-364 2015

Ewert, C., Vater, A. & Schröder-Abé, M. Self-Compassion and Coping: a Meta-Analysis. Mindfulness 12, 1063–1077 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-020-01563-8

Lee, K.J., Lee, S.M. The role of self-compassion in the academic stress model. Curr Psychol41, 3195–3204 (2022).https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-00843-9

Dreisoerner, A., Klaic, A., van Dick, R. et al. Self-Compassion as a Means to Improve Job-Related Well-Being in Academia. J Happiness Stud 24, 409–428 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-022-00602-6

Phillips WJ, Hine DW. Self-compassion, physical health, and health behaviour: a meta-analysis. Health Psychol Rev. 2021 Mar;15(1):113-139. Doi:10.1080/17437199.2019.1705872. Epub 2019 Dec 22. PMID: 31842689.

Neff, K. Self-Compassion: Theory, Method, Research, and Intervention. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2023. 74:193–218.

Acknowledgement: Episode artwork image of person hugging themselves: Photo by Hala Al-Asadi on Unsplash

Mark Reed on mental health, love and impact

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 13:52:00 +0200

Professor Mark Reed is an academic, author, podcaster, consultant, trainer, policy advisor among his many roles. His research area is on ecosystem markets and environmental governance, and he studies how researchers can generate and share their knowledge so they can change the world. Reflecting both of these strands, he is both an academic, co-directing a research Centre at Scotland’s Rural College, and he is the founder of Fast Track Impact, a training and coaching company, and he hosts The Fast Track Impact podcast. He also has a host of other roles you can read about on his web page.

We discuss the concept of 'impact' in academia, the challenges of mental health and burnout amongst academics, and the importance of self-compassion, self-reflection and self-care. Driven by a desire to make a difference, Mark intertwines his academic inquiries with a commitment to environmental stewardship and decolonizing research. He also talks about his commitment to empowering colleagues, managing postdocs efficiently, and his take on the biases and limitations within the academic system.

Overview

00:05 Introduction

00:30 Meet Professor Mark Reed: A Multi-faceted Academic

01:18 The Importance of Self-Reflection in Academia

01:56 Mark's Personal Struggles and the Importance of Self-Compassion

02:07 The Role of Purpose and Values in Mark's Work

02:56 Mark's Journey as an Academic and Policy Advisor

07:23 The Challenges and Biases in the Academic System

08:32 Building a Compassionate Culture in Academia

11:33 Decolonizing Research and Influencing Policy

27:11 The Role of Empathy and Love in Research

32:13 The Importance of Self-Care and Work-Life Balance in Academia

48:05 Creating a Purposeful Workplace and Leading from the Bottom Up

51:24 Conclusion: The Impact of Love and Empathy in Academia

52:56 End

Listen here for a version to follow the transcript linked directly to the audio

Mark’s books: https://www.fasttrackimpact.com/books#impact-culture

The Research Impact Handbook 2nd Ed 2018
The Productive Researcher 2017
Impact Culture 2022

Mark’s ‘The Fast Track Impact’ podcast series

Mark Reed & Hanna Rudman, Re-thinking research impact: voice, context and power at the interface of science, policy and practice, 18, Sustainability Science, 967-981, 2023.

Richard Watermeyer's 2019 book: Competitive Accountability in Academic Life: The Struggle for Social Impact and Public Legitimacy

Dr Kristin Neff, Uni of Austen Texas on self compassion

Prof Michelle Pinard, Uni of Aberdeen

On choosing the park

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 08:00:00 +0200

In this very short 7mins episode, I talk about choosing to go to the park instead of doing a longer episode as I had planned - making good enough choices and honouring other areas of my life.

I also point to related older podcasts that talked about issues around burnout, obsessive vs harmonious passion, self care, planning:

Jolanta Burke on burnout, harmonious passion, positive workplaces & helping others (from 2017)

Anna Cox on family, work & strategies for making the changes we want (from 2017)

Amy Ko on being reflectively self-aware, deliberately structured, & amazingly productive (also from 2017)

Irina Shklovski (Part 2) on coming back from burnout, being enough, doing enough

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 08:00:00 +0200

Professor Irina Shklovski, University of Copenhagen, continues her powerful story about her academic burn-out experiences, returning to work and learning the dance of how to be enough and do enough. She discusses the push-and-pull between professional expectations and personal health, the value of reflection and self-awareness, how to establish work boundaries, and the crucial role of support from colleagues. We also touch on university funding, neoliberal culture in academia, and the importance of nurturing a balanced lifestyle which includes non-work related activities. The conversation ends with a call for change in academia, highlighting the need to redefine standards for success and manage the increasing pressures in academic cultures.

Overview:

[00:29] Episode introduction & recap Part 1

[04:53] Trying to plan

[06:29] Saying no and yes

[14:44] Value of professional help

[22:57] Tracking work

[32:10] Making time for rest

[40:24] Culture/structure influences

[49:39] Supporting students in what is enough

[54:46] Wrapping up

[59:04] End

Listen here for a version to follow the transcript linked directly to the audio

Related Links:

Haruki Murakami, What I talk about when I talk about running

Irina Shklovski (Part 1) on Burning Out

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 08:00:00 +0200

Professor Irina Shklovski, University of Copenhagen, has a powerful story to tell about her burn-out experiences. In Part 1 she talks about how she got there, having an amazingly supportive department and colleagues, and how her body tells her when to stop. Implicated in this are issues such as being across two departments, defining her scholarship, starting a new uni during COVID, the downside of getting grants and what it’s like getting to the point of not being able to function and having to ask for help.

Apologies for missing music - trying to get that sorted!

Overview:

[00:29] Episode introduction

[01:58] Navigating two departments…during COVID

[10:32] Deciding for CS, being uncomfortable, having impact

[24:25] Journey to burnout

[29:35] Making the call for help

[38:45] How her body tells her when to stop

[42:32] Wrapping up

[45:17] End

Click here for a walk-through transcript

Related Links

Mobility, pensions and you, yes you! (solo)

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 08:00:00 +0200

In this short solo episode, I reflect back on recent conversations around academic mobility, discuss some benefits, and also point to an EU initiative to improve support for mobility across sectors, countries and disciplines. I also discuss some of the costs and issues around mobility, and in particular pensions, something we don’t often think about. In sharing my experiences with a complicated pension situation because of my international and sector mobility, I encourage everyone to think about this now.

Overview:

[00:29] Episode introduction, revisiting mobility form past episodes

[02:16] EU initiative towards better mobility support, mobility benefits

[04:47] Shadow sides of mobility

[06:12] Pension challenges with mobility

[08:12] My mobility and pension story

[15:08] Encouraging people to think more about pensions

[16:50] RESAVER pension fund

[19:24] End

Susanne Bødker on career, culture and choices

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 08:00:00 +0200

Professor Susanne Bødker is a professor of Human Computer Interaction at Aarhus University in Denmark. She reflects on 40 years at Aarhus University (AU) touching on issues including mobility, changes over time, hiring practices, creating collegial culture, being active in university politics, transitioning to retirement, being a single parent, among many others. You’ll hear a strongly held set of values around participation and human connections. Susanne is one of the most respected and impactful HCI researchers yet you’ll also hear her humility. Thank you Susanne for a career well served and that will hopefully continue in some ways as you explore your new opportunities.

Apologies for missing music - trying to get that sorted!

Overview

0:05 Welcome to Changing Academic Life.

[00:00:29] Episode introduction

[00:02:21] Susanne introduces herself and her PhD times

[00:14:36] Reflecting on 40 years in Aarhus

[00:21:31] The collegial social culture at Aarhus

[00:25:29] Hiring people for fit

[00:30:18] The value of mobility

[00:38:06] The big changes over time

[00:40:49] Being involved in university politics

[00:47:39] Transitioning to retirement

[00:54:39] How she sees her legacy

[01:00:05] Being a single parent

[01:04:52] Wrapping up

01:07:21 End

Related links:

Susanne Bødker, Google Scholar profile

Her published thesis: Susanne Bødker, Through the Interface: A Human Activity Approach to User Interface Design, Routledge, 1990

Austrian Academy of Sciences Lecture, 21 Sept 2023, “How do we understand tools, and why is that important for contemporary human-computer interaction?"

Morten Kyng, Kristen Nygaard, Kim Halskov, Joan Greenbaum

Winograd, Terry and Flores, Fernando, Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design, Intellect Books, 1986.

Dreyfus, Stuart E. and Dreyfus, Hubert L. (1986). Mind over Machine. New York, NY: Free Press.

Utopia project & Participatory IT (PIT) Centre

Keywords:

Academia, Career paths, Research culture, Retirement, Values

Click here to subscribe via the player of your choice.

Reforming research assessment top-down bottom-up middle-out (solo)

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 22:06:00 +0200

Following the conversation with Dr Karen Stroobants on the EU CoARA agreement, I discuss some other top-down initiatives at international and national levels for reforming research assessment. I also share some of my own bottom-up experiences trying to put these principles to work eg in writing references and being part of evaluation panels. It is also my hope that these actions can also have some middle-out influence.

Overview [41:33 mins] - full transcript available:

[00:00:29] Episode introduction

[00:02:10] The 10 Commitments of CoARA

[00:05:02] Other international initiatives

[00:10:34] Netherlands as example of national initiatives

[00:17:20] Some of my 'bottom up' examples

[00:34:18] Middle out strategies

[00:38:35] Wrapping up

LERU: League of European Research Universities

LERU Publication: A Pathway towards Multidimensional Academic Careers 2022

DORA: San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment 2013

Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics 2015

The Metric Tide: Review of metrics in research assessment

Strategy Evaluation Protocol 2021-2027

Room for Everyone’s Talent

Related podcasts:

Karen Stroobants on changing research culture and reforming research assessment

Sarah Davies: Part 1 on mobility, precarity and notions of excellence and part 2 on luck, disrupting excellence, and cultures of care

Tanita Casci and Elizabeth Adams on supporting, rewarding and celebrating a positive collegial research culture

James Wilsden on metrics and responsible research evaluation

Keywords:

Academia, CoARA, Diversity, Governance and policy, Research culture, Research Evaluation

Being a Work in Progress (solo)

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 17:00:00 +0200

In this short episode I reflect on my recurring life lesson about putting unrealistic pressures on myself, in this case to put out a full podcast this week. Especially when the platforms I am using are a work in progress. And accepting that I am also a work in progress. What are your recurring life lessons?

Transcript [08:03 mins]

[00:00:29] Geri: Do you ever have any of those life lessons where it seems like the universe needs to serve them up to you again and again and again? Because you're so slow to learn them. And so you need to be reminded about them over and over and over again. Well, this week I've been returned to one of my recurring life lessons that it seems like I still don't learn. Which is about setting up unreal expectations for myself.

[00:01:02] I made the bold claim in the short intro session to season four. That my aim was to try to release a podcast every week on a Wednesday morning. And so I've already put myself under enormous pressure to do that. Uh, we put out the great conversation with Karen last week Karen Stroobants about reforming research evaluation. And I wanted to follow up that podcast, just responding to some of the issues she raised in terms of my personal experiences. And so I did record something and then I spent ages processing the audio and so on. And doing it quite uncritically because I was just driven by, I had to get it out. I had to get it out. Uh, and then Wednesday came and I miss my 8:00 AM release time and it still wasn't done. And I'm still feeling the pressure last night and it just occurred to me. It has stepping back a little bit. It's actually not very good at all. Despite the huge amount of time and effort that I've put into it, it's really not ready to go out. And it's something that I should take just as a, as a rehearsal . So then I was feeling doubly bad about it.

[00:02:15] But do you know what? That all just comes from me? I created that. No one else. I know that no one is sitting around at 8:00 AM or 9:00 AM on a Wednesday. Waiting for the podcast to drop. But still I felt the pressure. I felt bad. And I ended up putting a whole lot of misdirected time and inefficient effort. Having bought into that pressure. And that whole unrealistic expectation.

[00:02:43] So I'm not going to release that podcast. I am still going to get something out this week. So what's my minimal commitment that I can do. And I'm just going to do this short one with yet another confession. About this time, setting up unrealistic expectations.

[00:03:01] And when you think about it, logically of course they were unrealistic expectations. What on earth was I thinking. Of course, it's going to be hard to do weekly at the moment. Because this whole new podcast set up is a work in progress, literally. We're still getting the new technology platforms in place for the podcast and that that's everything from the recording platform. The platform where I process the audio, do the transcriptions. Um, we're setting up a whole new podcast server. They're all new. At once. And so every aspect of the workflow now is brand new as well. And on top of that, they're really great platforms, but in being great, they're also quite complex. And so there's a huge learning curve, both just in getting to know the software and what each of the platforms can do. As well as how I want to use them and how to make that workflow work.

[00:04:02] And the other aspect, that's a big work in progress and taking time and effort is the website. And. And also there's a lot of interplay between the new podcast server and the new website that we're trying to work out as well. So that the whole environment I'm trying to work in. Is a work in progress.

[00:04:21] And I'm clearly a work in progress as well. Because I forgot to allow myself grace for being on a learning curve. And learning curves are always uncomfortable. Aren't they it's. It's uncomfortable feeling like you don't know, not being an expert. Um, and also dealing with the uncertainty of that, and also the inevitable challenges that come up and problems.

[00:04:46] And it's not just that on top of that, this my whole life situation. These are my last days in my current role before transitioning on. And there's a whole lot to be done practically. And not to mention a whole lot to deal with emotionally and the whole emotional overlay of, um, you know, those interesting aspects to endings and beginnings, you know, the sadness of endings the excitement of new beginnings and. so on., And on top of all of that, we've also had a lot of visitors, both personal visitors and work visitors. So, duh, of course, it's going to be hard to get something out on Wednesday. And that's okay. That it didn't happen.

[00:05:31] And so this week has been returning to the lesson. My recurring life lesson. That it's okay. That I'm okay. Uh, not to put such high expectations on myself and create my own pressures. To hold the expectation's lightly. To be comfortable with adjusting deadlines and to be comfortable with good enough and recognizing when good enough is good enough. And it's okay to also say that. Say the one that I had tried to prepare for this week. Wasn't good enough.

[00:06:05] So. This is just a short podcast today. I'll do my best to get something out next week, but I won't put pressure on myself and I'll just accept that. Work on being kind to myself, recognize that we will eventually get all of this new stuff, worked out, that the learning curve will become a little bit easier. The website will be up and running my new life, whatever that's going to have it, that's going to be unfolding. Will happen and we'll get into the rhythm as well, and just try to maintain, more of a detached curiosity to see how it all works out.

[00:06:45] So thanks for listening to my confession. Uh, maybe this invites you to also reflect on what are your recurring life lessons that the universe needs to present you with again, and again, and again. And hopefully. Maybe you are not as slow as me as at learning those lessons. Have a good week

Karen Stroobants on changing research culture and reforming research assessment

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 08:00:00 +0200

We need to reform research evaluation because "It's not just which people are we excluding, which profiles are we excluding, which ideas are we excluding, but also whose problems are we not solving" says Dr Karen Stroobants.

Karen is a researcher, policy adviser and consultant on research policy and strategy, with a focus on research culture. Her research background and PhD is in chemistry. She now manages a portfolio of activities, combining roles as (part-time) lead policy advisor on research landscape & economy for the Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK and as freelance consultant, focusing most recently on contributing to the drafting of a European agreement on research assessment reform.

This agreement on reforming research assessment from CoARA, the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment, is the reason I wanted to speak with Karen. We cover: concerns of current research assessment approaches; the need for both top-down and bottom up buy in to create research culture change and what that change might look like; how we can navigate career choices while the system is still in transition; the importance of reflection for research culture change and embracing a diversity of people ideas and research problems; the core commitments of the CoARA agreement; and the move to more qualitative assessments at both individual and institutional and national levels. We finish with Karen reflecting on her own career choices driven by values and what is important.

[00:00:29] Episode introduction
[00:02:39] Welcome & Introduction
[00:04:39] Concerns around research system
[00:13:05] Research culture change needs top-down and bottom-up buy-in
[00:20:12] Negotiating choices while the system is undergoing transition
[00:23:25] Importance of reflection for research culture change
[00:30:21] Diversity of people, ideas and research problems
[00:34:17] CoARA Agreement on reforming research assessment
[00:40:04] Signing up to the CoARA agreement
[00:50:10] Narrative CVs - for inividuals, organisations and national level
[00:54:02] Other ways of brining a qualitative lens
[00:56:15] Karen's career path - setting boundaries, choosing values

Related links:

CoARA: Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment https://coara.eu

Prof Frank Miedema, UMC Utrecht, https://www.umcutrecht.nl/en/research/researchers/miedema-frank-f#

Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions MSCA https://marie-sklodowska-curie-action; San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment s.ec.europa.eu

INORMS: International Network of Research Management Societies https://inorms.net

DORA: San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment https://sfdora.org/dora-community-engagement-grants-supporting-academic-assessment-reform/

The Metric Tide: Review of metrics in research assessment https://www.ukri.org/publications/review-of-metrics-in-research-assessment-and-management/

Book:

Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women, Vintage Books, 2019

https://carolinecriadoperez.com/book/invisible-women/

Related podcasts:

Sarah Davies: Part 1 on mobility, precarity and notions of excellence https://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal81-sarah-davies-part-1 and part 2 on luck, disrupting excellence, and cultures of care https://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal82-sarah-davies-part-2

Tanita Casci and Elizabeth Adams on supporting, rewarding and celebrating a positive collegial research culture https://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2021/5/21/tanita-casci-elizabeth-adams

James Wilsden on metrics and responsible research evaluation https://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal77-james-wilsdon-replay

New Season Welcome (solo)

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 11:00:00 +0200

This is a short episode to kick off the new Season of the Changing Academic Life podcast series.

Looking forward to bringing some great conversations coming on a range of topics fro reforming research assessment, burnout and neurodiversity.

A new website will be coming very soon!

You can access all the latest episodes via this link that will connect you to your favourite podcast player. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already to be sure you don’t miss any episodes!

End of Season Reflections and Transitions

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 06:07:00 +0200

This is the end of the current season of episodes. I take the opportunity to shortly reflect on the themes we’ve heard - around listening, leadership, wellbeing, peer review, and research excellence and evaluation. I also invite you to share your feedback and suggestions, and I share some of the various transitions happening over the break, all leading up to the next season starting Sept/Oct 2023.

If you missed any episodes from this season, you can find them all on your favourite podcast app where you subscribe to this or go to the Changing Academic Life podcast page.

I’d also really love to hear from you if you have any feedback generally about what works well, what doesn’t work so well with the podcasts for you, any suggestions for future themes or people you’d like me to talk with, or if you’d like to volunteer to help out with a transcription. You can contact me via the contact form here or via my uni account (email on this page).

Full transcript available to download here.

Overview:

00:27 Introduction and request for feedback and suggestions.

02:03 Walking through common themes of the last 23 episodes of this season

09:26 The transition to a new podcasting server platform and new webpage

12:59 The personal transition post-Sept 2023

14:51 Wrapping up, reminder re feedback, and final thanks

18:59 End

Special Thanks:

Thanks to Sabrina Burtscher for all the help with transcriptions and wishing her all the best for her PhD. Thanks too to Rafael Vrecar, Katharina Werner and Silke Buchberger who are helping with transcriptions.

Sarah Davies (Part 2) on luck, disrupting excellence, and cultures of care

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 07:31:00 +0200

Sarah Davies is a Professor of Technosciences, Materiality, & Digital Cultures at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University of Vienna. Overall her work explores how science and society are co-produced, with the digital and digitisation being key aspects. Of particular interest for our discussions is her current research on the conditions of academic work and knowledge production.

In Part 2, Sarah Davies shares from both her research and lived experiences on topics like equity and valuing diverse work, care work in academia and who does that work, creating collegial research cultures, and about luck - the trigger for why I wanted to talk to Sarah. She discusses a recent paper she and co-authors published on luck and the situations of research, and how accounting for luck might just be one way of disrupting problematic rhetorics of excellence. This is a continuation of Part 1 of our conversation where she talked about her own career path, touching on issues of mobility, precarity and projectification of research notions of excellence.

“Care for people is very integrated with care for their science…You [can’t] separate the epistemic production, the knowledge production, from caring for people”

“It throws into contrast, this narrative of the heroic, excellent individual researcher, and the complex contexts in which good research is done.”

“You can't do science alone, you can't be this isolated person, you actually need quite some social skills”

“When we talk about excellence, that is somehow really seen as not including luck […] It's important to take luck seriously.”

Overview (times approximate) [Transcript coming soon]:

00:29 Episode introduction

03:26 Sarah’s inaugural lecture

06:06 Negotiating contemporary academia, related equity issues & how we can see and value diverse work

08:17 Acknowledging care work and who does that work

11:09 Increasing interest in statements on research cultures

12:38 Having explicit discussions about how we engage together

17:19 The way people speak about luck in academic trajectories & the disruption of the excellence rhetoric

22:15 Toxic behaviors and the care work it requires

25:14 Taking luck seriously & her won experiences of luck

30:00 The importance of people and social skills

31:55 Sarah’s experiences in setting up her own group and learning through doing

37:05 End

Related links:

Sarah’s Inaugural lecture

Text: https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/o:1622120
Video: https://vimeo.com/780321785/0ef9327e6b

Papers:

Davies, Sarah R., and Maja Horst. 2015. ‘Crafting the Group: Care in Research Management’. Social Studies of Science 45 (3): 371–93.

On ‘research culture' (56 min) - Wellcome seems to be taking the lead here:

Davies, S. R., & Pham, B.-C. (2023). Luck and the ‘situations’ of research. Social Studies of Science, 53(2), 287–299.

Davies, S.R. & B-C Pham, Why don't we account for luck in research careers? LSE Blog, 18 April 2023.

Liboiron, Max, Justine Ammendolia, Katharine Winsor, Alex Zahara, Hillary Bradshaw, Jessica Melvin, Charles Mather, et al. 2017. ‘Equity in Author Order: A Feminist Laboratory’s Approach’. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3 (2): 1–17.

Loveday, Vik. 2017. ‘“Luck, Chance, and Happenstance? Perceptions of Success and Failure amongst Fixed-Term Academic Staff in UK Higher Education”: Luck, Chance, and Happenstance?’ The British Journal of Sociology, September.

Lund, Rebecca W. B. 2015. Doing the Ideal Academic - Gender, Excellence and Changing Academia. Aalto University.

Tanita Casci and Elizabeth Glasgow CAL podcast conversation: ‘Tanita Casci and Elizabeth Adams on supporting, rewarding and celebrating a positive collegial research culture’

Sarah’s collaborators/team members

CC BY-SA 4.0 by Geraldine Fitzpatrick and Sarah Davies

Thanks to Jana Herwig and Mario Seidl from the Vienna University Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) Video production suite for use of their podcast recording facilities.

Sarah Davies (Part 1) on mobility, precarity and notions of excellence

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 05:12:00 +0200

Sarah Davies is a Professor of Technosciences, Materiality, & Digital Cultures at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University of Vienna. Overall her work explores how science and society are co-produced, with the digital and digitisation being key aspects. Of particular interest is her current research on the conditions of academic work and knowledge production.

In Part 1 here, we discuss her experiences with academic mobility, touching on issues of cultural differences, precarity, and reflecting on who is able to be mobile or not and with what consequences. This leads to discussions about how we interpret CVs, and she challenges us to re-think internationalization, projectification of research, and notions of excellence. Part 2 is out now too.

“Research always unfolds…also …finding things that I thought were interesting, or people that I wanted to work with, and that was driving some of the choices I made around this mobility.”

[Projectification]: “the shift to a project logic, where you have to design a piece of research that fits into a certain timeframe… it is actually a totally different logic to older imaginations of scholarship … something that unfolded over many years. It was not oriented to packages of funding”

Overview (times approximate) [Transcript coming soon]:

0:05 Welcome to Changing Academic Life & episode introduction

02:58 Sarah introduces her background and her many geographical and disciplinary moves

08:30 The passive voice removing the messiness of the lab

11:02 Move from science communication to science and technology studies

16:30 The red threads through her work

19:00 Coping with the uncertainty of shorter term contracts

23:00 The cultural challenges of the different academic contexts

33:15 Re-thinking how we imagine internationalization and mobility to explore other ways of creating networks

37:38 How we interpret CVs to recognize diverse situations

40:56 Notions of excellence and projectification, re-thinking new funding models and more long-term positions

51:47 End

Elizabeth Churchill on creating culture, leading teams, loving challenges

Wed, 24 May 2023 11:09:00 +0200

Dr Elizabeth Churchill is a Senior Director at Google. We recorded this interview while we were both at a conference, where she was awarded a SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award. In this conversation she shares insights and experiences around building good team cultures, managing diversity, onboarding for global teams, and some management frameworks that she has found useful. She also shares her journey from a psychology background to working in big tech and from research to now delivering technical infrastructures, what she was looking for in moving between companies, and the red threads of her love of people, of being challenged and continually learning.

“In a team, you don't need to know everything. Yes, it's actually a collective.”

Download a full transcript of the conversation here.

Overview (times approximate):

0:05 Welcome to Changing Academic Life.

0:30 Intro to the episode

02:18 The joy of in-person conferences

04:09 Elizabeth introduces herself and her current operating systems work

09:12 Team culture and diversity

15:18 Negotiating tensions and conflicts

23:15 Culture of software engineering environments

27:48 Onboarding for a global team

31:37 Frameworks for management of teams

39:35 Her fascination with people that took her from psychology to large scale tech companies

43:08 The pragmatics that led her to industry positions and from industry research to platform

47:39 The motivations around the moves to different companies

53:02 Love of learning and taking on new challenges

56:02 Her Interactions magazine article on imposterism & being comfortable not knowing everything

01:02:11 Final exhortation find your community

01:06:05 End

Marta Cecchinato (part 2) on promoting wellbeing through leadership, EDI & self-care

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 11:41:00 +0200

This is part 2 of my conversation with Dr Marta Cecchinato (Part 1 is here). Marta is an Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) in the Computer and Information Sciences Department at Northumbria University. Her research focuses on understanding the complexities of multiple technologies in everyday life and how digital experiences can be shaped to support wellbeing at work and in our personal lives.

In part 2, we go on to discuss a range of issues from how her wellbeing stance has influenced her leadership of a new group and the Athena Swan EDI initiative in her department, how managers can better support people on parental leave, her own experiences being a first-time mother, and the digital wellbeing strategies that have been most helpful to her.

“I love my job, but it’s a job at the end of the day, and just because I stopped sooner, and I don't work longer hours every day doesn't mean that I love my job less. I'm probably setting a better example. For others as well.”

“There's so much more to life than than just work”

Overview (times approximate): [Full TRANSCRIPT available here]

00:30 Preamble

03:00 Setting up her own group and building trust in your relationships

9:11 The transition from a self-acknowledged control freak to a leader.

13:46 Leading the Athena Swan exercise.

17:53 Digital wellbeing, flexible working and EDU issues

20:03 How managers can better support people going on parental leave

25:30 Having her own first child during the pandemic

31:12 The importance of being out in nature.

35:02 The micro-boundary strategies with the biggest impact for her

38:01 Sabbatical plans

41:31 How Marta creates micro moments of rest in her day

44:29 Key strengths

47:11 End

Marta Cecchinato (part 1) on digital wellbeing and microboundary strategies

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 13:56:00 +0200

Dr Marta Cecchinato is an Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) in the Computer and Information Sciences Department at Northumbria University. Her research focuses on understanding the complexities of dealing with multiple technologies in everyday life and how digital experiences can be shaped to support wellbeing at work and in our personal lives.

In part 1 of our conversation, she talks about her digital wellbeing research, the concept of microboundaries, and strategies for taking more control of these microboundaries. You can also download her Digital Wellbeing Strategies Handbook to find more practical strategies.

“It's not about having that equal balance between work and life. As life changes, your responsibilities change, you need to revise things.”

“The way we use technology is different depending on the roles that we are embodying in that specific moment.”

“Micro boundary strategies help limit the negative impact that might arise from constant micro role transitions throughout the day.”

“Empower people…to make the technology to work for them, rather than working for the technology.”

Overview (times approximate): [Full transcript available here]

00:30 Introductions

02:22 Marta’s psychology background and path to her PhD at UCLIC around work life balance in the digital age

05:37 Language and culture differences in terminology eg no WLB term in Italian

09:47 What made her fall in love with research

13:15 Her PhD research journey to a focus on digital wellbeing

17:10 Her issues with the term WLB

19:20 A digital wellbeing approach, empowering people bottom-up, microboundary strategies & making these accessible via a downloadable booklet

23:20 Red thread of improving life, also through impacting EDI issues

28:15 The definition of microboundary supporting micro-role transitions & practical examples from her own life

32:05 The importance of reflection and colleagues to reflect with

38:05 Broad types of microboundary strategies

38:53 End

James Wilsdon - Replay on metrics & responsible research evaluation

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 16:06:00 +0200

This is a replay of a 2018 conversation with Professor James Wilsdon when he was a Professor of Research Policy in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield in the UK. He is now at UCL as a Professor of Research Policy in the Dept for Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP). James has been involved in many policy and think tank initiatives. Of particular interest here, he chaired an independent review of the role of metrics in the management of the UK’s research system, publishing a final report in 2015 called The Metric Tide. Connecting to our recent episodes on review practices, we start here at about 19mins into the original recording exploring what is the purpose of research evaluation.

“Metrics are a technology and there is nothing intrinsically good or evil in them, it’s all about how they are used.”

“It is incumbent on us not to indulge processes of evaluation that we know empirically are bad science.”

Full Transcript available here.

Heike Winschiers-Theophilus on global south research, reviewer bias, abstract vs lived diversity, & pluriversality

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 22:07:00 +0200

This conversation continues the reflections on our peer reviewing practices, this time bringing in the experiences of someone from the Global South. Here I am speaking with Prof Heike Winschiers-Theophilus. Heike is a Professor in the Faculty of Computing & Informatics, at Namibia University of Science & Technology. Heike shares the many challenges she and her colleagues have faced in the form of reviewer assumptions and biases, often informed from a Global North mindset as the default ‘mainstream’ gold standard. She also talks about the challenges in getting their research to be equally valued in making contributions to knowledge creation, and not just accepting their projected positions as exotic others and mere users of knowledge. This is also exacerbated by the exclusionary implications of open access for them, and the difficulties in getting their work more internationally visible and cited.

“At times I don’t understand what is happening in the Global North. I don’t understand the issues and conversations.”

“How much context must we give so we can override assumptions?”

“You are exotic therefore your value comes through being different. But that’s not the case.”

“It’s still keeping the ‘mainstream’ as the goalposts but that’s not what diversity is supposed to be like. We are equivalent to any other”

“Reviewers explicitly write that actually: ‘we understand there should be diversity but you don’t compare to mainstream’”

“I don’t think people can imagine we do serious research here.”

“Do they [reviewers] really read our study, do they even look at the academic value of it. Or is it becoming a political discussion now.”

“We should remember our own western bias. But reviewers keep on forgetting that. Because now they are in this power position.”

“Context and assumptions … when I write I have to think, who can be the reviewer and how much must I write to convince the reviewer…to override whatever assumptions the person has. And it becomes really complicated.”

“We are no longer part of the whole knowledge creation process. [… Open access] is totally counterproductive for us. And that’s scary.”

Overview (times approximate): [Full TRANSCRIPT coming soon]

0:05 Welcome to Changing Academic Life.

0:30 Intro to the episode

03:17 Welcome

Heike introduces herself, how she came to Namibia, the challenges doing a PhD, and now working as a professor in Namibia and integrating issues around linguistics, AI and culture

09:40 Ways she experiences some of the cultural tensions giving example of developing software and the participatory design techniques that didn’t work in this context, leading to shift in research focus onto methodologies and indigenous knowledge.

…The importance of asking questions

14:42 Being fully immersed in Namibia and now not understand the issues and conversations in the Global North and how this makes communication about what she does here harder and harder.

15:57 Example of these issues are important in the Global North but not important for her – the difference between learned or abstract empathy but not lived. Tolerance as an example. Diversity and inclusion also. The dissonance between behaviour and abstract discussions.

18:27 How this plays out in the review process. Heike goes through some of their recent review experiences – illustrating a lot of assumptions e.g., issues around diversity, different expectations about the value they ‘should’ deliver being ‘exotic’

22:27 Keeping the [WEIRD] ‘mainstream’ as the goalposts and reviewers expecting them to compare to the ‘mainstream’ despite espousing diversity as a principle. Yet WEIRD is not even the majority on the planet.

25:07 Anchored in views, eg from media, that Africa cannot be progressive or come up with innovations.

26:25 And opinions being even worse than biased assumptions, being called colonisers which is really insulting, and the new form of apartheid ‘you are not allowed to use VR’

Telling the story of one particular paper and conference review experience

32:38 The power of the reviewers and in particular the 2AC, and the gamble of whether the 2AC likes it or not

34:15 The impact of these sorts of reviews on the people involved

36:49 The question of who can be their audience and who not, trying to anticipate and mitigate reviewer assumptions and bias, and the problems of anonymity for them

41”10 The challenges of visibility and getting cited, and the exclusive consequences of open access publishing when they don’t have national agreements or access to funds to pay to publish a paper, and are relegated to users not creators of knowledge.

45:09 Discussing different open access or publication models, and also the similar challenges of costs for conferences and what is missed there by not going

50:14 Pluraversality as an alternative for looking at different perspectives and that all fit… and also complicated to operationalize as an abstract concept

54:00 How to change our fundamental underlying perspectives – encouraging people to experience, come to Africa, see that there is real research happening, and more collaborations

58:06 It’s about individuals, the power is with the 1AC and 2AC, that we carefully choose our ACs and needing mentorship for ACs

1:01:49 And the extra challenges for people in the Global South who don’t have Heike’s experience; and the importance of national gatherings and the challenges getting these recognised

1:06:14 Wrapping up

1:07:36 My final reflections

1:09:53 End

Related links:

[Abbreviations; Acronyms]

PD: Participatory Design

CHI: Computer Human Interaction

1AC/2AC: Associate Chair roles in our SIGHI conference program committees, responsible for managing the reviews for a set of papers

VR: Virtual Reality

WEIRD people: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic

ACM: Association of Computing Machinery, a professional organisation

ACM SIGCHI: Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction https://sigchi.org

GIZ: the main German development agency, "Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit"

[People]

Prof Christiane Floyd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiane_Floyd

Stanley

[Misc]

SIGCHI Ethics Committee: https://sigchi.org/ethics/

SIGCHI Gary Marsden Travel Awards: https://sigchi.org/awards/gary-marsden-travel-awards/

[Book]

Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, 2018, Duke University Press

[Heike’s publications if you want to check them out]

Edward Lee on the toxic culture of peer review

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 16:25:00 +0200

In the last episode from my own reviewing hall of shame, I mentioned the coincidence of attending a webinar where Edward Lee talked about the ‘toxic culture of rejection’, based on a blog post he write in 2022. In this episode we hear from Edward directly and discuss the culture of rejection, in CS especially, the problems with peer reviewing, the nature of conferences, and how we might approach reviewing differently and start to change the culture around publications, acceptance rates and evaluations without losing quality standards.

His bio: Edward A. Lee has been working on embedded software systems for more than 40 years. After studying and working at Yale, MIT, and Bell Labs, he landed at Berkeley, where he is now Professor of the Graduate School in EECS. His research is focused on cyber-physical systems. He leads the open-source software project Lingua Franca and previously Ptolemy II, is a coauthor of textbooks on embedded systems, signals and systems, digital communications, and philosophical and social implications of technology. His current research is focused on a polyglot coordination language for distributed real-time systems called Lingua Franca that combines features of discrete-event modeling, synchronous languages, and actors.

“There's a classical view of the purpose of publication, which is essentially to add knowledge to the archive […] I feel…we should understand that the primary purpose of publication is to communicate with other humans.”

“A scientific discipline progresses in a very cultural way… it's really about a human culture of developing and evolving, and, and it tends to evolve in a very chaotic way.”

“Institutions should be prepared to do their own evaluation.”

“The criterion should be, what is informative, interesting, and potentially valuable and useful to the community.”

“Everyone involved in the [review] process knows that we're dealing with other human beings. And the phrase that I've tried to use, […] is to pretend that this paper was written by their sister. How would that change [how you assess the paper]?”

Overview (times approximate): [FULL TRANSCRIPT for download]

0:05 Welcome to Changing Academic Life.

0:30 Intro to the episode

03:03 Welcome Edward Lee starts to introduce himself

06:04 How the faculty position selection process has changed over time - hypercompetition.

07:31 The gradual change towards hypercompetition, the randomness of the review process and the role of luck in getting papers accepted

11:41 The problem of the conference peer review process in no real opportunity for dialogue compared to journal review processes

12:38 This has the effect of a certain amount of randomness and conservatism.

14:44 What are conferences for? The importance of informal communication orthogonal to the publications

17:02 The obsessive focus on novelty

18:25 The purpose of publication, how science progresses and the importance of dialogue and culture.

22:59 The challenge of publishing multidisciplinary and systems papers

26:44 Playing the game the right way

31:17 The randomness of reviews and factors around this in program committees

37:30 The tensions and conflicts of selective conferences for rankings

38:07 Learning from how other communities work re conferences and journals

40:21 The association of publications with funding to attend a conference

44:23 Institutions should be prepared to do their own evaluations not outsource them to reviewers

47:55 What we should be looking for when evaluating papers

51:16 The advantages and challenges of the double blind review process

55:38 Reminder that we are dealing with humans as reviewers

59:35 Arguing for getting rid of acceptance rate

01:04:25 Wrapping up

Acknowledgements:

Edward Lee photo: Photo credit by Rusi Mchedlishvili

A confession from my review hall of shame

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 17:29:00 +0200

This short reflection follows on from the last episode, a replay of my 2017 conversation with Gloria Mark in honour of her just having published her book called “Attention span: a groundbreaking way to restore balance, happiness and productivity”. I make a confession here that comes from my reviewing hall of shame, about when I was a reviewer of one of the key papers leading to this book, a paper authored by Victor González and Gloria Mark. And how I (very wrongly!) argued for rejection. Luckily good colleagues saved me from myself and the paper was accepted but I use this as an example to urge us all to be more reflective about the biases we bring to reviewing and position this also against the broader challenges around reviewing in our increasingly hypercompetitive publication culture. I share this story with Victor González and Gloria Mark’s permission.

Full transcript pdf for download

Overview (times approximate):

0:05 Introduction to changing academic life.

1:31Introduction of the story – paper related to Gloria’s new bo

3:07 Rigorous fieldwork and data collection by Victor Gonzalez.

5:07 Arguing for rejection, discussing the paper in the corridor.

7:15 Judging a paper on its merits.

9:07 The coincidence of other conversations about reviewing eg Life in Academia Seminar

11:11 Review bias eg quantitative vs qualitative research, and Big Q vs little Q qualitative research.

13:27 The broader critiques of the review process.

15:57 Unsustainability of review effort - CHI 2023 example.

17:19 The need to radically rethink peer-review and publication practices.

19:45 End

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Sabrina Burtscher for cleaning up the otter.ai transcript.

Gloria Mark - Replay

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 09:18:00 +0200

Gloria Mark is a Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at University of California Irvine. This is a replay of our conversation in 2017 in honour of her having just published her book called ‘Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity’ which is being touted as the ‘must-read book for January’ and receiving a lot of enthusiastic media and podcast attention.

In this conversation from 2017, you’ll hear Gloria talk about her experiences as chair of a major conference, how she moved from a Fine Arts background, painting murals on buildings, to a PhD in cognitive science and to studying the relationship between media use, attention and stress. I’m re-playing this as I think it will be interesting to see how this work put her on the path to her current book and inspire people to similarly think about how they can amplify the impact of their academic outputs.

Full transcript to download

Overview:

0:05 Introduction to this episode.

5:31 How Gloria has grown in(to) the role of conference chair.

12:33 How the alternative of painting in a studio (when murals would be no option any more) was not a good fit.

13:41 From Arts to Biostatistics to Psychology: about being open-minded and taking risks.

26:03 About the patterns that can be seen in studying us multitaskers.

31:53 How digital media intensifies our multitasking and shifts attention.

36:08 Rewards and gratifications that people get with email, and how this makes breaking bad habits hard.

39:25 The importance of having a macro-level strategy.

43:11 How Gloria looks after herself and tries to alleviate stress.

53:29 End

Leadership development with Austen Rainer

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 07:41:00 +0200

Austen Rainer and I love co-facilitating academic leadership development courses for Informatics Europe and sharing experiences with so many people who share a commitment to doing academia differently. In this conversation we reflect on how these courses came about and experiences running them so far. We also try to unpack the similarities and differences between the online and residential versions of the course as well as the broad topic areas we cover. Join us in being part of changing academic cultures through good leadership practices.

[A leader is] “anyone who holds themselves accountable for developing the potential in others” Lucy Ryan, Lunchtime Learning for Leaders p.3

“A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for recognising the potential in people and ideas, and has the courage to develop that potential” Brené Brown

“... collectively trying to change academic cultures for the better through positive constructive leadership practices, and bringing out the best in people.” Geri

“I find it such a rewarding course to be involved in, how much I learn from everybody that participates,...and certainly that's the feedback we get, how beneficial the course is to help people in the kind of development... of leadership in academia.” Austen

Overview (times approximate):

0:05 Welcome to Changing Academic Life.

5:58 Dagstuhl 2019 and the first meeting.

10:26 What made you want to do the master’s degree?

16:42 What is the value of co-facilitation?

20:05 How would you define leadership within the academic context?

25:20 Giving people permission to pursue something.

33:09 The importance of self-reflection and ongoing learning.

40:38 Differences between online courses vs. residential courses.

44:16 Broad topic areas of the courses

48:46 Invitation to join the next courses -online starting in Spring 2023 and the residential in June 2023

50:40 End

Download a full transcript of the conversation.

End of 2022 Reflections

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 15:50:00 +0200

In this short podcast [19:16 mins], I reflect on some of the themes from across the podcast discussions since Sept 2022 - themes around listening, leadership and stepping up to make a difference. I also conclude with a call to take some time now to reflect on and savour your 2022 and to think of your theme for 2023.

Full transcript: [Also downloadable as pdf]

00:05 Welcome to changing academic life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick. And this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas and provoke discussions about what we can do it individually and collectively to change academic life for the better.

00:30 As 2022 draws to an end, I thought it would be useful just to step back and reflect on the different themes and the conversations we've heard in this series. So far. As I shared in the first short podcast in September 1, actually, this year, it's been a bit of a strange year, I think still trying to reconnect and get reestablished or to find new ways of being and working, and living and then in, in the ongoing situations that we're dealing with worldwide. So the podcast series only really started up again in September. And I think across the conversations that we've had, so far, there's some really interesting common themes around the power of good listening, the different ways of doing leadership and being leader, and how any of us can step up and be part of making a difference.

01:27 So we started off this series, listening to Oscar Trimboli, who's who's an expert on listening, and whose mission is to create 100 million deep listeners in the world. So he's not an academic, per se, but does draw on a lot of research based work to promote different ways of listening well. And just as a little sidebar, I was talking about this in a workshop, we're running around mentoring and mentioning about deep listening. And someone just had a little chuckle, because talking to a group of computer scientists, deep listening is DL, which is deep learning, you know, so that you can think of it as DL. But what I think Oscar really was good at just drawing attention to was the importance of just how we're present with people. And the importance of really listening deeply, so that we can also then ask great questions that aren't for our own understanding, but helping other people better understand and develop. And he also talked about or unpacked for us five different levels of listening. So different ways that we can really listen.

02:39 He also talked about us needing to communicate more in how we communicate. So for me, I think that thing of being really present with people and trying to listen well, and being more explicit in how we're communicating is a useful thing to pick up. And, and interestingly, that was something that Julie Kientz mentioned in her discussion as well about taking on a head of department role, where she talks about needing to be very explicit with people that she was working with, especially some of her students and that which hat she was wearing, or which hat they wanted her to wear an interaction. So I think that's a nice example of communicating how we communicate.

03:28 We also then, after Oscar heard from four different people, Julie Kientz, who stepped up and took on a head of department role, Darragh McCashin, who stepped up and was part of creating a COST network on how to promote better mental health amongst researchers. We had Stuart Reeves, who stepped up to become part of the University Senate as a way of trying to affect change in his local institution. And we had Aisling O'Kane who stepped up as a as an interim department head as well. And what I think is interesting about all of these people, you know, Aisling talks to talked about the fact that she wasn't, she always sort of associated these roles with the grey hairs, the lots of experience, and all of these people are relatively young, career wise. And yet all of them demonstrated that it is possible if we see something that needs to be done that we can step up and do it and we don't need to be senior.

04:44 So, you know, Darragh was talking about the, the stepping up and setting out sort of working with others on mental health initiatives as part of the cost network and touching upon issues of imposter. And for me the discussions of impostor wasn't just about the fact that it's dealing with impostor, which is perhaps a common experience that many of us share. But again, that that thread of the value of listening to each other, of sharing our own stories and hearing that we're not alone in dealing with these issues, and, and the power of that, and a lot of the interventions and events that they've held, we had Stuart who's talking about slow heart change working from the inside of institutions. And that the, you know, what must be frustrating at times, just because of how slow these institutions are to change. But if we want to see change, we've got to be part of it. And the way that he's learning to work within the bureaucratic structures of the University Senate to try to affect change, and to try to bring in the voices of other people that he works with. And so again, that theme of listening to what the other voices and concerns are, so that he could properly represent them.

06:17 And then Julie and Aisling, both taking on heads of department role, and dealing with the challenges of shifting from being appear to stepping into a different sort of role. And so there are a couple of interesting things, I think I heard across their discussions as well. And that is that there's no ideal way of doing leadership. You know, as we said, you don't have to be the grey experienced person, grey haired, experienced person. And what I liked about both of the ways that they navigated through their, their stepping into these roles was the way that they connected to what their own strengths were, and defining a modality of leadership that reflected who they were. So for Julie, that was really tapping into her strength around being a mentor and her love of mentoring, and how she could reinterpret that within a wider faculty context. And for Aisling, it was very much around how to bring forward those strengths that she brings into the research around engaging multiple voices and participatory design co design sort of processes, and how to bring similar participatory decision making to the faculty.

07:38 And it's interesting the both of them in different ways, talked about being reluctant sort of authority figures, and somehow having uneasy relationships to power because of the relative youth and having stepped from peer into leadership. And I think, both and in fact, all of them demonstrate really interesting examples of a way of exercising power that's around power with. And this goes back to some work of Mary Parker Follett, who studied organisations back in the 1940s, who first wrote about these notions of power over versus power with, and that's since been developed by lots of different authors to also include power to. So power over is often associated with the more grey had experienced, like it's the asymmetrical power relationships, it's very hierarchical command and control, the power to reflects that sense of the ability of the leader to have some influence. And this is an interesting concept. The power to because it can be it can play out in relation to power, I have the power to have power over. But it can also be, I have the power to help other people find their power.

09:03 And that points to more of the power with and that's how you that the ability of the leader to actively promote people to work together to act together and to empower them to be part of decision making. And I think all of them have talked about different ways of engaging with people that really illustrate specific examples of power with Julie talked about the importance of being open and communicative and doing it in a timely way. And, you know, and also recognising the power to because she also talked about in your recognising that when you're in a position of leadership, and you see something some situation or some that needs dealing with or some people come to you with some concerns you actually have power to do something about it. And Aisling similarly talked about, one of the motivations for her stepping into the department head role was seeing that there were changes that were needed because of the rapid recent growth of the department and the current challenges of the context that we're in. And recognising that there was something she could do about it and wanting to make a difference.

10:27 Now, we also saw different people talk about the different trade offs and costs of doing this. So there, I think it's worth pointing out that there are trade offs and costs in not doing anything, which is the status quo, or other people exercising power, taking things in directions that you may not want to see things go in. Some of the costs were around research time. And yeah, the amount of time to really sort of focus on that. They're also impacts on family life as well, in some ways. And again, they have different ways of navigating and negotiating this.

11:07 Some other themes that I think we've seen is around the permission, that to give ourselves not to be perfect, to learn, to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. As Julie said, The recognising that we're not always going to get it right, and asking for advice. And as Aisling so beautifully illustrated, also sort of recognising what could have been done differently or better, and acknowledging that. So I think there's lots of encouragement in the discussions that we've heard about, any one of us can step up and be part of making a difference.

11:53 And I think also recognising that it's always going to be in situations of change and challenges. That what we've seen in the last couple of years, maybe a little bit more exaggerated, if you like, and more shared global experience in terms of challenges. But if you even think back to Stuart's early days being on the picket line, there were challenges then that they were responding to. So I think that it's situation normal, that there always going to be challenges and complex issues to deal with.

12:33 The other thing that I think we've heard across all of the discussions as well, and whether is about the complex structures that we need to engage with, and that the anything that we're dealing with here is multi level. So Darragh talked about needing to have both top down and bottom up approaches, Stuart talked about the really complex management structures. Both Julie and Aisling talked about the way they had to engage, you know, top down and bottom up and across as well. And the ways in which, when and how those sorts of interactions were important for effecting change. And through all of that, again, was that thread of the importance of listening to people.

13:21 What I also heard across the discussions was the importance of support and connection and collegiality, whether it was connecting with other heads of department, whether it was connecting with other people within the group for support, you know, for and Darragh talking, for example, about the importance of connecting with other people in the lab and just sharing and peers and just sharing. We also heard as part of this, the importance of empathy. Both Julie and Aisling mentioned that in particular, when it comes to leadership.

13:56 So let's be encouraged by what they've said. About Darragh talking about the value in putting ourselves out there. The call from Julie to try out leadership and really, that being a way of being able to amplify the impact and having bigger impacts that can be better for all. The encouragement of Aisling to create better workplaces for all of them that she benefits from as well as everyone else. Of Stuart recognising the great power that there is through collective action. So how can you and I step up within our individual contexts? What are the opportunities right now where we can listen better? To understand the concerns and the issues? And where we can connect to our values and strengths, and work out how we can best make a contribution to having an impact in our local contexts?

15:04 And Julie's decision framework that she had that was more talking about her research, I think can also be useful here. So I and I would sort of riff off her decision framework as she talked about, will I have fun doing it? Will I learn something from it? Am I uniquely qualified to do it? And I'd sort of unpack that mi uniquely qualified to do it to think about what are the unique strengths that I can bring to this right now, you know, and then your unique passions. So I look forward to bringing more conversations in 2023.

15:46

And just to end on a slightly different note, can I encourage you just to take some time to reflect back on your 2022 on what you achieved, what you've enjoyed, what you've survived? And take a little bit of time just to pat yourself on the back as well. Because I think that one of the things that Darragh talked about was with the imposter, we often don't sit with our achievements very long. We're always looking for the next thing. Yes, we've accomplished this. And what's the next thing is we're immediately jumping to that because there's always something more.

16:29 So, in closing, I just like to encourage us all to take to gift ourselves, five minutes, 10 minutes just to sit and reflect on what we're proud of this year. And it could be achievements could be things like, you know, the usual publications or grants. But it could just be that we made it to the end of the year, that we're relatively saying that we're, that we're healthy enough. It could be valuing and being grateful for the social connections that we have for the supports we have. It could be the gratitude for reconnecting to that to what's important to us and getting better perspective, given all the challenges that we've had in the last couple of years. So taking some time just to stop and reflect and celebrate, and savour and I'll point to a previous related work that I did around just taking time to savour.

17:34 So may you enjoy your time at the in this in these dying minutes of 2022 to savour and reflect on what you have achieved. And looking forward to 2023. And towards this I'll also put a link in the on the web page to another related work podcast that was called my year of being bold. That actually talked about the value of deciding on some theme that's going to set you up for your new year to describe your new year in terms of some overall connection to your why. What do you want this year to be for you? So all the best. And thank you for listening with me for this year.

18:25 [Outro]

19:17 End

Aisling O’Kane on radical participatory decision making (Part 2)

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 07:33:00 +0200

Dr. Aisling O’Kane is an Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in Health at the University of Bristol in the UK. In Part 1 of our conversation, she talked about her very diverse background ad reflected on issues like the importance of mobility, the challenges being part of an academic couple with family, and the impact of COVID. In Part 2 here, she goes on to talk about how she came to take on an acting Head of Department role as a relatively junior faculty member, motivated by wanting to try to make a better workplace for herself and others. She also talks about issues of power and engagement and what she terms ‘a radical participatory decision making’ approach as way to try to engage people in being part of the change.

“[Prev HoD] was the poster child of what you want for leadership, just his emotional intelligence, his empathy, his view on things engaging with people is fantastic.”

“You might think…what to sacrifice, what a volunteer. It was entirely selfish. I wanted a better workplace.”

“I certainly wasn’t the authority figure.”

“So that was pulling on…my research, which involves co design…participatory design, and treating that year…as a big co design activity and making decisions that way. “

“I remember arriving and being new and female and and not feeling like I could talk about things.”

“I am much more confident going into it and knowing that I don't know things and it's okay… And to be able to reach out and ask the stupid questions and not be ashamed of what you don't know.”

“I'm happier here now. It's more collegiate place in a nicer place to work.”

Overview (times approximate):

00:28 Episode introduction

0:05 Introduction to Part 2 of this episode.

2:24 The current situation in computer science at Bristol

5:21 The transition from a department into a school and the need for leadership.

10:51 The wild west of the university system.

17:15 The key things that made it work for a year.

23:24 The importance of being part of the change and the cost of being selfish.

27:12 The move to online discussions and decision making and how people feel about it.

32:51 What Aisling learned from this year as head

38:09 Being proud of what she has achieved and also reflecting on the mistakes

41:00 My final reflections

43:43 End

Download a full transcript of the conversation

Aisling O’Kane on mobility, interdisciplinary threads & family (Part 1)

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 16:15:00 +0200

Dr. Aisling O’Kane is an Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in Health at the University of Bristol in the UK. In Part 1 of our conversation, she talks about her very diverse background from engineering to human factors and working in industry, from margarine, beer and nuclear risk assessment, then to doing a PhD, and now being in a faculty position. Along the way she reflects on the importance of mobility, the challenges being part of an academic couple with family, and the impact of COVID. In Part 2, we will go on to talk about how she came to take on an acting Head of Department role to try to make a better workplace for herself and others.

“I'm really quite passionate about understanding the real world influence on these things that are designed to be safety critical for health.”

“It is luck. But it's a lot to do with my parents, setting me up with an education that I could I could pursue something of interest rather than just having to focus on making money.”

“We're very lucky here to have not only superstars, but they're also really nice…they're all parents as well.”

Overview (times approximate):

00:30 Preamble

02:31 Aisling introduces herself, her very diverse background, and draws the threads together in her current work on safety critical health technologies.

06:49 Combining experiences from different disciplinary areas and experiences for her PhD and current work around real world influences on safety critical systems

09:40 The important influence of her parents on so-called luck

11:30 Reflecting on the skills needed to bridge different disciplinary and application domains

15:47 The importance of mobility and ability to travel for her and the impact of COVID, having two children and the ‘two body problem’ as well as the environmental impact concerns

20:31 Coming out of COVID and choosing to go into the office now for more face to face, chit chat banter with nice colleagues, lab meetings and accommodating people’s different childcare responsibilities using online tools

24:54 Impacts of COVID on CV etc, as well as the passive impact of choosing to have two kids on her CV and research trajectory and appreciating having the safety net of a permanent role

26:21 Reflecting on some tips and tricks for how to manage that, eg using external conference and review deadlines

28:06 Reflecting on generational differences

31:15 My final reflections

33:19 End

Download a full transcript of the conversation.

Stuart Reeves on effecting change – from the picket line to the Senate (Part 2)

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 19:42:00 +0200

Dr. Stuart Reeves is an Associate Professor in the Mixed Reality Lab and Horizon Research Institute at Nottingham University in the UK. This conversation is in two parts. In Part 1 of our conversation, he reflected on the complexities of universities and the structural/managerial issues that contribute to this. In Part 2 here, Stuart goes on to describe his journey from protesting about pensions on the picket line to becoming an academic member of the university Senate and his experiences of trying to effect change in university governance. As you will understand, he necessarily has to be circumspect about the specific details he shares but nonetheless there is much to be inspired by hearing someone not just see challenges but commit to being part of the change to meet these challenges.

“Just making a noise about stuff can bring it onto the agenda.”

“People will say…they're just activists…but they miss the fact that…there's a lot of people who agree with you, or at least have some kind of similar troubles with how universities work.”

“Sometimes universities do stupid things…partly just because they've just not consulted people.”

“The more people…involved in speaking about regular issues, the better.”

“Through that collective action, there's great power.”

Overview (times approximate)

00:29 My introduction to Stuart

02:55 How Stuart responds personally – he tells the story of his 2018 involvement in the strike about pensions and how it was the trigger for him thinking that he should start to do something more about this

08:37 This led him and some others to run for the university senate and effect change in that way, albeit it being a slow frustrating process of change

11:30 The level of commitment being part of Senate

12:49 The sorts of changes that can be effected via the Senate work, e.g., structural changes in ways the Senate works, centralization/decentralization discussions, having the long view, connecting with others also asking what are universities for, how to make it more democratic

17:49 Reflects on the importance of it being ‘the bunch of us’ doing this work, collegiality, and people responding differently in terms of action

21:54 The costs of getting involved in these ways and the types of time and effort involved and wanting to see universities become less top down

27:37 Advice for anyone who may be thinking about getting involved in university governance

30:02 The lack of collective action by university leadership

31:17 Signing up to DORA has been useful to push back on metrics for publications

32:09 The rankings racket, like QS and Times Higher, and a call for university leadership to get together and push back a bit in the way they have done with journals

33:51 Why he is still in academia

37:17 My final reflections

38:43 End

Download a full transcript of the conversation here.

Stuart Reeves on 'what are universities for' and management complexities (Part 1)

Fri, 25 Nov 2022 14:06:00 +0200

Dr. Stuart Reeves is an Associate Professor in the Mixed Reality Lab in the School of Computer Science and Horizon Research Institute both at Nottingham University in the UK. This conversation is in two parts. In Part 1 here, he reflects on the conflict in defining one’s own research brand vs the importance of the collective and collegiality in academia, and the structural issues that contribute to this. He raises the question of ‘what are universities for’ and highlights the complexities of university management and the structures around this. In Part 2 we will go on to discuss his response to these challenges by becoming actively involved in governance at his university.

‘The idea of creating one's own research brands…collegiality creates a bit of friction with that. And it's a big kind of mess of things which we're all caught up in …there's a big struggle between defining yourself as part of a group, but also defining yourself as an individual’

‘I struggle with that kind of Big [research] Vision element’

‘Describing what universities are for socially, culturally, and their value beyond … just producing valuable economic units, economic actors, ie graduate students’

‘This is a crisis that's been emerging…it's been visible for years ever since the fees are introduced, you could argue, if you extrapolate,…it was going to happen, at some point, it became more and more significant’

Overview (times approximate):

2:25 My preamble to Part 1

3:01 Stuart introduces himself

5:17 His reasoning coming back to Nottingham where he did his PhD

6:41 The conflict in defining own research brand vs the importance of the collective and collegiality

9:46 The structures that help reinforce those tensions e.g., how funding is allocated, how universities value certain aspects

11:45 Different research styles that don’t work so well with massive grants – a skill to be able to talk about individual pieces of research as part of some grand vision

15:05 About rankings and how governments engage with universities – they can’t articulate what universities are for – and managerialist ways

18:55 Balancing this with accountability against the public purse and critiques ways of valuing degrees

21:42 What Stuart would argue universities are for – value on different dimensions and impact of degrees on society

24:50 The pressure on student numbers, and capped student fees – ‘this is a crisis that has been visible for years’ – the funding pressures for universities and the disparity between institutions and how much they rely on fees

31:32 The day to day impact of all this depends on where you are and internal balancing of finances; also impacts in casualization of workforce; and the management decisions of universities

35:32 The backgrounds of university management and management tracks for academics that can lead them to be detached from academic staff

38:39 My final comments.

39:58 End

Download a full transcript of the conversation here.

Steve Benford & MRL

Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute

UKRI Digital Economy Programme

EPSRC Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Darragh McCashin on imposter phenomenon and multi-level strategies (Part 2)

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 11:30:00 +0200

Welcome to Part 2 of my discussion with Dr Darragh McCashin. In Part 1 Darragh discussed his PhD in Digital mental health and his path to being an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology at Dublin City University during COVID. In part 2, we start off replaying what he was saying about the mental health challenges faced by PhD and early career researchers in particular and then we get into a focus on the imposter, something that we can probably all relate to. Based on his work and that of his colleagues in the EU ReMO COST Action, ReMo standing for Researcher Mental Health Observatory, Darragh talks about what is imposterism, how it is experienced, the importance of raising awareness and the power of sharing our imposter experiences. He also talks about the importance of taking both top down and bottom up approaches for dealing with imposterism, and shares practical strategies for doing this.

“You see the value in putting oneself out there”

“It's incredibly powerful when somebody beside you a different career stage …spews the same type of impostor stuff”

“It's multi level… it has to be top down meets bottom up”

“You're externalising it. And you're living with rather than…living under the feelings of impostor”

“At an institutional level, there needs to be an acknowledgement matched with resources”

Overview (times approximate):

0:30 Preamble

01:40 How he got into this work in the first place – by putting himself out there

07:29 The themes that come up in discussions about mental health, how mental health issues practically play out and the patterns he sees

12:28 The importance of taking both a top down and bottom-up approach

15:50 How he defines imposter

19:13 Moving to talk about the levels and practical tips for taking action; Being aware of the imposter cycle - ‘It’s always the next thing’ and imposter awareness

21:44 Changing toxic lab environments by connecting, and sharing to disrupt the imposter cycle by increasing awareness

27:50 Externalizing the imposter as a common experience, finding ways to disrupt the patterns – the importance of language framing – living with rather than under the imposter

34:15 More about what can be done to support each other at the group level

37:03 The systemic issues and working at the system/institutional level where there needs to be acknowledgement matched by resources, and the challenges of a duty of care

42:59 Final thoughts wrapping up – signposting ReMO COST Action and their manifesto re multi-level change

44:35 My reflections at the end

47:29 End

Download a full transcript of the conversation here.

Related Links

People/Projects/Webinars:

Darragh’s ReMO Webinar on ‘Understanding the Psychology of Impostor Syndrome in Academia and Beyond’ YouTube link

ReMO COST Action

ReMO Researcher Mental Health and Wellbeing Manifesto

Gábor Kismihók, Brian Cahill, Stéphanie Gauttier, Janet Metcalfe, Stefan T. Mol, Darragh McCashin, Jana Lasser, Murat Güneş, Mathias Schroijen, Martin Grund, Katia Levecque, Susan Guthrie, Katarzyna Wac, Jesper Dahlgaard, Mohamad Nadim Adi, & Christina Kling. (2021). Researcher Mental Health and Well-being Manifesto.

Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5788557

ReMO on twitter

Hugh Kearns https://www.ithinkwell.com.au/hugh-kearns

Papers:

Katia Levecque et al, 2017 Work organization and mental health problems in PhD students. Research Policy, 46:4, 868-879.

Interview with Katia https://www.science.org/content/article/four-years-after-landmark-study-phd-student-mental-health-what-has-changed

Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey, 2021, Stop telling women they have imposter syndrome, HBR

Kirstin Mulholland, David Nichol & Aidan Gillespie, 2022, ‘It feels like you’re going back to the beginning…’: addressing imposter feelings in early career academics through the creation of communities of practice, J. Of Further and Higher Education, online July 2022.

Darragh McCashin on interdisciplinarity, a new lecturership during COVID, and his imposter (Part 1)

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 11:39:00 +0200

Dr Darragh McCashin started as an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology at Dublin City University during COVID. In Part 1 of this conversation, he reflects on his experiences doing an interdisciplinary PhD in digital mental health, on the importance of interdisciplinary thinking, and on starting a lecturer position at a new university during COVID times. Darragh is also part of the Core Group for the EU COST Network on Researcher Mental Health Observatory, called ReMO. In sharing what he loves and what he finds challenging in his lecturing role, we start to touch on the theme of the imposter, a theme that we focus on in Part 2, coming soon.

“It's so hard methodologically logistically to manifest that interdisciplinarity.”

“Taking up that [lecturer] position early September 2020. So .. I'm excited for that. But like anything, it was all on Zoom. So it almost didn't feel real.”

“[Likes] the flexibility in being able to say, okay, I can set my research agenda”

“It's always the next thing … the cycle of imposterism, you'll achieve that thing that you thought you'd never achieve. … And then almost like lightning, it's the next thing that the anxious gaze shifts towards.”

“It's incredibly powerful when somebody beside you in a different career stage or in a different discipline, spews the same type of imposter stuff, … You're like, okay, so it's not it's not just me”

Overview (times approximate):

00:30 Preamble

02:07 Darragh introduces himself

08:07 How he manifests interdisciplinary thinking

09:35 His men in rural Ireland study for a Movember project

14:43 Experiences of taking on his first lecturer position in the middle of a pandemic

20:13 What he loves about his job

22:38 What he is afraid of – the imposter.

25:39 The recognition from audiences when he talks about the pressures of academia and the imposter

30:01 My reflections at the end

32:46 End

In more detail: PART 1

00:30 Preamble

02:07 Darragh introduces his background in sociology and psychology, getting to a PhD in digital mental health and now being an Ass Prof in Dublin City University

08:07 How he manifests interdisciplinary thinking but having to be located within a discipline and the shift to transversal skills (soft skills)

09:35 His men in rural Ireland study for a Movember project bringing together qualitative thinking/methods and psychology constructs

14:43 Experiences of taking on his first lecturer position in the middle of a pandemic, the zoom haze and the challenges getting to know processes, culture and colleagues

20:13 What he loves about his job - the flexibility and learning that he can facilitate and is good at it

22:38 What he is afraid of – the imposter.

25:39 The recognition from audiences when he talks about the pressures of academia and the imposter, and on hearing the research that says 1 in 3 PhD students experience mental health issues

30:01 My reflections at the end

32:46 End

Download a full transcript of the conversation here.

Julie Kientz on leadership, impact, & being comfortable with being uncomfortable (Part 2)

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 09:18:00 +0200

Dr. Julie Kientz is a professor and Chair of the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington in the US. In part 1 of our conversation, Julie reflected on how she made her own way from a small town geeky outcast, to get through college, and then on to a PhD and a faculty position and parenthood.

We continue here in Part 2 with Julie talking about some early roles that demonstrated leadership skills, her tenure process and finding a more focused path post-tenure. She also talks about how she came to take on the Department Chair role and then almost immediately having to lead her department through the COVID crisis and then the murder of George Floyd and ongoing racial justice issues. She role models leadership from a place of humility and care, working to her strengths, amplifying impact and being comfortable with being uncomfortable.

“Having the authority to really do those things felt really great, it was also scary right, but it was great to recognise that when you are in a position of leadership and you see something or people come to you with concerns, you can do something about it.”

“It was important to be open, communicative and timely too.”

“I don’t always know what to say but it is better to say something than to struggle with the exact right thing to say.”

“Those little things can have an impact on people. But they are hard.”

“Being comfortable with being uncomfortable, pushing outside your comfort zones”

“Don’t take yourself too seriously, take feedback”

Overview (times approximate):

02:35 How she became chair through her reputation for being an organized person, trying new things, developing new processes

03:57 A digression into her tenure experience

05:42 Finding her more focused path post tenure during sabbatical – topic & people & making impact through people

11:00 Getting back to the department chair story, being approached by the Dean as an interim chair

12:58 Attending a post-tenure mentoring program and deciding a PhD program chair was her ideal role which she does and implements lots of changes, with lots of positive feedback

15:04 Taking on interim chair role Fall 2019, creating associate chair roles for support, then being the sole applicant when they did the permanent chair search in Feb 2020

18:04 Navigating the department through COVID and racial justice issues, working out how to respond, getting and giving support, not always getting it right

25:51 Forming a peer support network, re-framing the role of department chair towards mentoring faculty

29:05 Managing the shift in relationship from peer to leader, and clarity about different roles/hats

31:45 Relationship with power

35:52 Her legacy/impact wishes

37:02 Encouragement to try out leadership and amplify impact

38:41 What’s hard about the job, and handling the hard decisions

41:01 Julie’s final thoughts

42:07 My final reflections on the conversation with Julie

44:56 End

Download a full transcript of the conversation here.

Related Links

Julie Kientz - Bio & Part 1 of our conversation

Anind Dey, Amy Ko

Post-tenure Pathfinders Programme

Julie Kientz on making her way from small town geeky outcast to uni professor (Part 1)

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 08:25:00 +0200

Dr. Julie Kientz is a professor and Chair of the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington in the US. In part 1 of our conversation, Julie shares her fascinating journey from first wanting to be a vet to then getting into a small town college to do computer science and then eventually doing a PhD at Georgia Tech and later getting a tenure track position. Her telling of the story is rich with reflective insights and nuggets of wisdom, whether it is about the about the value of good mentors, advice to PhD students, doing a job search as part of an academic couple, how to survive that first year as a faculty member, making decisions and managing boundaries, and parenting alongside work. In Part 2 we will focus on her path into leadership and being a department chair.

They were such good mentors. And life changing.

The first year is all about survival. So many things you have to learn in that first year [as Assistant Professor].

I learned I can’t do it all so I developed this [decision] framework: will I have fun doing it, will I learn something from it, … am I uniquely qualified to do it?

There are a lot of parallels between mentoring and parenting

Overview (times approximate):

02:22 Julie introduces herself and how she got into computing

05:00 Discovering research and the life changing impact of good mentors

09:25 Getting into Grad School and doing her PhD

11:57 Challenges/experiences doing a PhD and learnings as advice to other students

16:47 Finding her post-PhD path

18:40 Doing a job search together with partner

25:08 Surviving the first year

29:45 Making decisions about service, learning about setting boundaries

34:14 Managing parenting and being more focused and strategic with work

41:25 End

Download a full transcript of the conversation here.

Oscar Trimboli (Part 2) on how to listen deeply (CAL62)

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 09:49:00 +0200

Oscar Trimboli is an author, host of the Apple award-winning podcast Deep Listening and a sought-after keynote speaker. Along with the Deep Listening Ambassador Community, he is on a quest to create 100 million deep listeners in the workplace. Oscar has experienced first-hand the transformational impact leaders can have when they listen beyond words. He believes that when leadership teams focus their attention and listening, they will build organizations that create powerful legacies for the people they serve. Oscar is a marketing and technology industry veteran working for Microsoft, PeopleSoft, Polycom, and Vodafone. He consults with organizations including American Express, AstraZeneca, Cisco, Google, HSBC, IAG, Montblanc, PwC, Salesforce, Sanofi, SAP, and Siemens.

In the previous podcast, Part 1 of this conversation, Oscar motivated why deep listening is important. In this Part 2, we get practical and he unpacks his 5 levels of listening with some actionable strategies for how we can be better listeners. We also touch on listening in group contexts and cultural issues around listening. And he briefly introduces the four listening villains that can get in the way of good listening.

Not enough of us communicate how we communicate.

At the beginning of the meeting, simply ask what would make this a great meeting for you?

It’s not your job as the listener to always make sense of what they say, it’s your job to help them make sense of what they think.

It’s the simplest thing that make us better listeners and you’ll never be perfect.

Overview (times approximate):

02:50 The five levels of listening: 1. listening to yourself, 2. to the content, 3. for the context, 4. for unsaid, 5. for meaning

04:08 Level 1: being present to the moment by managing distractions, being well hydrated, taking three deep breaths – simple rituals, difficult to practice.

12:40 Level 2: what you see, hear, sense – emotion as a signal about what matters; listening to body language including on zoom

17:50 Level 3: the backstory, their backstory; asking the backstory to help them, e.g., asking ‘how long have you thought about this for?’

21:30 Level 4: listening for the unsaid, the first thing people say is top of mind so exploring the unsaid with phrases like ‘tell me more’, ‘what else’, and silence. 28:25 Level 4 plays out in one-on-one as well as groups. The importance of listening to all present, listening for difference, and for perspectives not in the room.

35:32 Level 5: not imposing your own assumptions re meaning

40:20 The four villains of listening – the dramatic, interrupting, lost/distracted, shrewd villains.

43:28 One thing to try now – listen for what’s not said. Just be comfortable in knowing it’s the simplest things that make us better listeners.

45:34 Cultural differences and listening

48:02 Wrap up

50:45 End

You can download a full transcript of the conversation here.

Related Links

Oscar Trimboli: oscartrimboli.com

Listening Quiz: https://www.oscartrimboli.com/listeningquiz/

90 Day Deep Listening Challenge: https://www.oscartrimboli.com/thanks-for-registering-for-the-90-day-deep-listening-challenge/

Books/People:

Oscar Trimboli, Deep Listening: Impact beyond words (2017)

Oscar Trimboli, How to listen: Discover the hidden key to better communication (coming out Oct 2022)

Marc Brackett, Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

Mark Brackett,: Permission to Feel, 2020, Celadon Books

Kieran Flanagan, Dan Gregory, Selfish, scared and stupid: Stop fighting human nature and increase your performance, engagement and influence. 2014. Wiley.

Oscar Trimboli (Part 1) on being better listeners (CAL61)

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 10:19:00 +0200

Oscar Trimboli is an author, host of the Apple award-winning podcast Deep Listening and a sought-after keynote speaker. Along with the Deep Listening Ambassador Community, he is on a quest to create 100 million deep listeners in the workplace. Oscar has experienced first-hand the transformational impact leaders can have when they listen beyond words. He believes that when leadership teams focus their attention and listening, they will build organisations that create powerful legacies for the people they serve – today and more importantly, for future generations. Oscar is a marketing and technology industry veteran working for Microsoft, PeopleSoft, Polycom, and Vodafone. He consults with organisations around the world, including Cisco, Google, SAP, and Siemens in the tech industry.

In Part 1 of this conversation, we discuss his quest to quest to create deep listeners, the costs of not listening, the 125-400-900 rule, how to be listeners rather than just do listening, and how to ask great questions. In Part 2 (coming next) he will unpack his 5 levels of listening with some actionable strategies.

“What you said [was] really useful, but how you were being with us, your curiosity, your pausing, the way you are listening to the room. I learned more from your [listening] example.”

“Great listeners really influence the speaker”

“How can I bring my presence here?”

“It's the consciousness and awareness of you as a listener… in this moment for this situation, for this context to move forward, the outcome we're trying to achieve…”

Overview (times approximate):

03:50 The difference between a mission and a quest and mission to get a 100 million deep listeners

12:57 The cost of not listening

22:35 Speaking about listening and the 125-400-900 rule, the numbers that matter: 125 words/min speaking speed, 400 words/min listening speed, 900 words/min thinking speed

26:38 How to listen to ask great questions that advance the knowledge in the room e.g., at conferences

31:54 End

You can download a full transcript of the conversation here.

Related Links

Oscar Trimboli: oscartrimboli.com

Listening Quiz, and the 90 Day Deep Listening Challenge

Oscar’s books:

Deep Listening: Impact beyond words (2017)

How to listen: Discover the hidden key to better communication (coming out Oct 2022)

Journal paper on speeding up listening:

Murphy et al., Watching a lecture twice at double speed can benefit learning, Appl Cognit Psychol 2022;36:69-82. [short BPS article based on the paper, and the full published paper]

Reconnecting in 2022

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 12:22:00 +0200

A short preamble to kick start a new season for 2022 of Changing Academic Life podcasts. [6:56 mins]

Links:

Austen Rainer, Queens Uni Belfast

Online Academic Leadership Development Course (Starting end Sept 2022)

Residential Leadership Development Course (last held June 2022)

Informatics Europe

Transcript:

(00:04) Welcome to changing academic life I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick. And this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas and provoke discussions about what we can do individually and collectively to change academic life for the better.

(00:30) So welcome to this brand new series of the changing academic life podcast. I know it has been a long, long time coming. I think the last podcast I released was in June, 2021, and that was when I was still COVID stranded in Australia. It took some getting out of Australia. We were initially denied permission to leave despite our bags being on the plane and us thinking that we had all the correct permissions, but we eventually got back to Vienna in August, 2021. And I don't know about you, but it's been an ongoing process of readjusting and renegotiating what life and work looks like in these ongoing times. The term VUCA has been around for a number of years to describe a world where there's a lot of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and, and it feels like we're in a world, that's a VUCA world on steroids still.

(01:37) And I know that for our own group, our own research group, we're still renegotiating how to gather again and how to be a group and how we reconfigure the sort of working from home and working from the office. And, also how we renegotiate connecting with community and conference travel or not travel and so on. So there's been lots going on and I feel like we are just, I'm just surfacing a little bit now, and that's not to say there weren't still some really interesting things going on around the changing academic life theme with my co-facilitator Austen Rainer, we were able to run two versions of the online academic leadership development course last autumn semester. And, this summer semester that were well received and we plan on running the next autumn online version that runs for seven sessions over a couple of months, starting in September towards the end of September.

(02:46) So if you're interested in that, I'll put a link on the webpage. We were also finally able to run a residential leadership course in June this year that was targeted to more senior leaders. And again, that was a very humbling experience and very rich and rewarding for us as facilitators as well. And we are planning to run another version of the residential course next June, again You might wanna keep your eyes open for that. And just to say that we're running these leadership courses for informatics Europe. So you can also find the links to them on the Informatics Europe webpage. And in the course of the year, there are also various talks and workshops on, you know, to audiences ranging from lecturers to early career researchers, to PhD students on things like bringing a coaching mindset to supervision or how to say yes, no strategically.

(03:46) I also developed and ran a brand new course for the PhD school in our faculty. And this was in response to seeing the stresses that PhD students were on, especially around pandemic, um, impacts. And I called the course from 'surviving to thriving, crafting your good professional life'. Um, and again, that was well received and such a, again, such a humbling experience to be part of that journey for people. And we'll be running it again. I'll be running it again, this coming semester and looking at ways that I might be able to package that and offer it more generally because I really see a need there.

(04:33) And so now for 2022 and the new podcast series, I'm really looking forward to bringing whole lots of new conversations with people to share with you. And, I already have a bunch of people who've agreed to have a chat with me and have a couple recorded already that I'll be releasing over the next little while and really looking forward to just hearing people's stories and seeing what we can learn from each other and being part of continuing an open conversation about how we can do academia differently and better and in more collegial and sustainable ways while still producing great research.

(05:21) And I think for me, one of the big messages that comes through again and again and again in the conversations is the fact that we can take many small choices that can have some really big impacts for ourselves and for the people that we work with. And I know that the agenda of culture change more generally in academia is a longer term project, but it starts with our small steps. So looking forward to being part of the ongoing conversation and discussion around how we can change academic life for the better and really glad to have you along as part of the journey. So keep your eye open for the next podcast, which will be the first conversation that I release in this new season, starting September, 2022. So look forward to talking to you again very soon, take care.

(06:20) You can find the summary notes and related links for this podcast on www.changingacademiclife.com. You can also subscribe to changing academic life on iTunes or on Stitcher, and you can follow changeacadlife on Twitter. And if something connected with you, please consider sharing this podcast with your colleagues so that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Photo by Artturi Jalli on Unsplash

RW9 Progress and praise

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 10:25:00 +0200

This short related-work podcast replays part of a previous podcast conversation with Katherine Isbister about working 8-5, reflecting on productivity and praising yourself. I set this up against some discussions in a meeting this week about the struggles seeing progress, our negativity bias, and recent research on stress in academia. Following the replay, I also relate Katherine’s approach to research around self-compassion and savoring.

Full transcript below.

Related work links

Katherine Isbister – previous podcast: On finding your fit, being productive 8-5 an praising yourself

Negativity bias

Müller-Pinzler, L., Czekalla, N., Mayer, A.V. et al. Negativity-bias in forming beliefs about own abilities. Sci Rep 9, 14416 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-50821-w

Uni stress

Dougall, I., Weick, M., & Vasiljevic, M. (2021, June 22). Inside UK Universities: Staff mental health and wellbeing during the coronavirus pandemic. Retrieved from psyarxiv.com/23axu

Lee, M. et al. (2021) Our uni teachers were already among the world’s most stressed. COVID and student feedback have just made things worse. The Conversation.

Green Carmichael, S. (2015) The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies. Harvard Business Review.

Savoring

Kennelly, Stacey. (2012) 10 steps to Savoring the Good Things in Life. Greater Good Magazine, Greater Good Science Centre at the University of California, Berkeley

Bryant, F. B., & Veroff, J. (2007). Savoring: A new model of positive experience. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

Self compassion

Kristin Neff https://self-compassion.org/the-three-elements-of-self-compassion-2/

Chris Germer https://chrisgermer.com/about/

Transcript

Geri (00:05):

Welcome to changing academic life I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick. And this is a bite-size related work podcast where we pick up on a single idea from literature and experience that may provide some insights or tips that will help us change academic life for the better

(00:27):

In managing your own academic working life, how do you go about recognizing and rewarding yourself or judging the, how productive you are in your work and seeing progress? The focus of this short podcast is mainly to replay a snippet from a conversation that I had, a podcast conversation I had quite a while ago with Katherine Isbister who talks really well about the way in which she's managing her work life so that she can work eight to five, Monday to Friday, and in particular, reflecting on her own productivity and praising herself. And I chose this snippet to replay on the basis of two particular encounters this week.

(01:17):

One was a meeting where one of the people in the meeting was talking about really struggling with some writing they were doing there. They were struggling to find the story across a number of studies that they had done to pull and how to pull it together. And in that struggle, they were also struggling to see any reward or great progress as they talked about it. They also felt that others were judging them as not being very good because they were having this struggle and those others being people who might've given them some constructive feedback on the writing is important. And so they thought they weren't very good, but I, you know, I can assure you that this is not the case. In fact, this person is really amazing as a researcher, but nonetheless, what we can see here, some of the sort of feelings of being an impostor not progressing. And we also recognize a negativity bias, which psychology literature talk will talk to us about being an, a natural tendency that we have that does have some protective properties and, and has an evolutionary basis. I want to draw particular attention to a 2019 Nature paper by Mueller-Pinzler et al called 'Negativity bias in forming beliefs about own abilities'. And they talk about negativity bias specific for learning. Can you know about our own compared to others performances and that being modulating by prior beliefs about ourself, and that there's a stronger negativity bias in people with who are lower in self-esteem and that social anxiety affect self related negativity bias when individuals are exposed to a judging audience and in academia, we definitely have a judging audience don't we in reviewers and supervisors and so on, or so it might feel.

(03:16):

And so this triggered a conversation in the meeting with, with the others who were present about what were people's strategies for trying to, what did progress mean and how did they recognize progress and how did they handle the ups and downs of writing? And there was one other person in the meeting in particular who really impressed me in how they talked about having also struggled with these issues, but realizing that they needed to do something different and, and taking on a very deliberate strategy of trying to spend time focusing on what they had done, what they had achieved, and also just how lucky they were or how lucky they felt that they were able to do research on a topic that they were really passionate about. And to have this time to struggle with writing, even though it was a struggle and they were having, you know, having to do multiple iterations to develop the research story across their data as well.

(04:18):

And the second encounter this week was just coming across a couple of particular research studies. One was of UK university staff that was reported in, that I saw in Times Higher Education, but reflecting a preprint article by Dougall et al from 2021 about mental health and wellbeing and people having high levels of anxiety one and a half times the national average, especially during this pandemic there was an, also a Conversations article about Australian and New Zealand academics that also similarly reported them being very stressed. And I also happened to come across Harvard Business Review article that talked about 'The research is clear: long hours backfire for people and for companies'. So it's not particularly about academia, but it does show clear research about long working long hours being counterproductive. And, and we're not as creative and we're not our outputs aren't as good. And also just the whole health and wellbeing impacts. And we know that we see similar articles reported on academic context. And I think a lot of what the, you know, that person reported in the meeting and, you know, it was leading to stress and that stress was related to performance pressures and the general stress of academe.

(05:45):

So I thought it was really timely to revisit this podcast chat with Katherine. And I want to replay from about 34 minutes, 55 seconds into the original conversation with her. And I would encourage you to listen to the rest as well, if you haven't already, as, as there's really great stuff there that she shares. And I think Katherine's chat connects to both these themes. She very deliberately manages productive, working life, very productive working life. And she does it between the hours of eight to five and Monday to Friday because of what she said is as important to her. And that's time with family and friends outside of work as well. She also talks about some of the strategies that she's put in place towards this about taking time to stop and recognize what she has achieved, like reflecting on your own productivity and surprising yourself. So have a listen here.

podcast extract from Katherine Isbister>

Katherine (06:46):

Well, I mean, one thing is I, I don't work weekends and I try not to work late nights. I mean, I said pretty strict boundaries on family time and also in the summer.

Geri (07:01):

So practically, what does that mean setting strict boundaries?

Katherine (07:05):

Well it means that I, I learned once was born, I learned to work within sort of like eight to five weekdays boundary. I mean, the downside of that as I don't do a lot of water cooler chat, so I think it can affect your networking within your institution, but I was sort of willing to make that trade off to get the work done during the hours and the be there in the evenings and weekends. Yeah. So I think that's really helped. And then I think my husband's German, so we've always gone to Germany for part of the summer. So my daughter's always been traversing contexts and seeing that as a part of life. Now, now that we're settled in Santa Cruz, she's nine now I, I would not leave, you know, until she is done with high school. Right.

Geri: So it's a new phase in your life.

Katherine: Exactly. Yes.

Geri: Because deal with politics if ...

Katherine (08:00):

I will, I will, I can, I can do it now. I can be Zen about it. Yeah, no, I mean, I think kids, when they're younger, there is a lot of shuffling people do, but I think at a certain point it's pretty important. So I wouldn't do that to her now.

Geri (08:14):

So it sounds like the being very disciplined about working eight to five, if I, if I can just reinterpret that is about being very disciplined about how you spend every minute of that day. Because you, you said about not having so much time for the water cooler chats, which yes. Points to the fact that we might be, some of us might be at work for 12 hours or something, but you know, how much of that time is actually productive or what do we define as productive as and important and how do we prioritize water-cooler versus whatever other activity we need to do.

Katherine (08:45):

Well, and I think too, I wouldn't be surprised if there's more drift now that I'm at Santa Cruz. Because as I was saying about NYU, I didn't have colleagues where I'd have these cross-fertilization conversations. But at Santa Cruz that's much more likely. So I think when it's causing that to happen, it's really great to have water cooler conversations. Whereas the kind that aren't so productive or the sort of chewing on politics, or, I mean also, you know, if you form friendships at work, that's great. That's not a problem. Right. I think for me though, I just realized I have all of this family and extended friend and family network that I need to preserve. So the way I do it is I figure out when is my best hours for writing and then in the morning. And usually the very best time is right after a vacation or a weekend like that first slot is when I can think of almost anything really creative. So I know that, and I blocked that time, then everything else comes in the other time. Right. And I know the Friday afternoons are crap and they're not good for much, you know? So you just get realistic about,

Geri (09:57):

And do you do things like plan the night before what you're going to do the next day so that you are productive and disciplined? Or do you just know?

Katherine (10:04):

Oh yeah, I have I have like I set up the whole week. I have a little journal and I set up the whole week of what I'm going to do all week. And then I have every Friday I do a weekend review. So I look at what actually I did get done and I didn't, and then I kind of troubleshoot based on that because otherwise weeks can go by and I have no sense of, and then lately I've, I've been like kind of categorizing those things. Cause when I was associate professor at NYU, I got way too caught up in service duties. Cause I thought I had to solve all these things. And so lately I tag things as research intensive things and that has to be the majority of what I do every week. And if I start to drift off of that, then I just back off.

Geri (10:49):

So you have a strong sense of what the balance of the components of your work is. And I really liked this sort of Friday review back on the week and troubleshooting.

Katherine (10:59):

Yeah. And then I make sure to, I actually like write my own assessment every, because I sound so compulsive, but, and I was like, make a point of praising myself if I did a good job because the other thing, cause I used to always beat myself up. I'd be like, yeah, sure. He did those five things. What are the other three things? And then you don't want to work anymore.

Geri (11:18):

That's so important to do it is because one of the challenges in academia, we can always be doing more things.

Katherine (11:27):

Yeah. Yeah. And nobody sits you down and says, okay, that was enough Geraldine. You did good. Go home and take a break. And so I think I do that to myself. I say, yep, you did a good job this week. You get to take the weekend off. And it's, it's really nice. It feels like liberating. Yeah.

Geri (11:42):

So it sounds like a nice closure to the week as well. That really enables you to step into the weekend. Yes. Leaving that behind.

Katherine (11:48):

And that's why at that same time I try to plan the next week so that I I've queued it all up. I know it's coming because the other thing I think it does is it drops the things into my subconscious on that Friday afternoon. That need to be percolating for Monday. So then I'm ready.

Geri (12:06):

But not in the subconscious in the way of, I can't forget to do that because it's written down in the list. It's that sort of positive percolating rather than the stressing.

Katherine (12:15):

Yes. Yeah. That's the goal. Anyway.

Geri (12:17):

That sounds really amazing. There was something that we had that you had said yesterday when we were just talking informally about, you know, when you were working eight to five, sometimes feeling guilty about telling people that, can you just say a little bit around that?

Katherine (12:36):

Sure. Yeah. Like I, I think, I don't know how it is in Europe and in the U S there's this culture around oh, I worked more than you worked. I worked even more exactly. I was like, oh, I'm working 60 hour weeks. And, and I, I actually did tell someone one time, I remember one time saying, oh, I'm only working this amount. And they got kind of upset with me and I realized, okay, revealing that you actually have work-life balance. It will, it makes people angry if they don't and they're working overworking themselves, it kind of makes them question the narrative. And it also sort of makes people feel bad sometimes because they think, well, why am I overworking? And that person's not right. So instead of it becoming a discussion about a better model for working, I think it can sometimes become this like implicit critique of someone else's practice. And also the other side of it, when I was more junior was I was scared that people would think I wasn't to be taken seriously being a woman. And then once I had a child, it's like, oh no, she's gone out to pasture. She's not going to do anything.

Geri (13:44):

But you've clearly been able to negotiate a way of working. That's very productive, very effective where you sought after you're in a great position now. And you're a great role model for showing that it can work.

Katherine (13:56):

Yeah. Yes. I, I think everyone should have work life balance. I just, I think most of the research on when you're really like on your death bed and they ask people, you know, they don't say, I wish I had been on one more service committee for a conference. I wish I'd worked one more Sunday.

Geri (14:15):

Well, it's always challenging to keep that perspective in mind in the minutia of the day-to-day challenge.

Katherine (14:21):

And I think that's a good reason to reflect on your productivity and praise yourself. Because I think one thing about academia is you don't get instant, positive feedback from someone else, like in a design job. When I used to work in design, you had a manager who would review your work and say, yes, wow. You know, you did good. And they had a good overview of how productive you were compared to others, but we just don't have that in academe. So you kind of...

Geri (14:49):

We can start it. We can start being more conscious of praising people and saying to people, if that's good enough or that's enough. Yes. You could do more. But what at what cost, what exactly.

Katherine (15:01):

Exactly. No I really like, I like this podcast because I think also people exposing and talking about these like pressures and tensions as they move through the practice of their work is another way to, to notice and to say, oh, okay. It's not just me. It's other people have these issues. Yes. Yeah.

Geri (15:21):

Isn't that great. And in terms of this being related work podcast, I just want to make some links to what Katherine has said and what research says as well. So in the last part of that conversation, Katherine talks about that. You know, we're not the only ones who experienced this. And this reminds me of the research on self-compassion, especially by leading psychology researchers in self-compassion Christian, Kristin Neff from University of Texas and Chris Germer from Harvard medical school and the center for mindfulness and compassion at the Cambridge health Alliance. And they talk about self-compassion as having three particular components. One is taking an attitude of self-acceptance rather than self judgment. And that means accepting reality. And just accepting that, you know, we do suffer or fail or feel inadequate and not, not I either not ignoring that. We feel like that nor, nor beating ourselves up with self criticism for not succeeding.

(16:29):

And I think that's really important. So we, we just embrace the reality of yeah. Sometimes things aren't working out or sometimes things are hard and it's a struggle. The second element of this approach to self-compassion is recognizing that we share a common humanity rather than it just being something that just happens to me. And in this case, we can talk about recognizing that this is part of the shared academic experience. Writing is hard. We all struggle

RW8 Asking good questions, empowering good people

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 06:55:00 +0200

This short related-work podcast follows up on the last conversation with Michael Bungay-Stanier, to present the seven coach-like questions from his book ‘The Coaching Habit’ for helping us to stay curious longer, jump to advice a little more slowly. I also reflect on my experiences trying to apply this in my academic life where I see it as one of our most powerful tools to help empower and develop good people.

Acknowledgements:

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Michael Bungay Stanier on the power of curiosity and taming your advice monster

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 09:28:00 +0200

Michael Bungay Stanier (MBS for short) is an internationally renowned author, company founder and thought leader in coaching. Michael is the founder of Box of Crayons, a learning and development company that helps organizations move from advice-driven to curiosity-led. He's the author of 6 books, the best known of which is The Coaching Habit which has sold close to a million copies and has thousands of 5-star reviews. His latest book The Advice Trap, focuses on what it takes to tame your Advice Monster. We start off the conversation reflecting on his career choices and discussing the differences between academia and industry. He then discusses what it means to be more coach-like in our work - staying curious a little longer, asking good questions, and being slower to jump to advice – as well as how to recognise our different advice monsters. We finish off with some questions posed by participants on a recent academic leadership development course.

Notable quotes:

[10:49] “[Two things] I hope. One is people find work that is meaningful for them, that lights them up and you enter that virtuous circle of doing work that amplifies and strengthens the best of who you are. […] And then the second thing I hope for is that you do work that gives more to the world than it takes.”

[17:00] “I'd love people to stay curious just a little bit longer and rush to action and advice giving a little bit more slowly.”

[20:13] [Even] if you've got some advice, which is stellar, which is the perfect advice, […] is this the right act for the moment? […] What's the consequence of me giving advice at this moment? Sure. It might solve the problem, but does it increase capacity and confidence and competence and autonomy and self-sufficiency in those around me? Because often the bigger win is to build those capacities because they're longer term capacities.

[30:27] “You don't have the answers because it's not your job to have all the answers.”

[33:39] “The three advice monsters are tell it, save it and control it….But each advice monster has prizes and punishments. And the prizes tend to be short term and a bit kind of ego-driven punishments tend to have bigger implications.”

[38:13] “If you can manage people in a way that liberates them and frees them and encourages them, then that's brilliant. And your advice monster is not going to be a path for that.”

[39:54] “What is the game being played and how are you playing this game? And are you happy with the choices you're making? Because for many of us, those choices are automatic rather than mindful.”

Overview (times approximate):

[Full Transcript also available here for download.]

00:28 Preamble

04:07 Bio: Michael gives his short bio and introduces his two books, The Coaching Habit and The Advice Trap

07:26 Career choices: We discuss interesting career path choices, finding work that is meaningful and gives more to the world than it takes

11:41 Academia: We explore the ways in which academia might be different and also similar to other organizational contexts, especially when it comes to being ‘experts’

16:45 Curiosity: Michael talks about the power of curiosity, reflected in his manifesto for change, where people stay curious a bit longer and rush to action and advice giving a bit more slowly.

18:05 Advice challenges: Michael discusses the three challenges with moving to advice giving too quickly and proposes instead we first explore what is the real challenge.

23:26 Getting practical: Michael gives some practical conversational phrases and strategies for how we can play this out in different situations.

32:22 Advice monsters: Michael describes the backstory to The Advice Trap book, and explains the three different advice monsters, tell-it, save-it, control-it, and their respective prizes and punishments.

42:51 Misc questions: Michael responds to three questions from our recent Academic Leadership Development course: when is a coaching-like approach not appropriate; what if others around you don’t buy into this approach; when is it culturally appropriate; and can you apply this in giving advice eg to government bodies.

51:32 Wrap: We wrap up the conversation. My post-script

53:55 End

Related Links

https://boxofcrayons.com Box of Crayons has taught coaching skills to hundreds of thousands of people around the world

https://www.mbs.works “Where people find clarity, courage & community to do work that's thrilling, important & daunting.”

And you can find the link to the advice monster questionnaire at https://go.mbs.works/theadvicetrap

Books:

The Coaching Habit - the best-selling book on coaching this century

The Advice Trap Be humble, stay curious & change the way you lead forever

Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork. Start the Work That Matters.

Tanita Casci and Elizabeth Adams on supporting, rewarding and celebrating a positive collegial research culture

Fri, 21 May 2021 10:33:00 +0200

Dr. Tanita Casci is Head of Research Policy, and Dr. Elizabeth Adams is Workstream Lead – Research Culture, at the University of Glasgow. The trigger for this conversation was an LSE blog article they wrote about rewarding contributions to research culture. In this conversation they talk about their journey in trying to promote a supportive collegial research culture that is aligned around core institutional values that reflect what matters to the people in the research units. They discuss various initiatives that are part of this, such as promotion criteria that reward collegiality, formal recognition of everyone’s contributions to research, from PIs, researchers, students and to technicians, and better supporting early career researchers. They make a compelling case for the importance of culture for good research, and role model what universities can do to proactively enable this.

“The university succeeds when the individual succeeds.“

“You can do better bigger things working together across disciplines and sectors.”

“It is expected that you will be collegiate in your teaching and your research and your knowledge exchange and all the different things that you do and that you will support others and by doing so research will be better for everyone.“

“Culture is the vehicle to better research.”

“Of all the things you could be doing, what is the very small number of things that you are going to align all your communications, activities and investment to?”

Overview (times approximate):

[Full Transcript also available here for download]

2:00 Introductions: Tanita and Elizabeth introduce themselves

4:20 Defining quality: formative reviews to understand what quality means to different disciplines and what is needed to help people succeed

9:40 Recognising different types of contributions

12:50 Aligned initiatives: Showcasing good practice, setting collegiality expectations, and supporting, rewarding and celebrating what they value

17:00 Early career support to develop positive research cultures

18:25 Culture as the vehicle to better research

20:40 Understanding the values to inform strategy

24:05 Role of sector drivers

25:10 Practical strategies, challenges, and navigating a good pace for change

30:05 Reinterpreting good research practice for different disciplines

33:20 Roles of governance structures and local leadership, and giving PIs tools and support

39:20 Looking at it as a long-term learning game – nothing is born perfect

41:20 Importance of communication & clarity re focus and definition

45:30 What they are proudest of – support for fieldwork, and including collegiality in the promotions criteria, and putting outputs on a par with impact

51:00 End

Related Links

Tanita Casci – Glasgow Uni profile, LinkedIn profile

Elizabeth Adams – Glasgow Uni profile

University of Glasgow Research Strategy 2020-25: Collaboration | Creativity | Careers and Research Culture initiatives

Sector initiatives:

DORA “The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) recognizes the need to improve the ways in which researchers and the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated.”

Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2015 Report

Concordat The Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers – Sept 2019

Research Excellence Framework – “the system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions.”

Athena Swan Charter – “a framework which is used across the globe to support and transform gender equality within higher education (HE) and research”

Articles:

Adams, E. & Casci, T. (2020) Rewarding contributions to research culture is part of building a better university. LSE Blog.

Casci, T & Adams, E. Research culture: Setting the right tone eLife 2020;9:e55543. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.55543

Casci, T & Adams, E. (2019) Reimagining research culture. F1000 Research blog

Jeremy Birnholtz on sustainability of reviewing, queer research and being curious

Fri, 07 May 2021 09:13:00 +0200

Jeremy Birnholtz is an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Communication Studies and the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Departments at Northwestern University in Chicago in the US. He also directs the Social Media Lab. The trigger for this conversation was the recent discussion with John Tang about reviewing and Jeremy continues this discussion, looking at issues around authoring and service asymmetries, the unsustainability of the current review and publication models based on what he calls the perpetual motion machine that pushes researchers to churn out more and more papers. He calls for a greater focus on quality of papers instead of numbers and to identify quality signifiers beyond just publications. We discuss his role as conference chair of the upcoming CSCW conference, which is traditionally about distributed online collaboration, and moving the conference online. Shifting topics, we also talk about his personal coming out and the pivot of his research to explore topics around gender and sexuality. Through all of these discussions, Jeremy’s curiosity and care comes through again and again. Much to ponder on here.

“If you are playing the long game, eventually it [career] does work out.”

“I’ve come to believe that you just need a smaller number of very very good papers to make your contribution and a name for yourself.”

“On search committees, writing tenure letters, it is in our collective interest to not be obsessed with numbers and to focus on the contribution and on the quality of the work.”

“As a junior person it is easy to get caught up in the perpetual motion machine mentally where you are constantly spinning out new papers.”

“We’re smart observant people. If we look around and have these conversations we can come up with a way to fix this. This is a solvable problem but it takes stepping back, noticing and talking about it.”

“There’s something I really enjoy about throwing myself in a situation where all of my assumptions are very likely to be wrong and trying to figure out where to go from there.”

Overview (times approximate):

02:00 Jeremy’s background and career path to date

07:50 Reflecting on reviewing and service challenges

36:35 Shifting to queer research topics

53:00 Values & superpowers

59:09 End

In a little more detail… or download the full transcript here

Background:

02:00 Jeremy gives an overview of his background and career to date.

04:30 Jeremy discusses why he moved from Cornell to Northwestern, right before he was up for tenure, and early career choices and challenges.

“If you are playing the long game, eventually it [career] does work out.”

Reviewing & service:

07:50 We shift to the ongoing discussion around reviewing (building on the conversation with John Tang).

08:20 One issue is the arms race in CV length, the pressure to publish lots of papers, and the volunteer service required, which can put the emphasis on the writing that we must do and not the service that we can do.

“In order to get the papers published, people need to review. But if that is getting de-prioritised it is getting harder to find people to review.”

09:50 The cost structure of reviewing – once written the cost of submitting is very little and the cost of reviewing it is pushed onto the community. A sustainability issue.

11:10 We discuss the impact on quality and how large numbers of papers do not equate to quality, and what he finds more compelling when on a search committee.

“I’ve come to believe that you just need a smaller number of very very good papers to make your contribution and a name for yourself.”

13:20 We talk about where publication numbers do have impact, in the filtering process of initial applications. And he talks about looking for other quality signals. But you have to look for it.

15:00 Jeremy discusses the debates about highly selective conferences but not as much of a shift as he would like to see – a hard thing to let go of if you have been arguing for selective conferences all your career. And acceptance rates being arbitrary.

17:10 We note the impact on younger academics and career pressures and I Ask about alternative suggestions? Jeremy talks about not being obsessed with numbers, focusing on quality, and re-thinking deadlines and acceptance rates.

“On search committees, writing tenure letters, it is in our collective interest to not be obsessed with numbers and to focus on the contribution and on the quality of the work.”

“As a junior person it is easy to get caught up in the perpetual motion machine mentally where you are constantly spinning out new papers.”

“If we focused on writing a smaller number of better papers, accept rates might go up.”

The shift to multiple deadlines or being able to submit anytime means you can submit when the work is ready.

21:00 Jeremy talks about it as a classic social dilemma problem and possibly experimenting with charging but then the equity issues this opens up, and also issues around review karma. And saying no to review requests.

26:55 Jeremy talks about stepping back from being an associate editor because of how hard it was to get reviewers and doing more reviewing again. The asymmetry of power to say no, and of information around reviewing and service - the lack of transparency into what other service people are doing when they do say no.

29:50 Jeremy discusses how we can become blind to some processes and assumptions when we come into a field and need to stop and look around.

31:00 Jeremy talks about planning the next CSCW conference and the experiments they are trying, and how to promote more social interaction.

33:00 They have appointed a virtual attendance task force to think about how to address this e.g., through more structured activities, ways to have random encounters, but not trying to replicate face to face.

34:30 We discuss CSCW as the area that has been researching distributed collaboration since the 80s and dealing with distributed and online now in the pandemic. And finding the ‘beyond being there’ moments.

Queer research:

36:35 Jeremy discusses his shift in research from more pragmatic interests (publishable and fundable) to sexuality and gender studies. Also coming out when he was 25. And starting on this new research area looking at CraigsList ads and then Grindr (leading to Charlie’s undergrad thesis) and the encouragement of Fred Turner to look at this as research.

42:45 Jeremy discusses some of the research studies he is doing in this space, including working with collaborators in India and learning so much.

47:00 Jeremy responds to the question about whether there have been personal challenges in coming out and he says not really and the HCI community being very open and welcoming.

49:30 Jeremy reflects on how the community could still change and do better. “There are some hard conversations ahead and hopefully they can be productive conversations.”

“There’s something I really enjoy about throwing myself in a situation where all of my assumptions are very likely to be wrong and trying to figure out where to go from there.”

Values & superpowers

53:00 Jeremy reflects on other values driving his work – addressing real problems in a way that can impact broader understanding, thinking about Pasteur’s Quadrant. And the superpowers he brings – a naïve curiosity and being willing to ask questions at every stage.

57:20 Wrapping up.

59:09 End

Related Links

Acronyms:

CHI Computer Human Interaction

CSCW 2021 conference - Computer Supported Cooperative Work

People:

John Tang’s recent podcast episode on reviewing

Gillian R. Hayes: Inclusive and Engaged Research. CHI2019 SIGCHI Social Impact Award talk

Mary L. Gray Microsoft Research, Harvard Uni Klein Center for Internet and Society

Fred Turner, Stanford

Jed Brubaker, Colorado

Papers/Books:

Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta. 1992. Beyond being there. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '92). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 119–125.

Katta Spiel, Os Keyes, Ashley Marie Walker, Michael A. DeVito, Jeremy Birnholtz, Emeline Brulé, Ann Light, Pınar Barlas, Jean Hardy, Alex Ahmed, Jennifer A. Rode, Jed R. Brubaker, and Gopinaath Kannabiran. 2019. Queer(ing) HCI: Moving Forward in Theory and Practice. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper SIG11, 1–4. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3311750

Donald E. Stokes, 1997, Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation. Brookins Institution Press.

Neha Kumar on choices, authenticity and the power of the collective

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 09:24:00 +0200

Neha Kumar is an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech, with a joint appointment between the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. Her research area is human-computer interaction for global development.

In this conversation she discusses the circumstances and choices and people that contributed to her path from India to Germany to the US, where she studied at Stanford and UC Berkeley, with time working at Microsoft in between. She then talks about her current faculty position and setting up her own research lab. She also talks with great generosity and reflective insight about the penalties and privileges of always being an underrepresented voice in every room and respecting difference. She brings a similar capacity to take perspective and see the bigger picture in talking about her tenure process, her service roles and how she looks after herself in the middle of all this.

Notable bites:

I started to feel that this is a product that the top 1% of the world uses, and it's not really driving my passion and I don't know what to do about it. I call it my quarter-life crisis. I was 25. [14:48]

Everything could be a blessing and a curse. It's just a question of molding it in that way. [31:56]

We're so tied to this performance that we always feel this pressure to be right. That's something I've been thinking about—how we don't give ourselves room to be flawed, but we are... We are inherently flawed, except we want to make it look like we're not. [45:53]

It's about what's liberating. I think it's tremendously liberating to feel like I can grow in this moment, as opposed to: "I'm just going to stay put and not move.” [47:54]

I hope we can think a little more about each other and a little less about ourselves alone. And if there was one thing that I would hope for, it would be that--to really believe in the power of the collective, to believe in solidarity, to believe that we're stronger together, and that we cannot really do better by putting other people down. We have to rise up together. To me that's super important to remember in the minutest of things that we do. [01:03:18]

Overview (times approximate):

02:00 Preamble

03:10 Neha’s path and career choices towards a PhD

13:00 Finding her own way and the value of good friends and supervisors

22:50 Getting a faculty position and running her own lab, TanDEm Lab

36:10 The experiences of always being an underrepresented voice in every room and respecting difference

48:25 The tenure application experience

55:00 Service roles and self-care

1:02:10 A call to the power of the collective, being stronger together

01:05:54 End

Transcript

Full Transcript available here

Related Links

TanDEm Lab, Georgia Tech

ACM Future Academy

ACM SIGCHI

Michael Best – Faculty mentor at Georgia Tech

Book: Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, 2013, Crown.

Photo credit: Susan Dray

RW7 Job Crafting - small tweaks can make a big difference

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 05:34:00 +0200

Having talked about superpowers and strengths, in the last related work podcast, it’s a natural follow on to talk about job crafting and exploring where we the power and autonomy to shape the work we do. Drawing on work by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, I talk about three ways you can job craft – cognitive, task and relational – and draw on examples including from pervious podcasts to illustrate. We all have more scope to make work more meaningful than we might think and even small tweaks can make a big difference.

Related work links:

Job Crafting website – including an exercise you can buy and links to various published papers https://positiveorgs.bus.umich.edu/cpo-tools/job-crafting-exercise/

Michelle McQuaid’s podcast conversation with Amy Wrzesniewski about job crafting

First key paper: Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E.(2001) Crafting a job; Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179-201.

Specific to academia: Wellman, N. and Spreitzer, G. (2011) Crafting scholarly life: Strategies for creating meaning in academic careers, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32(6), 927-931.

The love-loathe article: Buckingham, M and Goodall, A. Work-Life Balance is a myth. Do this Instead. Time Magazine, June 6 2019.

The Changing Academic Life podcasts mentioned – see the notes on the webpage for dipping in if you don’t want to

Ali Black podcast conversation

Cliff Lampe podcast conversation and Cliff’s article on why he loves academic service

Katherine Isbister podcast conversation

Mike Twidale podcast conversation

Image acknowledgement: Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash

Transcript

(00:05):

(00:21):

In the last related work podcast, we talked about super powers and strengths, super powers and strengths being those things that we're not just good at, but that we really love doing where we're at our best, and we can really make an impact. And we also talked about the literature saying that if we can work out and identify what our strengths are and then use and develop, the more we'll be happier, more engaged have all sorts of positive benefits from it. So what might be some practical strategies then for how we go about doing that? What I want to talk about today is a theory of job crafting that was developed by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton in a paper in 2001 based on some qualitative studies that they'd done on people at work, and they identify three different types of ways that we can craft our work to connect to something that's more meaningful that makes more use of our strengths. That makes work more fun.

(01:30):

And so I'd like to just spend a little bit of time now, just reflecting on that. So to start off with that might be useful just to think for yourself about, you know, if you think about the, all the different sorts of aspects of your work from your great work that you really love, where you're using your strengths, where you're at your best to have to work, that you don't enjoy that that's just tedious, but you can't really get out of and just think about what some of those might be, because I'm going to suggest that the strategies that they propose can make the great work, even more fun and allow you to do even more of that. And to turn some of the, have to work, that's a bit of a chore and a bit tedious into something where it's still may not be your favorite thing to do, but you've found a way of connecting with it more to make it more interesting.

(02:29):

And why I think this notion of job crafting is really interesting is that it invites us to explore what are the things within our power, within our control that we can shape, even when we think we may not have a lot of scope. I think that we still do have, we still do have scope to make things better, to some extent, and especially as academics, this notion of academic freedom and autonomy, even though we know that it's probably a contested notion these days is we're still very lucky that we do have a lot of autonomy to some extent compared to many other people. So how do we make best use of that? So the three types of crafting that they talk about cognitive crafting task crafting and relational crafting. So let me just walk through each of those.

(03:32):

So cognitive crafting is about changing the way we think about or approach some job or work. So it's about changing your mindset in a way that might connect to something that you care about. So I can give you an example for myself where I think I'm marking, you know, especially if you have sort of long essays to mark in a big class can be something that, you know, where you just look at that pile of papers to be marked and go, Oh, do I have to do it? And I've been working on lately trying to flip that around and just say I'm really interested to learn from the students because often they will pick essay topics. If I give them an open essay topic where they write about things that I don't know a lot about. And I think I said last week, I'm quite eclectic in my interests and I love learning new things.

(04:32):

So I've, I've reshaped that to think about, Oh, this is a great opportunity just to learn about a topic that I don't know anything about and what I've also done is I often ask the students to write a reflective learning report. And I, of course, I think there's value for them in doing that, but it makes my marking more fun as well because one of the other things I really care about that drives me is helping people develop themselves. And I love reading the learning reports now because I can see the journey that the students have been on. So I've still got the job of marking, but it's no longer quite feeling as tedious as it was. It still takes time, but I I've found a way of finding meaning in that work. So in, in previous podcasts as well, you may remember Cliff Lampe and I always, this always struck me because he talked about loving, going to faculty meetings and that's changed for me how I think now about faculty meetings that they're, they're not something that's a big chunk of time out of my week or out, out of my calendar that doesn't add any value. But he challenged me to rethink my relationship to faculty meetings and that thinking about it as a chance to catch up with colleagues and to contribute to the future direction of this.

(06:13):

So what are the things that might be your 'have to do' work that isn't fun. That is a bit tedious. And is there a way that you can change the way you think about it, even, that it makes it a little bit different that changes the energy around it when you go to do that at work,

(06:39):

They also talk about task crafting, and this is where you may be able to find, so you still have to deliver on a task and there's still some output that's required, but there may be a way that you can change the mix of activities that you do in delivering on that task, or that you have possibility to change the scope of the task in some way, or that you can change the way you perform the task that may be connects to more of your strengths. So it's sort of exploring the boundaries of that task and how it can be made different. So if I pick up on my marking thing, the other thing that I've done with marking is I now also change the way I do that job as well, apart from adding in the reflective learning report to the task for the students, and to my task, I also mark the papers on the iPad with the pencil and go and sit somewhere nice. So I changed my location and the setting makes a big difference. It's sort of an inviting, warm setting, you know, that I choose and just even changing the setting has helped with that as a job that I didn't particularly like doing, and it would feel worse doing it, sitting at my desk.

(08:08):

I can also reflect back on something I did with the teaching challenge as, as being an instance of task shaping to fit, to connect more to my strengths. So I had a lecture that I'd been doing quite a number of years, and the slides were getting quite outdated in the design and the content may be needed updating as well, but I was really, really busy and I just didn't have time to put in all the effort that was needed to do that. But I did care about the students' learning experience as well. And just as a sort of an essential sort of solution, I started conducting this course not so much as lectures anymore, but as facilitated discussions workshopping with the class, obviously it was a small enough class for about 30, 40 students that it was possible to do this. And I realized that I had more fun and the students were more engaged and it felt like, and it seemed like it's certainly in their assessments that they learned a lot more as well.

(09:22):

And what it did was I connected I'm actually, I think one of my superpowers is in facilitating these sort of group workshopping type experiences. And I'd actually fallen back on one of my natural strengths as a solution for shaping the way I did that job of teaching to deal with the very practical challenge. But now it's the way I, I now choose to run my courses wherever I can, wherever the content suits that. And I, I think that's been really important because I now really look forward to teaching those classes. I'm not just standing up going blah, blah, blah, the whole time. I think the students do too.

(10:05):

And I'm also reflecting on a story that another colleague in another university was telling me about how they were given a database class to teach, and that's not their area at all for first years. And they weren't looking forward to it. They were inheriting someone else's material, and they ended up crafting how they taught this topic. So they still had to deliver to the curriculum, but they were, there are very creative person and their core research areas more in multimedia. And they ended up connecting to multimedia type databases and materials and metadata as example data that the students worked with in the database class. And I thought that was a really lovely example of someone, again, shaping a job that didn't seem like it was going to be so good or much fun, but connecting it to what they knew, what they were good at and having the freedom, you know, using the freedom that they had to shape sort of the examples that they used in the assignments to make it more fun for them and of course the students.

(11:14):

And I think in the podcasts conversations that I've had so far, the chat with Ali Black is also a lovely example of shaping the task. And I don't know if you listened to Ali's conversation it's really worth listening to, she talked about how she was pretty sort of feeling like a failure and pretty broken down by the whole managerial approach to academia and the challenge of trying to get promoted and, and, you know, ticking all the boxes and ended up as a reaction or as a totally pivoting her research that she did. And actually focusing on slow scholarship as, as a topic of research, and paradoxically has ended up producing lots of beans that get counted that do the tick boxes, but now it's not being done just as an external motivator, but it's come out of something that she loves doing and that she cares about, which I think also connects then to the third type of crafting that can be done, which is relational crafting.

(12:32):

So that's changing where we can, who we do things with, or the social context will support that we draw on in getting work done. And so the other part of Ali's story is that she created this wise woman's writing group, and, and she talks about how this wise women writing group became a real saving space for her and helped to find her own ways of working on what mattered to her. And in the end, she was able to create a promotion application that she said was like me. So I thought that was really useful and strategy because when she was struggling, the way she shaped her work was not just to pivot in the topic that she was working on, but reaching out to colleagues and, and being instrumental in forming this writing group in the first place so that she had that support. So I'd really strongly recommend listening to that conversation.

(13:37):

Katherine Isbister as well. She didn't talk, she talked about this after we actually finished recording, and I just mentioned it at the end. She also talks about how a really important thing that she has done that helps her deal with just her role more generally, is that she has a weekly Skype call with a friend colleague where they act as a peer mentor for each other and help hold each other accountable to commitments. And just check in. And again, like this is just building on social networks and relational aspects to shape the work so that you're not doing it so much alone.

(14:20):

And I think we could also interpret Mike Twidale's example from last week where there, there was some of the details that of scheduling a job that needed to be done as part of his curriculum role. He didn't like that at all. And he had just assumed that no one would like it. And then he found a colleague who lit up and loved doing that sort of work. And he ended up, she ended up taking that on and he could then do the more strategic things that he was better at. And that, I think that's a lovely example of crafting as well, is co-opting other people and being able to draw together all of your different strengths and working together on the task. I know that for the academic leadership development courses that we're running, doing it with Austin Rainer has just been such a pleasure and so much more rewarding and enriching than just doing it on my own. And I've learned so much more from doing that, even though it's been a little bit harder in some ways, in terms of needing more time, just to coordinate and plan together.

(15:26):

And we could also think about, you know, the move in a lot of academic circles to have shut up and write groups or reading groups. These are all nice examples of relational crafting and shaping aspects around our work to connect to other, and those notions of high quality connections can be really important. The literature also talks about in terms of relational crafting the value of understanding who benefits from your work. So it could be for us, as lecturers may be hearing back from students or connecting back with students to hear how they're going, or from what they've learned in your courses, or if you're doing a lot of participatory research with participants, you know, thinking more also about how they might benefit from the work.

(16:25):

So I think that, you know, even if the power that we have to shape our work to craft our work is only in terms of how we think about it. That's a huge power because how we think about it really can impact how we engage with the work and the energy that we bring to it.

(16:47):

And then if we also have the opportunity to, you know, to the autonomy, to shape the task itself in how we engage with it, or the boundaries of it, how can we shape this job to do more of this sort of thing and less of that, the other sort of things. I know that it goes going back to the task shaping. I know that if I have a research problem, I will choose to shape the research questions that connect to more, how and why research questions that connect to my love of more qualitative exploratory in depth research, rather than framing it up as a hypothesis that would require an empirical lab study. While I, I appreciate the value that such studies bring, they not working to my strengths, or they don't get me as excited. So we often have much more power than what we think.

(17:41):

And we can help others that we work with also explore what are the boundaries that they to shape their work, and whether that's people were mentoring or people that we're working with, or students, even in working with masters students or PhD students, when they're looking at their key topics, or they're looking at their methods, we can have conversations with them. That sort of say, what, what do you want to get out of this, this research work for your thesis for your future career? What skills do you want to develop? What knowledge areas do you want to develop, and what do you really love doing? And help them iterate around to shape a question or an approach that connects to where they want to go, and that makes use of where they are. And if we're working as a team in the way that Mike did with the woman that he was working with, you know, how do we exploit the exploit? That sounds like the wrong word in this context, doesn't it. But how do we enable the shaping of the work as a team so that everyone's able to do more of what they like?

(18:48):

And there was an interesting

RW6 Exploring your own superpowers

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 08:19:00 +0200

Two recent interactions made me think more about the importance of knowing our own unique superpowers (as Aaron Quigley discussed), ie our strengths, and also our kryponite (thanks Lewis Chuang), and how this can help us work out what is our good academic life. And to recognise that it’s ok that we can all have different superpowers.

Aaron Quigley podcast conversation

Mike Twidale podcast conversation

Acknowledgement: Photo of power pose by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

Related Work:

Michelle McQuaid, 2014, Ten Reasons to Focus on Your Strengths No matter what your job description says, Psychology Today.

Jeremy Sutton, 2021, Cultivating Strengths at Work: 10+ Examples and Ideas, PositivePsychology.com.

Ryan M. Niemiec, 2020, Coronavirus Coping: 6 Ways Your Strengths Will Help You Turn to your best qualities for prevention, safety, and health. Psychology Today.

Transcript:

(00:05):

Welcome to changing academic life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick. And this is a bite-size related work podcast where we pick up on a single idea from literature and experience that may provide some insights or tips that will help us change academic life for the better.

(00:27):

Where do you naturally choose to spend your time? When you have the option of making a choice, what do you naturally gravitate to doing where's your happy place or places as an academic? What is it that you really love doing when you feel the most alive and in the flow maybe? I wanted to muse on this today triggered by two different, but I think related interactions from last week, one was the discussion with a senior professor whose colleague made a comment to them that they should be writing more and notice the 'should'. But for this senior academic, they would always choose to spend time with their students, not sitting down, writing another paper yet, even though they were really clear on this as their own choice, they felt that they still felt somehow weren't measuring up to what an academic should be. Again, the 'should'.

(01:32):

The other example was a Twitter discussion, responding to the conversation with Aaron Quigley, where he talked about his super powers of not worrying who gets the credit listening and talking. Lewis Chuang started a Twitter conversation around superpowers. And interestingly also asked Aaron what's his kryptonite. I love this nod to the Superman comics. So if you remember, kryptonite is Superman's Achilles heel, it made him weak and all sorts of different types of kryptonite emerged over the series, having different effects on Superman. And then in some, some of the episodes, he could become immune or found that he could be immune from kryptonite by traveling to alternate dimensions.

(02:19):

I think a generic kryptonite for many of us as academics is thinking that they must be some ideal, super academic academic that we all should be aspiring to. And this isn't helped by the hyper competitive culture and the generic metrics that we all have to report to. And I would suggest that we can get some immunity from this kryptonite by traveling to the alternate dimension of knowing ourselves better and identifying what are our unique superpowers, looking to where we get our energy from in doing our academic work and also knowing what's our kryptonite. It's more specifically, and having mitigation strategies against this. I really strongly believe and promote that there's no ideal academic that we should all be aspiring to. We're all unique. And we need the diverse mix of us all to deliver good science overall.

(03:25):

So what are your superpowers? The questions I started with can be one way to start to reflect on this. So for example, when you do have the option of making a choice of how you spend your time or the opportunity to volunteer to something, what sort of things do you naturally gravitate to doing? Where's your happy place? What is it that you really love doing that makes you feel alive and where you really get in flow? If I think of people I've worked with over the years, I know that there's one person I'll always find in the maker lab if they have free time, because this is what lights them up. Another person I know will be there behind their closed door, sitting at their desk and reveling in the time to write. And for me, I know that I will always prioritise time for people and mentoring over writing or tinkering. None of us are better or worse academics than the other. We're just different. And we bring different superpowers to our work.

(04:38):

So I can also give another illustration too, that just might help make this more concrete. So all of us work who are working in universities might be required to do some lecturing. And so on the surface by role title and by task, it might look like that is all pretty much the same, the same job of lecturing. But if you actually ask around to the people that you know, and ask them, what is it about lecturing that they really like if they, if they like it. And I'm sure that you will get a whole range of answers. So some of the answers that I've heard to this question, you know, some people love the aspect of actually standing up in front of the class and performing in a way and engaging this class. Other people will talk about it's really the interaction with the students and facilitating learning conversations. For others, it's about breaking down complex ideas into teachable chinks, and how to communicate that .For others, it's the creative work of developing, learning materials, innovative learning materials, or it might be the strategic planning of the whole learning journey for the student. And that sort of that strategic thinking is what really drives people. Or it might be that you're just motivated by inspiring the next generation of leaders.

(06:16):

And I'm sure you can come up with other reasons. And it'd be interesting to know what are your reasons for anything we do. I would suggest even in delivering to the metrics, the things that we have to do, we can still ask ourselves though, what other parts of this that we might actually love, and then look at how we can do more of that in delivering to what we have to do, because that's where our energy lies. And that's where we get to use our strengths and our superpowers. So in delivering to the metrics, it may be really annoying and painful, but maybe I can also take the time to celebrate for myself what it is that I've learned over the time. If love of learning is a strength for you just as an example.

(07:12):

So there's really strong evidence across a lot of diverse literature in different countries, cultures, and with different settings from students to businesses, to everyday life. That points to really strong benefits of knowing and using and developing your strengths. And the literature talks about things like, you know, people use their strengths more, a happier experience, less stress, feel healthier, have more energy, feel more satisfied and more confident. They're more creative and agile at work, and they experience more meaning at work and are more engaged as well. So recognising that we all have different superpowers also reminds us that we don't have to be good or excellent at everything, and that's completely okay. And that we all bring very different interests and superpowers to our work. And that's the great value of working in collaboration with others. I had a conversation for the podcast with Mike Twidale some time ago, and he gave us a great example of how we can put our different super powers together to complement one another, just take a listen to this extract.

(08:32):

"I realized that, you know, one aspect of delegation that I could do with delegate things, to people who were really good at doing this thing that I was really bad at doing, and that's partly recognising strengths and weaknesses in ourselves. And it was a struggle because at times I'm inclined to be very egocentric and think, well, if I hate doing it that surely everybody else hates doing it. So I am now going to ask them to do this horrible thing. And then discovering this thing, I think is horrible. It's something they think is really nice. And this is something they think is horrible, I think is fun. So learning what it is that, you know, plays to other people's strengths. And then maybe it's something that everybody hates and that has to be dealt, but often there are these sort of different strengths and skills that can be played to." [Mike Twidale]

(09:20):

So isn't that a great example. So it's also worth knowing that it's not enough just to name our superpowers and assume that they're always fantastic to use or that we don't need to develop other skills if we need to. So two examples or caveats around the whole notion of superpowers. One is not having some super power doesn't mean that we can't do something at all, or that we couldn't learn. It just means that it doesn't come so naturally to us. And we'll have to put in more explicit effort to develop that programming is an example for me, so I could learn how to do programming and even be good at it. But I really had to draw on my super power of conscientiousness and persistence to put in the hard work, to get through it and to enjoy the sense of achievement at the end, even if I didn't enjoy the process and it took explicit effort. I'm also not so great at the bigger picture, strategic thinking. And I could go on courses for this. And luckily, so far, like Mike's example, I've been able to work with other people who are better at this and to compliment our strengths together.

(10:39):

The second caveat is that sometimes our strengths or our super powers can also be hidden kryptonite for us if we overuse them or under-use them, or use them unskilfully or inappropriately in a specific context. So one of my superpowers is being really curious and love, just love to learn. And what that means is I have really eclectic interests and, you know, have a broad feel of lots of what's going on in different areas. But the downside that I have to watch out for is because I can be interested in all sorts of things, I'm really prone to going down rabbit holes. And so I need to work much harder on staying in focus if there's something I need to do and watching out for myself, going down a rabbit hole and wasting time. Another example is I think one of my super powers might be fairness, and that leads me to behave in particular ways around people and with people to, to see that things are just and fair, but it can also not serve me well when I notice unfairness or injustice somewhere else, or feel like someone's treated me unfairly and I can really end up ruminating and being very upset and having sleepless nights around that. So I need to have strategies for trying to manage that. So just having a superpower doesn't mean that that's brilliant, you know, there's lots of nuances around actually understanding and using your superpowers to best advantage.

(12:28):

So in summary, we all have our own particular superpowers and our own particular kryptonite. And what I think is interesting in all of the podcast conversations that I have, how much we hear this in different people's stories, everyone has a different, a different career path, different motivations for their choices, different sorts of things that really drive them and that they get excited about. And it's just a great reminder that there's no such thing as the ideal academic or the good academic life. It's, what's a good academic life to you. And this connects to our related work today, as I said, there's a huge body of evidence in the psychology and in the organisational business literature about the power of using superpowers more.

(13:22):

So I'm going to link to two popular science articles that provide a broad overview or summary or discussion of strengths, and also links to the underlying peer reviewed papers. And I said that some of the ways that you can investigate your own superpowers is to just think about the questions that I asked, but you could also ask others, because often if we think something comes so naturally to us we, we just take it for granted and assume everyone can do that because it's just so effortless for us. So sometimes it needs others, we need other people to reflect it back. And so there's a link in one of those articles to an exercise called reflected best self, where it helps you. It talks about how you can go and talk to other people about helping you identify your strengths. And the articles also point to some online profile profiling tools that you may like to use as tools to think with that might start to point you I'll also link to a third article by Ryan Niemiec that talks about 'Coronavirus Coping: 6 Ways Your Strengths Will Help You turn to your best qualities for prevention, safety, and health’. So have fun discovering and playing.

(14:48):

You can find the summary notes and related links for this podcast on www dot, changing academic life.com. You can also subscribe to changing academic life on iTunes, and now also on Stitcher. And you can follow ChangeAcadLife on Twitter. And if something connected with you, please consider sharing this podcast with your colleagues so that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently.

15:26 END

John Tang on review stress in a pandemic, community-level solutions and distributed work

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 08:04:00 +0200

John Tang is a Senior Researcher with Microsoft Research, joining in 2008 and having previously worked in other industrial research labs at Xerox PARC, Sun, and IBM. He has a PhD from the design division of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford University. He is a deep expert distributed collaboration and in particular the use of video in this context, which is now highly relevant considering the increase in video conferencing in these pandemic times. He also serves in many senior editorial and papers chair roles managing the review process for papers.

In this conversation we reflect on the increasing amount of overwork and exhaustion we are seeing in the peer community and how this is playing out for the review process and also look at the broader implications. John describes it in terms of invisible disabilities and it being a community problem needing solutions at the community level. We also talk about the differential effect the pandemic is having, the particular challenges for more junior people and recognising his own privileged situation. He embodies a graciousness and generosity in how he approaches these challenges, including the impact on himself, that can serve as a role model for us all. He also reflects on the experiences of video connections in pandemic times.

“I’ve been a bit saddened by the amount of overwork and exhaustion out in our community, evidenced by the reasons why people aren’t available to do reviews. Illness, caregiving, childcare, all really good reasons that people are not available to do a review, and while it makes my job as an Editor/AC harder, my heart goes out even more to people who are dealing with daily stresses. All the more why I don’t want to needlessly add to the stress about a late review…" [email]

“It's just so common that it was so systemic that we just really needed to again, think about it as a community problem, not an individual problem and figure out how we can help each other work through this aspect of it.”

“The thing that surprised me … is that all this intentional remote connection is maintaining strong ties, but we're losing weak ties.”

“I'm super interested in how this global increase in video literacy and remote collaboration, what that's going to enable in the future”

Overview (times approximate): - see below for full Transcript

00:30 Preamble and introduction

05:10 Reviewing in a pandemic: John talks about how he thinks of the pandemic impacts (around reviewing) as invisible disability and the differential effects of the pandemic despite the supposed common experience, and how this impacts getting reviews done, how much people disclose, and the job of editors/chairs

10:25 Impacts: We discuss that reviewers, editors and authors all have impacts and the widening gap between junior and senior people and the temporal ripples of impacts.

17:25 Who has power to manage boundaries: We wonder about who is more able to say no to reviewing and how level of seniority can make a difference in how we manage work-life boundaries, and more particularly younger people trying to establish boundaries for the first time in the pandemic

23:00 Managing boundaries: We discuss the impacts of losing the office-home boundary with working from home and missing the commute and managing this.

28:35 Community issue: John talks about the challenges with reviews and reviewers as a community issue and we explore possible different ways of doing things, and a call to senior people here – a call to graciousness and generosity and how to foster that as a community on all sides and inviting senior people to step up more

39:35 Distributed work & video: We shift to discussing the experiences of distributed working from home in the pandemic, reflecting on his 30 years of research working on these topics. He talks about the challenges of supporting serendipitous interaction, reflecting on the old Media Space work, and on all the video conferencing experiences, not being surprised by the fatigue and loss of spontaneity findings from recent research, and surprised by how much we lose weak ties and the impacts of this, and by how smoothly we apparently have migrated to online and curious about what this global increase in video literacy will mean for the future, and the blurring of live and pre-recorded interaction, and the role of social acceptance.

55:15 Final thoughts: John reminds us how to think about it as a community problem and how to help each other and care for each other as a community.

58:31 End

Related Links

Web article about Microsoft’s upcoming virtual commute feature: How to create your own Microsoft Teams virtual commute, today.

A Microsoft story about the collection of wellbeing features being introduced to Microsoft productivity apps: New tools can help boost wellbeing and soothe unexpected stresses of working from home - Stories (microsoft.com)

eWorkLife Project and Anna Cox being interviewed about #FakeCommute

Media Space – example publication: https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/ENS/CSCW/2013/papers/Bly-mediaspaces-CACM93.pdf

John’s publications on video and distributed work: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=E4cMwQMAAAAJ

Acronyms

AC Associate Chair

CSCW Computer Supported Cooperative Work

HCI Human Computer Interaction

Transcript

Download the full transcript here - created with Temi.com - unedited

Aaron Quigley on silent warriors, secret powers, and making the world better

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 10:22:00 +0200

Aaron Quigley is a Professor and Head of School in Computer Science and Engineering at University of New South Wales. He discusses his various career moves that have brought him to the current position and the role of both strategic hindsight and foresight around choices. He talks about silent warriors in relation to mentoring and supervision, as well as peer service. And he talks about his three secret powers of not worrying who gets the credit, listening and talking, and how they play out in practice. As part of this we also hear about his approach to leadership, getting the best out of people, and making the world a better place.

Notable bites:

“That’s the thing about the Head of School job – it is to help others to achieve success and together we work towards greater success.”

“There are a lot of people out there who are the silent warriors, who are doing work that actually makes the world a better place but they don’t necessarily get the acclaim.”

“You can get a lot done in this world if you don’t care who gets the credit.“

“I think the things I can help set up and nurture and support will help make the world a better place in the long run.”

“World leading, world beating, or world building. Pick your poison and work in that way.”

“There is no handbook. Every head of school’s role is different. The handbook is - start building, start thinking, start looking, start documenting, start understanding, start meeting.”

“You have to know how to talk to your audience…You’ve got listen. You’ve got to look. And you’ve got to talk to them in way to keep them encouraged.”

“Success has many parents.”

Overview (times approximate):

02:00 Career path from degree in Computer Science to Head of School at UNSW

16:00 Making choices, strategic hindsight and foresight, and getting the right advice

22:55 The importance of silent warriors and service roles and his secret power of caring about getting things done and not caring about who gets the credit

34:15 His secret power of listening

37:55 Moving into his new role as Head of School

44:45 His secret power of talking

58:21 End

In more detail, he talks about…

02:00 Aaron talks about stumbling into computer science, and about computing being a global field and his various moves over his career – Dublin, Germany, California US, Japan (to teach English), Australia, Austen Texas, lecturing in Newcastle and PhD in Sydney Australia, Mitsubishi Research Labs Boston, travelling in Patagonia and Europe, post doc in Sydney Australia, Dublin Ireland, Tasmania Australia, St Andrews Scotland. 10 years in Scotland, never thought they would leave, but Brexit came along and then a global pandemic and now back in Australia at UNSW as head of school.

16:00 Aaron discusses the extent to which the moves were strategic, that there was always a long term strategy to get back to Australia and how he thinks there is strategic hindsight and strategic foresight. Foresighting activities are where he will go to round out his skill set.

18:30 Aaron talks about an example of unexpected re-connecting with people, using a recent Clubhouse experience as an example, and connecting to his three secret super skills. Your paths always interconnect.

22:30 Aaron talks about the value of seeking advice from the right people, and Bob Kummerfeld and Judy Kay being exemplary as supervisors in how they nurture the next generation, and being silent warriors

25:55 In relation to silent warriors, Aaron talks about he is very aware of this through his work as CHI general chair and his SIGCHI work writing blog posts about SIGCHI policies, and the importance of making policies for codifying decisions and guiding actions; talking in particular of all the people contributing for example to the CHI courses policy – three digits can include weeks of thinking by numerous people about why do we do that; and the balance of trying acknowledge all the people who contributed but also recognising the people trying to claim false credit.

29:45 Aaron discusses his ‘why’ for his various service roles, including lots of small things that are invisible. His secret secret secret power is: “I think you can get a lot done in this world if you don’t care who gets the credit.” (with a digression into the attribution of Henry Ford’s supposed famous quote)

34:15 Aaron talks about his second secret power being listening. He gives example of how he listens – listening in to podcasts and clubhouse sessions and learning from them. Looking for different ideas and making connections.

37:55 Aaron talks about when he started at UNSW, meeting with every single person and listening – what’s your passion, what’s driving you, tell me about…. He also used a tool that tracked proportion of talking and his goal was to only talk 20% of the time. He is looking for world leading, world beating, or world building and looking for people to convince him they are doing one of those three things and he will have their back. Listening to 55 people was exhausting.

41:10 Aaron started at UNSW 10 Aug, 400 page handbook – but a blank sheet of paper. “There is no handbook. Every head of school’s role is different. The handbook is start building, start thinking, start looking, start documenting, start understanding, start meeting.” He writes his own book, synthesising what he’s heard from colleagues (plus strategy work of the last 6 months)…. The next thing is present, listen … and the students have something to say as well, and the alumni, and international relations people and benefactors. Discusses John Lions – understated influence on the world (open source etc) and a distinguished lecture series starting 27 May.

44:45 Aaron talks about his secret power, talking… how he talks differently to different people. He talks about how he learnt this during his time as an English teacher in Japan and talking to different people there about or in English.

51:10 The icebreaking game, three truths and one lie (that GF fails badly at!)

54:15 Wrapping up. Talking about podcasts. And points to Vicki Hanson and the ACM Future of Computing Academy, the ACM ByteCast, and Clubhouse, and encouraging people to listen and learn. Listen and don’t wait to talk.

00:58:21 End

Misc:

UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering

CHI2021, SIGCHI

Clubhouse

ACM Future of Computing Academy, ACM Bytecast podcast

Event: In augural John Lyons Distinguished Lecture Series starting 27 May

Book: Richard N Bolles & Katherine Brookes, What color is your parachute

RW5 Finding the management sweet spot

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 05:54:00 +0200

I hadn’t thought before about the fact that under managing could be just as harmful if not more than micromanaging. Finding the sweet spot is my challenge moving forward. These reflections are triggered by an experience this last semester, where I realised in trying not to micro manage I hadn’t set up the team for success. The challenging part of this was learning to step back from pointing the finger at the ‘others’ and to ask how I was complicit in creating this situation as a manager and what I could learn from this to do differently next time.

“How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?” [Jerry Colonna]

Deci and Ryan (various) Self Determination Theory – mini theory of ‘Basic psychological needs’ -autonomy, competence, relatedness https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/theory/

Victor Lipman, 2018, Under-Management Is the Flip Side of Micromanagement — and It’s a Problem Too, Harvard Business Review, Nov 2018. https://hbr.org/2018/11/under-management-is-the-flip-side-of-micromanagement-and-its-a-problem-too

Don’t be a conflict avoider
View goal-setting as mission critical
Is this the absolute best work you can do [GF: not sure I agree with this last one]

Transcript

Automated transcript via Temi.com so may be some inaccuracies.

(00:05):

(00:25):

In this short podcast, I'd like to share some of my own reflections on trying to find that sweet spot between micro-managing and under managing. And this has been triggered by a particular experience in this last semester, brought to light, I think because of the circumstances of COVID and being remote. But before getting to there, it's useful for me to start back to when I first started being responsible for research projects and a bunch of researchers, and I inherited a large number of projects and people, and this was in the early two thousands. And I felt really out of my depth and really insecure. And I think, you know, the imposter syndrome would have, would be a definite definition for what was going on then. And I know that at times this led me to slip into micromanager mode, which isn't a very helpful mode to be in because it can really undermine the people that you're working with and good people. And there was a particular incident incidents where without going into details, the researchers should have walked away from a day of running a study, celebrating a great success. Yes, we could reflect on lessons learned and what we could take forward to our next study, but they actually had really done a great job. But they walked away feeling really de-motivated and deflated because of some of my unnecessary interventions that day, and this isn't the sort of leader that I want to be.

(02:08):

And I I'm grateful for people who've put up with me on my own learning journey that hopefully I have a much better sense now that it's not my role. I don't need to control, but I should enable and empower people. And that, especially in academia where we're working with really clever people, how can we trust people that we're working with and provide the enabling and supportive structures and create more of a learning mindset and making mistakes and learning experiences okay. But without feeling like you need to step in as the all-knowing expert. And this is underpinned by Deci and Ryan self-determination theory, and there are many theories part of that about basic psychological needs, which talks about how all of us want to experience autonomy and a sense of competence and a sense of relatedness. And micromanagement, it cuts down on all of those, I'm in micro-managing, I'm not giving people autonomy, I'm taking it away. And often unexpectedly. I'm questioning their competence by the way, the inappropriate way that I might step in. And it breaks our relationship because I'm not showing any trust or respect for them in their own learning journey. So I think that over time I've got much better at not micromanaging. I know that when there are times of stress, I may tend to step back into that again. But I think I have a little bit more self-awareness and recognized and step back.

(03:51):

But the experience of the last semester has raised the question for me about whether I might even be now under managing people or projects. And there's a paper that I'll put a link to by Victor Lee Littman from 2018, that talks about under management may be just as big a problem as micromanagement.

(04:15):

And what happened this semester? Again, I won't go into details, but we got to a situation where I found myself feeling quite cranky with some people, because I felt like why wasn't this stuff getting done? And don't they know that something's needed. And you know, so I, I was really reacting to a situation and there was a, you know, a sense of sort of blaming them for not being good enough or, and wondering whether I should be confronting the situation and say, look, what's going on. But I was reminded by something that a master coach, Jerry Colonna says a lot, which is ‘how have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want'. And that's a really powerful question because it puts a spot spotlight back onto me about what am I responsible for. And the complicit is not, it's still recognizing that others may have been able to act differently, make different choices, but what's my role in all of this in setting this up.

(05:31):

And what I realized was that I had just assumed a whole lot. I always remember my mother saying assume, never assume because it makes an ass out of you and an ass out of me. And that's certainly what I'd been doing. I thought that this was a situation that we'd been through before that people just knew what was needed and expected and by when, and we have any explicit discussion about it. So I actually didn't set people up for success. I wasn't enabling them. And as I think about it as well, there were very particular circumstances this semester, where they actually had quite a big pressures on them related to COVID in the situation where even if they may be, should have known or could have known there were other circumstances that they were trying to deal with us.

(06:27):

Well, so what this points to for me is what can I do next time? You know, how do I look forward? Not in terms of focusing on the problem like what's going on. So for the immediate step, we, we did have a discussion. I had been able to step back from the crankiness and blaming them in my head and could actually have a discussion and own up to the fact that I hadn't been very good at setting expectations on, you know, getting some shared understandings about what was needed when, and then we looked very practically at how we could move forward and get done what was needed. And what I've learned from this for future iterations that might be similar is the important need of finding that sweet spot, where I'm still enabling and respecting people's autonomy and competence and relatedness. But I'm also recognizing my own role as a manager and scaffolding that a little bit more and getting clarity because that's really where I can help empower them.

(07:41):

And it's not that I should step in and say, okay, this is what we need done by when I say, does everyone agree? We're all on the same page, great go forth. I can still do get to clarity and set, shared expectations in a way that empowers them. So I can say, what's your thoughts so far about what we need to do when, or who might be responsible for what, and set it up as a discussion where they can have real input and control over how we set up the plan for the, for the semester or the project or whatever it is, where we might agree, timelines, where we might agree responsibilities. And I can then sort of say, what do you need from me going forward to support you in this? And also making it very clear that there's open communication to come back and ask questions.

(08:33):

It may be appropriate to set up regular check-ins or communications. And I realized I'd got away with a lot of under management, probably over the years, because we'd been co located where I could do a lot of that, just dropping my, you know, dropping into someone's room and just doing a quick, check-in saying, how's it going? Or I had more visibility. Well, just because we're in the same physical space. And these are some of the things that we've lost or I've lost at least in being physically distance from people. So, you know, those more informal check-ins, you know, awareness stuff and, and just being able to sort of have visibility. But I think even when we do have our office spaces back again, and we can be hanging out together, it's a really good practice to think about how do I best scaffold and people and set, and projects and set them up for success. So that's my lesson that I take away from this last semester, trying to find the sweet spot between micro-managing and under managing that can empower people to take their own learning journey, but feeling like they're doing, they're doing it with support and with clarity, and that there's a shared understanding.

(10:00):

You can find the summary notes and related links for this podcast on www dot, changing academic life.com. You can also subscribe to changing academic life on iTunes, and now also on Stitcher. And you can follow change our life on Twitter. And if something connected with you, please consider sharing this podcast with your colleagues so that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently.

Acknowledgements:

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

Austen Rainer on changing cultures, leading people and values

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 03:27:00 +0200

Austen Rainer is a Professor at Queen’s University Belfast in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His main focus area is team-based software innovation for societal, economic and environmental impact. Austen and I also co-facilitate an academic leadership development course. We talk about lots of different topics, from the motivation for his various moves from the UK to New Zealand to Northern Ireland, and negotiating various cultural differences, to his experiences being an academic leader, what he has learnt, including about having difficult conversations, and the strong values that underpin all his work. We also touch upon his COVID lockdown experiences, both in teaching his team-based module and how well that worked, and the personal challenges negotiating boundaries and staying well in working from home.

“It can be easy to overlook the fact that people who come into a new job, it’s not just a new job, it’s a new country, a new culture, that there’s all sorts of challenges.”

“How do I navigate the way that you should lead in this particular culture and the way that you led in a previous culture may not be the way that fits with the current culture.

‘“There’s a whole range of really difficult but also interesting and rewarding challenges about how you relate to all these different people [academics, technical, professional staff as a leader]”

“If you are going to take on these [leadership] roles there will be difficult decisions, there will be tensions, there’s competing interests, there’s politics. … So difficult conversations happen.”

“The challenges don’t go away. Just because you handled something well in one situation it doesn’t …just naturally follow that you’ll handle it well in the next one because of the subtleties of personality and politics and the situation you are dealing with.”

“Care can be interpreted sometimes as interfering.”

Overview (times approximate - see full transcript at end):

02:00 Motivation for moves from the UK to New Zealand to Northern Ireland – exploring different cultures and being after a challenge.

07:20 The subtle cultural differences such as national cultures, academic cultures, and how software engineering is regarded.

11:35 The real diversity you can get within an academic school and a university, and the challenges of relocation.

13:25 Suggestions for things to help people with relocation and the ways that different cultural signals can even get in the way, making it uncertain as to how to navigate the challenges.

16:25 The challenges coming into a leadership position as a new person and the challenge of how to figure out how to lead in this particular culture.

17:30 The move into a role as head of department at Canterbury, building on other previous leadership roles at Hertfordshire, and discussing different kinds of leadership.

20:30 Lessons from moving into leadership roles, big L and little l leadership roles - how varied and different academics can be, as well as various professional and technical roles etc.

24:50 The difficult conversations that come with leadership. And always learning since situations are different.

30:00 Imposter syndrome, the masculine perspective, and the value of sense checking with other people.

34:00 How else he has learnt along the way: by going on courses and the difference between general professional environments vs academia; 360 degree assessments in conjunction with a coach or a mentor.

39:00 The values and strengths he brings – fairness, equality, respect, care, inclusiveness, analytic in wanting to understand the root of the issues, depth of thinking and reflection.

45:00 The team-based software engineering module for final year students and learning how valuable the right technologies are for doing this online during COVID experiences.

50:15 The COVID experience – rewarding for him as an introvert and also the challenges of managing the boundaries when working from home, dealing with dependents, the importance of nature and exercise, and cooking more.

54:00 What drives him as an academic – multidisciplinary challenges and team-based innovation

55:30 Key learnings from the last leadership development course

58:09 End

Related Links

Austen’s links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/austenrainer/?originalSubdomain=uk

https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/persons/austen-rainer

https://softwareinnovation.nz/austenrainer-chair2017/

Academic leadership development course – next course starting 11 March 2021 https://www.informatics-europe.org/services/academic-leadership.html

Atlassian ‘My user manual’ https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/my-user-manual

———Transcript———

Automated transcription via Temi.com – may well be inaccuracies!

Intro (00:05):

Welcome to changing academic life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick. And this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas and provoke discussions about what we can do individually and collectively to change academic life for the better.

Geri (00:29):

This first conversation for 2021 is with Austin Rainer. Austin is a professor at Queens university Belfast in the school of electronics, electrical engineering, and computer science. And his main focus area is team-based software innovation, the societal economic and environmental impact Austin. And I have the pleasure and the privilege of co-facilitating an academic leadership development course, and Austin is just such a great person to work with. And I'm keen to introduce you to him here, so you can get to know him too. We talk about lots of different topics from the motivation for his various moves from the UK to New Zealand, to Northern Ireland and negotiating the various cultural differences that you necessarily encounter. We also discuss his experiences being an academic leader, and what he's learned in including a discussion about the difficult conversations that you have to have. And through all this we also hear a very clear sense of the strong values that underpin all his work. We also touch upon the COVID lockdown experiences and impacts on teaching software engineering as teams for students and how well that worked and the personal challenges, negotiating boundaries, and staying well in working from home. So I really hope you enjoy this conversation with Austin Rainer.

Geri (02:01):

So I'm really excited to introduce everyone today to Austin Rainer, who has been and continues to be a great collaborator and friend. And we've been working on the academic leadership development course together, and we have another one coming up with it starting in March. So if people wanted to sign up, we'll put a link at the, on the webpage so you can follow through. And I just thought it would be useful just to have a chat with you Austin, and introduce you to people a little bit more. So thank you for getting up so early in your morning.

Geri (02:43):

Oh, you're very welcome. Thank you for having me today. I'm very much enjoying working with you. I just, you're a software engineer through and through. And in that you did your PhD in software and that's been your sort of focus and research area ever since. And I noticed actually that we got our PhDs in the same year in 1998. Yeah, I hadn't noticed that before, but what, what I'm really interested in is you, you were at Hartford CIF for a long time after your PhD at moving through various positions, and then you moved to New Zealand and now you're back in Belfast in Northern Ireland. So I'm just curious about what were some of those transitions about what was some of the things?

Austen (03:39):

So what I intended the motivation. Yeah. yeah, gosh, sort of large question in a way. I mean, sure. Like some of it's some of it's challenge that different roles as I progress through Hertfordshire and then over to New Zealand and then Northern Ireland are professional opportunities in the professional challenge and opportunities for growth that comes with that. But for me also, I mean, you know, Geri, you and I will know about this, we've talked about the whole work-life balance thing, but for, for lots of these decisions, sure. Some of the decisions were professional decisions in terms of career and kind of professional opportunity. But for me, for many of these decisions were also if you like a work-life balance decision in the sense of what's the implications for my wife and my children and my family overall. So it's a combination of things.

Geri (04:35):

Can you unpack that a little bit more?

Austen (04:40):

Yeah, sure. My, my pause is I may unpack in a different direction to what you'd like me to

Geri (04:47):

Anywhere anywhere you want to take it. There's no, no agenda here.

Austen (04:52):

Yeah. I mean, I New Zealand obviously was a big move. If you see what I mean, and people asked me before I went, you know, that's a kind of long way to go. And, and I was like, well, I'm after a challenge, you know? And it's like, well, you know, that's a big challenge to emigrate a long way. I mean, I, I realized as well, Geri you've, you've done your fair share of M immigration and immigration. So some of it goes back to my roots as well. My, my parents lived in Africa for 14 years. And so I've spent a lot of time when I was younger traveling and moving around. So some of it was around wanting to explore cultural differences both academically in terms of how a different department and university did things. And one of the things I found really interesting about Canterbury and New Zealand is the emphasis they place on engineering broadly within, within if you like society and industry.

Austen (05:47):

I think it may well be the case in Australia as well, that the sort of status of engineers and engineering is in some senses, much more highly regarded than maybe it is in the UK. This is a course or relative. But also the emphasis they put on software engineering and New Zealand as being you know, it's something that's professionally accredited. So if you graduate with an engineering degree in New Zealand, and once you have sufficient professional experience, then you will recognize this as a certified engineer. And I thought that was particularly interesting in contrast to the kind of perspective taken in the UK where software engineering much more sits within a sort of computer science kind of discipline and perspective. So, I mean, that, wasn't the only thing, but when you're kind of asking about unpacking it a bit, it was looking at this fact that there was a very different perspective and culture academically, and then also in terms of where software engineering sort of fit within things. And we were after a challenge and it was a kind of good time in terms of the age of the children and you know, let's go for it. So that's,

Geri (06:53):

And you couldn't have moved much farther good shake.

Austen (06:57):

Well, indeed. Aye, aye, aye, aye. Joke with people I went about as far as you could go and still be in a civilized sort of, I mean, Dunedin is a little bit further, but you know, we're talking about a few hundred kilometers, which isn't yeah. But it was a, it's a long way away and a long way to go.

Geri (07:13):

Mm. So other cultural differences that you noticed, you know, I don't know, in faculty culture or, you know, other, other aspects that were interesting or surprising. Yeah,

Austen (07:29):

Yeah, yeah. New Zealand is. Well, I mean, part of my pause is that it's w w what was very interesting is actually how subtly different cultures can be when you think on the surface, that they're very similar in that. I mean, one of the things we were thinking about New Zealand is, is a Western culture, if you like. So I mean, my you know, my parents spent a long time in Africa and my eldest brother has been in China and Hong Kong for a long time. And I use those as examples because on the face of it, you would think they would be very different cultures are very different languages and very different ways of doing things. And then what, what I found very interesting is sure New Zealand is a Western culture is a first-world country, et cetera. And then there are subtle differences in the, the kind of national culture, if you like.

Austen (08:18):

And then also you find, I think, differences in the way that a particular university or the university sector approaches things. I think yeah, I I'm, I, my, my pause is to think through some of the, I mean, as I mentioned already, the, the, the, the way they position engineering and software engineering, I found very interesting. We, where there are with where I am in here at Belfast Queens university, it's very interesting to compare the, the kind of cultures, the academic cultures which I think here is probably in a sense, more hierarchical. But part of the reason I pause is you know, you can talk about a sort of national culture and then a particular university, but then even within a university, you will find very different cultures, even within the same academic school, if the school is large enough.

Austen (09:12):

And, and part of my pause is, is taught to be one, goes into the detail, but I think it's very interesting to reflect on, on working in New Zealand and he even here working in Northern Ireland, and then I reflect back on working in Hertfordshire, which is the particular group of people that you might be working with within a department that can have, you know, positive or negative effects, but that might be quite a different experience to something else that's happening in the very same academic school, you know, because it is about the particular kind of people you're working with and the way they approach. Yeah. So really good question. How to summarize it.

Geri (09:54):

Yes. Yes. Cause you make a, you're reminding me that. Yeah. Have you, as you said, having moved around myself that sometimes you think that just because you're speaking extensively the same language, and of course they're even language differences in the way people speak English, there are lots of subtle cultural differences. And I know that sometimes when I was in Sussex, I would have to go, Oh, was I just being Australian? Because I realized I had said something in a particular yeah. And the thing about cultures being different.

Austen (10:24):

Yes. Sorry. I was just going to respond to your comment on language, which is I was just joking with the colleague on email who was in New Zealand. He was asking me to provide some information from when I was there, which is like, you know,...

RW4 Rejection, tenure and so-called excellence

Thu, 11 Feb 2021 04:52:00 +0200

In this short related-work podcast, I share the stories of two people we’ll call Alex and Blake who are facing the challenge of meeting tenure criteria. From this I reflect on the personal, professional and societal impacts entailed in this push for so-called excellence. I then discuss two different papers that point in different ways to the need for institutional and cultural level response and present ideas for practical actions – for how we can address academic rejection and what it means to focus on soundness and capacity instead of excellence. As Moore et al state, excellence is not excellent and in fact is at odds with qualities of good research.

[Note: anonymised stories have been told with the permissions of ‘Alex’ and ‘Blake’]

Related Work:

Allen et al, Journal papers, grants, jobs … as rejections pile up, it’s not enough to tell academics to ‘suck it up, The Conversation, February 3 2021. https://theconversation.com/journal-papers-grants-jobs-as-rejections-pile-up-its-not-enough-to-tell-academics-to-suck-it-up-153886

Allen, Kelly-Ann; Donoghue, Gregory M; Pahlevansharif, Saeed; Jimerson, Shane R.; and Hattie, John A.C., Addressing academic rejection: Recommendations for reform, Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 17(5), 2020. Available at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol17/iss5/19

Moore, S., Neylon, C., Paul Eve, M. et al. “Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence. Palgrave Commun 3, 16105 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.105

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/03/donna-strickland-nobel-physics-prize-wikipedia-denied

Geraldine Fitzpatrick, 2017, ‘ The craziness of research funding. It costs us all’. , TEDx TUWien https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66_DRDYJz4g&list=PLq-OfvAJu5UZtNcBLLwsgmDRPbkARew6G&index=6

TRANSCRIPT: CAL Related Work 4

(00:26):

Reflections for this week are triggered by two interactions I had recently that highlighted for me the significant human impact of our so-called drive for excellence in academia and especially so for people who don't have traditional career paths or tend to do more cross-disciplinary work. Both of the people that I'm talking about are postdoc people in tenure track positions or tenured positions at two different universities in very different countries, not the UK or the US and I'm going to call them Alex and Blake.

(01:05):

So for Alex's story, Alex moved countries a couple of years ago to take up their first full-time faculty position at a university in a, in a, we can call it an Eastern European country. And this was after a long number of years on precarious short term projects with European funding. And a lot of that funding was about conducting more near to market research and involving industry partners.

(01:32):

So it wasn't always conducive to very deep, theoretical, journal papers, if you like. And so they were really excited to finally get a position that was full time in a faculty position and with the longer term output and where they could really shape their own research identity. We had a call last week as Alex was really anxious about their future prospects and wanted to talk it through. And let me tell you that Alex does really great work at the intersection of design and technology. They take a very participatory approach to their research and invite invite participants, or you might call them stakeholders or target audience to engage with them as co-design partners. So there's lots of hands on making and design and deploying technologies often with, within an activist agenda. And they really care deeply about this work and the values underpinning it. And the, the outputs of their research do tend to end up in highly ranked conferences in our field. And Alex also has a long list of international collaborators and co-authors, and they've also had some really excellent local public exhibitions and local community impacts as well. And if public engagement and impact were assessment criteria, they would definitely score really highly.

(02:55):

Alex is also really active in their peer community involved organizing workshops, being part of committees, addressing issues like equity and access. Alex also talks about loving teaching and working with students and the PhD students that they have in particular, and from all accounts, they really love Alex too. And Alex's immediate line manager also loves them and says that he's really happy with their work and loves what they're doing on all these fronts. However, this particular unit is really intent on trying to increase their research profile worldwide.

(03:35):

And this has some serious implications for Alex because even though the head of department is really happy, he also tells Alex that they still have to meet the centrally set university requirements for tenure. And that those requirements are three journal papers a year for every year in a top rated journal. And that top rated journal is, is top rated, according to a designated list produced by the university. And that's a huge ask for anybody. And what's particularly challenging for Alex is that the journals reflect the mainstream of the disciplinary area of the department, but Alex's work is very cross-disciplinary. So none of the journals in the list are ones that they would want to publish in or engage with as a peer community and the conferences and journals that they do currently publish in are not in the list, even though they're venues that are highly valued and rated within our peer community. And that whole issue of getting publications is further complicated if you like by Alex's personal commitment to trying to have a life and managing work so that they're not working 80 hours a week.

(04:57):

So Alex has put in enormous amounts of time so far into setting up all their new teaching, which we know takes a lot of effort and also in trying to get grants. Yeah, now that they're in this tenure position, and of course grants are also a criteria for tenure, but we know that the success rates for these grants are often in the single digits. And none of the proposals that Alex has been involved with so far in the last couple of years have been successful. And Alex still says, though, that they have learned a lot from doing these, and they've also helped to develop their networks, but it has meant no money. And so that's meant a lot of time talking about research and writing research plans, but not actually getting to do the research. And that means not actually having content that can form the basis of journal white papers and more over at single authored journal papers that are particularly valued in the criteria used by the so not even collaborative papers.

(06:02):

Now, it was fascinating as well as heartbreaking to watch Alex talk about their work over zoom. And when they talked about their research and their students and their teaching, and you could see and feel the energy, Alex sat up tall, their face was led up, and then they talked about their fears around not meeting tenure criteria, and then what it would take for them to even try to meet the criteria. And this would mean forcing themselves to write a paper for an audience they didn't particularly care about, or even particularly know well about work. That wouldn't actually be what they really wanted to do to get into the journal. And I just watched their body slump. I could see the anxiety in Alex's face. And as I said, it just really did break my heart. It felt like Alex was weighing up whether to sell their soul for the promise of a career in a tenured position or not.

(07:03):

And even then they were saying how getting tenure is no guarantee in their system, because they would still have to pass yearly evaluations, post tenure with similar output requirements and that they could be fired at any time. And so Alex was wanting to explore whether they should play the game or how, how should they play the game? And I know this isn't a new story. It could be the story of so many people who are caught up in our crazy academic system. And it's not my place either to give advice because Alex is the expert in their own life and own context, but we chatted about how other people who we both knew might respond differently because they're very different researchers. They had different career paths and different career ambitions and people that we also thought about might actually fit into that mainstream disciplinary mold to be happy to publish in those venues. But that wasn't Alex.

(08:05):

We also talked about what was important to them in their own work and, and connecting to what their values were and what strengths they brought to this work and what impact they really wanted to have. And that was an interesting conversation as well, because it, it connected more to what mattered and it helped to also open up what other options might be available that still connected to those things, to their values and strengths and what was important. So this is still something that Alex is going away to consider, but they're, they're really big questions to consider with big implications.

(08:46):

And so Blake, my second interaction from recently is in a very different type of university, one that considers itself already a top ranked one. Blake also moved countries like Alex to take up this position as a senior lecturer. And there were selected for this position precisely because of the great experience they brought from previous academic positions at well-regarded institutions in Europe as well as doing two startups in very cutting edge technology areas. And like Alex, Blake is also very active in their peer community, sitting on steering committees and advisory groups and, and has even been recognized as a senior member of the ACM.

(09:36):

However, because of their non-traditional career path, they understandably also have a lower H-index that might be then might be expected. And publications and grants though are going to become really important for their tenure review. Which is why this week they were feeling really, really down because they just had a grant application rejected and the system didn't allow them to respond in a way that drew out factual and process errors made by the reviewers.

(10:10):

And they're really frustrated by what they see as a system that seems to be stacked against younger researchers and researchers like themselves with non-standard paths. And the game to play in this particular system in this particular country is often having someone more senior with them with a strong track record and a good H-index as a co-investigator, but this wasn't even enough. And one reviewer said that, and to quote, that, that 'it would give more confidence if this more senior level person was the lead investigator'. And Blake was talking about how this just perpetuates the hopeless situation with funding and that it means that funding ends up being held by a very small minority of male professors. It becomes a real chicken and egg problem. And the other frustrating part that they drew attention to was that it took over a year from submission to get to this sort of final decision.

(11:13):

Getting this grant would have been so important for their tenure case and for providing research on which they could get publications to try to increase their H-index. And they're really worried now that they won't have enough when it comes to their tenure review. And even though the rhetoric of their uni says that they take account of non-standard paths, Blake knows from what they've seen, that this rarely plays out in practice. Just a quote from an email, they said that, 'it's quite amazing that heads of schools and tenure committees with bright people can't see that a non-standard equates to a lower than expected H-index'.

(11:58):

So just in the same way that the rhetoric of the grant scheme says that anyone can be successful. But this isn't the case, unless you have a very experienced PI. And I know that I've seen the same in promotion committees as well, where the policies state that research and teaching and service are all valued in different ways. But, you know, we know in practice that often research ends up being everything. And we also know that this often also plays out in very gendered ways, but that's a topic for another day.

(12:31):

So the stories of Alex and Blake are common. I know, and not just for people with non-standard career paths or doing cross-disciplinary research, that doesn't fit into a nice little box for both of them and for too many others in similar situations though, there's a huge personal cost in terms of stress and anxiety in having your confidence shattered in questioning yourself. And there's a huge cost for society in missing, out on the contributions from their work and what they can offer. They're good people, they do good work. And the craziness of these systems is also brought into sharp relief with stories like that of, I don't know if you remember from a few years ago, Donna Strickland, a Nobel prize winner, whose Wikipedia entry had been rejected by the moderator just a couple of months beforehand as not doing significant enough research. So we know that these harsh judgements are made at all levels .But as I said, it's society and science that are also missing out in really big ways. These are clever people who have enormous amounts to offer for advancing science and having real societal impact, but the systems in place require them to divert all their energies towards playing publication or grant getting games with success odds that are really hugely stacked against them. I talked about the craziness of research funding in a TEDx talk some years ago. Not that I actually got to any sort of real solutions.

(14:08):

And we also know that one of the other implications is the lack of diversity that we end up with. And we know that diversity is really important for healthy ecosystems. And this is also the case for academia. We need people who sit within disciplines, of course, but we also need people who sit across disciplines. We need people who have non-standard career paths. Interestingly, there was a Conversation's article last week by, someone called Kelly-Ann Allen and colleagues, and I'll link to this on the webpage. And they talking about a journal article that they had written where they drew attention to this toxic culture of evaluation and rejection. And the point of that, their stance is that it's not enough to tell academics to suck it up.

(14:55):

And they point to the adverse impacts of loss of great opportunity for learning and development and how these processes contribute to excessive workload and to really negative mental health and well-being consequences. And we know too that academics do have much lower levels of mental health and wellbeing compared to the general population and indeed to many other high stress professions. So that's a real issue. So Allen et al argue instead for systemic and institutional response to reduce the toxicity of this sort of culture. And they lay out various suggestions that include, you know, making success criteria clear, providing opportunities for feedback and mentoring and support having pre submission reviews and so on. And we could also add here making sure that stated policies are not just rhetoric, but making sure we hold reviewers and evaluators accountable to these policies. And the second set of suggestions is around trying to improve the timeliness of the process, for example, encouraging editors to do more desk rejects so that people have quicker turnarounds and can iterate and resubmit. And they also discuss things like forwarding on prior reviews with resubmissions to different venues here. We could also add things like, you know, having more agile grant review processes and maybe multi-stage processes that are starting to happen in some places. And the third set of suggestions goes towards looking after the mental health and a big step to this is not just recognising wins, but recognising effort and performance. Like what are the things that are within people's control and celebrating these.

(16:40):

That this toxic culture exists in the first place, though, it can be seen as part of the broader what many people are talking about is neoliberal agendas that so many of our universities are signing up to. Um, and the related push around that so-called excellence and every university is trying to be excellent in all sorts of ways. And excellence is used as the justification for having criteria like these journal outputs and so on for tenure.

(17:17):

And this reminds me, you have a great article journal article from 2017 by Moore et al called 'Excellence, R us: university research and the fetishization of excellence'. And it does a lovely job of unpacking the rhetoric of excellence and argues in the end that it doesn't actually have any intrinsic meaning, certainly not across disciplines and often not even within disciplines. And the article then goes on to posit that excellent serves maybe as a linguistic interchange mechanism, but that when it combines with narratives of scarcity and competition, it creates this hyper competition scenario that they argue is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. And they argue instead from an alternative rhetoric based on soundness and capacity building. One of the proposals that they have that I'd love to see happening is giving everyone some sort of base level of funding. And of course, having scope in the system to give some people more based on outputs, but let's just fund everyone able to do research in some way and have a mechanism that looks at what was the outputs of that funding in order to fund future research.

(18:39):

And I love their final conclusion is about excellence not being excellent and that a cultural problem needs a cultural solution similar to the other paper about needing an organizational institutional response. And I know though that changes like this cultural level changes always take a long, long time to happen. And they're very complicated. So what can we do in

RW3 Notice, appreciate, thank - a good contagion!

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 01:43:00 +0200

In this short Related Work podcast, I talk about the importance of noticing people, showing appreciation and saying thanks. Small actions can have a big impact, for them and you. And it can be contagious - a good contagion!

Related Work:

Grant, A. M., & Gino, F. (2010). A little thanks goes a long way: Explaining why gratitude expressions motivate prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(6), 946–955. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017935

Roberts, K. et al. 2020. The Little Things That Make Employees Feel Appreciated, HBR https://hbr.org/2020/01/the-little-things-that-make-employees-feel-appreciated

Fradera, A. 2017. Small acts of kindness at work benefit the giver, the receiver and the whole organization. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/07/04/small-acts-of-kindness-at-work-benefit-the-giver-the-receiver-and-the-whole-organisation/ (on Chancellor et al, 2018)

Ackerman, C. 2020. 28 Benefits of Gratitude & Most Significant Research Findings https://positivepsychology.com/benefits-gratitude-research-questions/

Fessler, L. 2017. Adam Grant recommends the best holiday gift managers can give employees. Quartz at Work. https://qz.com/work/1143760/adam-grant-says-gratitude-is-the-best-holiday-gift-managers-can-give-their-employees/

TRANSCRIPT: CAL Related Work 3

00:25:

So welcome again. Just a little bit of housekeeping to begin with. Apologies for the, uh, confusions in trying to get these related works up onto iTunes or out to podcast feeds. Um, it just took us a while to work out how Squarespace, how we set up a new page on Squarespace for the related work podcasts and how that interacts with iTunes. Uh, if only I had a PhD in computer science, oh dear! And I also just wanted to report on my being bold as my theme for the year. And it was just interesting. I had two occasions last week, where my gut reaction was to say, Oh, I couldn't do that. In the sense of sort of being a little bit daunted or am I really the right person? And then I reminded myself that this was supposed to be my year of being bold. And so I stepped up and said, yes, and they were things that I did want to do. Good things to say yes to. And part of that was also just accepting. It might not all work out perfectly. And it made me realise that that may be what holds me back from being bold sometimes But they'll both be fun to try and I'll learn a lot, either way, however, it works out. So there you go.