Changing Academic Life

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. Related Links:The twitter thread started by Lewis Chuang:Aaron Quigley podcast conversation Mike Twidale podcast conversation Acknowledgement: Photo of power pose by Miguel Bruna on UnsplashRelated 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 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 Transcript00:30 Preamble and introduction05:10 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/chairs10:25 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 pandemic23:00 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 more39:35 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 EndRelated LinksWeb 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 #FakeCommuteMedia 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 AcronymsAC Associate ChairCSCW Computer Supported Cooperative WorkHCI Human Computer InteractionTranscript Download the full transcript here - created with Temi.com - unedited

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 UNSW16:00 Making choices, strategic hindsight and foresight, and getting the right advice22:55 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 credit34:15 His secret power of listening37:55 Moving into his new role as Head of School44:45 His secret power of talking58:21 EndIn 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 warriors25:55 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 EndRelated Links People: Aaron Quigley, Paddy Nixon, Joe Marks, Judy Kay, Bob Kummerfeld, Patrick Baudisch, Albrecht Schmidt, John Lions, Vicki Hanson Misc: UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering CHI2021, SIGCHIClubhouse 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

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]Related Work: Jerry Colonna https://www.reboot.io/team/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 avoiderView goal-setting as mission criticalIs this the absolute best work you can do [GF: not sure I agree with this last one]TranscriptAutomated transcript via Temi.com so may be some inaccuracies. (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.(00:25):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 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 innovation55:30 Key learnings from the last leadership development course 58:09 EndRelated LinksAusten’s links:https://www.linkedin.com/in/austenrainer/?originalSubdomain=ukhttps://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.htmlAtlassian ‘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 toGeri (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,...

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

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/a0017935Roberts, 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 300:25: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.01:45And now for the topic of this week, which is, I just want to talk about the power of actually telling someone what you appreciate about them or what you want to thank them for what you're grateful for. And I can just start off with a personal anecdote because just this last week, it wasn't such an easy week for me. There was a particular situation at work that came up and a personal situation with a friend of mine who was, had just been told that her sickness was terminal.02:16And, so it was a bit of a tough week, but the week ended on a lovely high because I ended up getting some unsolicited student feedback. One was directly via email from the student and another was indirectly far another colleague who shared the content of a Slack exchange that they'd had with the student. And they shared it clearly with the student's permission. And it was just really lovely, detailed, very specific feedback about what they'd appreciated in the semester just gone. And that just meant the world to me. And reading it just made me smile. I felt warm. I felt good. I felt proud of the work that I'd done in the semester. Even though it was hard. It was hard work. And it certainly made all that work that I've put into the teaching feel like it was worth it. And it was interesting as well because the person who was the, who shared the feedback via the Slack chat, I could also tell that they were feeling good about being able to pass that on and share it because they knew I would feel good.03:29And I was reminded about another situation that happened about, I think it was about end of last November and out of the blue, I got a text on my phone from someone who used to work in our group doing research, and they were saying, Oh, I've been looking to tell you some news. And, you know, I started reading this and I thought it was going to be something about a new job or some family news. And so what they wanted to tell me about was that they were starting a master's degree and it was in a complementary area to their main research topic. And it was going to support them in helping to shape their research and career in a slightly different way, moving forward and are very excited about it. And they discussed it a little bit in the text. So I'm reading through this long text and thinking, Oh, that's great all well and fine.04:14And then totally unexpectedly, they added: 'And today I answered an exercise about role models and I wrote about you' and they proceeded to paste what they had written for me to read. I'm not going to read it out here. But what I can say is that I was deeply, deeply touched and it genuinely brought some tears to my eyes. And so I told them that I was deeply touched as well and thanked them for it. And they responded: 'I thought that instead of making a pointless exercise on role models, I would let you know that everyone notices what you do for all.' And it not only made me feel good, but it also seemed like it made them feel really good because they were able to share this with me. And it makes me so grateful for all of these people that they took the time and put in the effort to give specific feedback. And it reminded me that that's something that I want to be doing more of as well for the people around me.05:21And I want to pick up on a last word from that text exchange, which was the word - 'notices'. We all Want to be seen and recognised in some way, and to be acknowledged for what we do, what we bring, who we are. And I think this is particularly important in academia. I mean, it's important for everyone, of course, but particularly important in academia when so much of our formal acknowledgements are from, you know, the grand gestures of paper acceptances or grant successes. And, we know the low rate of these, and we also know that we get a lot of emphasis put on these performance metrics and outcomes, and we often define our own self-worth in these ways as well. And so being acknowledged just for who you are, how you do things, qualities that you bring, you know, people seeing the effort that you put in, not just focusing on the outcomes becomes really, really important.06:22And this is increasingly being recognised in the research literature, getting onto our related work. So there's the importance of acknowledgement in business. Corporate context is, is increasingly being discussed in the literature and leaders in particular. We often take for granted that people know we appreciate them but how do people know we appreciate them if we don't tell them .Then there's a link to an article I'm going to put in that that has a headline that says or that states in it that 'managers consistently underestimate how important it is to show their employees that they're valued. '07:04And this isn't just for managers and leaders too, to show recognition or acknowledgement, or, or to say things, but we can do this for one another, for all of our colleagues, to anyone, acknowledge the difference, the unique difference that they make to us. And that can be our people that we share office with, or who bring us a cup of coffee, or who just make the day a better day or the cleaner who empties your bin. You know, when we, whenever we get back to the office to have a bin that can be emptied. To anybody, to our line managers to say thanks.07:40And there is a lot of research about this, and I'm not going to get into, there are some conceptual debates about what's the definitions of gratitude and what's the difference between gratitude and appreciation and so on and so on. And you can find some of this work in a lot of positive psychology literature that talks about gratitude and appreciation and gratitude interventions, where people deliberately pay attention to the things that they can be grateful for, and also tell people. One set of interventions that have been consistently shown to have positive benefits. There's a whole lot of work in the social psychology literature. Again, they often talk about pro-social behaviours. The organisational leadership literature talks about the importance of recognition and recognising what is it about people or what they've just done, or how they've engaged with the task that makes you grateful for.08:38And I think that regardless of the research-based definitions and the conceptual arguments, it breaks down more practically for me. So there's the thing of feeling the gratitude and, and, you know, your own seeing and, and recognising in your own head what's going on and where someone may be doing something that you really appreciate taking the time to reflect on what it is about, what they're doing that you appreciate. And even just doing this, the literature says has benefits for you as an individual. That, that act of orienting yourself to be more attentive to what you can be grateful for.09:24But the real power comes from the other-focused action arising out of that feeling of gratitude and the reflecting on what's going on. And that's when we actually show appreciation, show that person the appreciation when we actually say thanks, when we give specific and detailed feedback and comments, when we draw our attention to what we appreciate, and this is where we can particularly focus, not on outcomes, you know, not just, yeah, congratulations on getting that paper submitted, but I really recognise how much time and effort that took for you to systematically work through. And I can see what you've learned. Or whatever it is, like give some very specific detail feedback.10:10And this is valuable because across all of the literature, it points to benefits like increased sense of social belonging and connection. Promoting increased pride in helping people be proud in their work, recognising their social worth. In giving attention to the details and telling them what exactly, we can help them come to recognise and value their own strengths that people often take for granted. Because if you've got a strength, you think that everyone can just do it. And you don't realise that what you do is maybe special in the way that you do it. There's a whole lot of personal, emotional and physical health and wellbeing benefits that have been recorded, not just for the receiver, but for the giver. And interestingly, in some of the studies, for example, about writing gratitude letters to someone and reading them out to them, there actually have been more long lasting effects for the giver than the receiver. In the business context, there's literature that talks about increased job satisfaction, increased engagement, increased productivity. Now, of course, we're not going to do this as managers just to increase productivity, are we, but it is a nice side effect. And another great side effect is that these everyday small actions of saying thanks, showing gratitude, appreciation, they're contagious. So there are many studies that point to the ways in which receivers pay forward with similar actions of their own and other studies that also point to not just the direct recipients of the thanks or the appreciation, but even observers others, not directly involved being impacted and increasing their own behaviours in these ways. So this is one very real practical way that we can start bringing about, um, culture change.12:13So there's really no downside to saying thanks, to letting someone know what we appreciate. And it's one of those things that's really, really small action. It can take a couple of extra seconds to not just say thanks, but to say, thanks in a very specific and detailed way, small actions, big, big impact. Hey, can you thank today? How can you build this into your everyday practices? How can I build this into my everyday practices? I know that some people do things like, have a have a ritual of taking a bit of time every Friday afternoon, just to write a handwritten note, to think about who in particular this week they want to thank and write a handwritten note or send an email or someone who will start yet. I've heard of other people who start their day in the first five minutes of their day are just taking, taking some time to think about who to thank and sending them a quick email or having a quick chat. So let's be quick to, thanks quick to recognise, appreciate and say, thanks a little bit can go a long way. And in these times that are really challenging and difficult. These small boosts can make all the difference.00:14:14 EndAcknowledgements:Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash (card and pen)Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash (blackoard)

In this bite-sized Related Work podcast, I reflect on how these stressful times can be a catalyst for growth and change, moving on from bouncing back (resilience) to bouncing forward. I connect to literature on resilience and post traumatic growth and theories around ‘tend and befriend’ to point to the choices we can make in how we interpret and respond to the current challenges. Related work:Tedeschi, R., & Calhoun, L. (2004). Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 15, 1-18. https://sites.uncc.edu/ptgi/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2013/01/PTG-Conceptual-Foundtns.pdfTaylor, S. (2006). Tend and Befriend. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15, 273 - 277.https://taylorlab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2014/10/2006_Tend-and-Befriend_Biobehavioral-Bases-of-Affiliation-Under-Stress.pdfSteve Taylor. The Coronavirus and Post-Traumatic Growth, Scientific American, April 19 2020https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-coronavirus-and-post-traumatic-growth/Transcript CAL Related Work 2 (with some editing)Jan 17 2021 [16:57 mins]One of the unexpected pleasures for me this year was not having any travel and having weekends at home where was being able to catch up on some reading. And one of the books that's been on my list forever is a book called Man's Search for Meaning. It was published in 1946 by Victor Frankel, who's an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher author, and what he talks about here, Holocaust survivor. He reports in this book about his experiences in the concentration camp, and they're really quite harrowing and horrific, and also amazingly uplifting at the same time. And just to read a quote from the book, he talks about “Everything can be taken from a man, but one thing,- the last of the human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances to choose one's way. And there were always choices to make.” He says, talking about his own experiences in the concentration camp, and it also says somewhere else later on “when we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves”.I mention this because as I record this, we're in the middle of January and many, many countries are in the middle of escalating numbers of cases and deaths with the COVID-19 pandemic, and dealing with ongoing restrictions in terms of lockdowns. And this is certainly the case in Austria, Vienna, where my home is located even though I’m not there are the moment, and where Frankel's home was located. So I was really surprised last week when I checked in with the students in my master's class over zoom, about how they were going. And I did the same thing with the people in my group at the beginning of our group meeting last week. And I just asked for everyone to give a, give a thumbs up or thumbs down or whatever.What was so surprising to me was that the majority of people gave a thumbs up and this is in the middle of all this hardship and difficulty they gave a thumbs up! A couple gave us a sort of ‘so, so, so’ thumb, but I didn't see anyone with a thumb down. I remember asking similar questions some months ago, same groups, and it was quite a different response. I find this really fascinating because I know that while everyone wouldn't necessarily answer the same, it's interesting that in some ways the external situation seems to be so much worse than a few months ago. Yet somehow in the middle of all this, despite the uncertainties and increasingly ongoing difficulties and challenges and stress, it seems like some people are somehow working out how to adapt and get on.This starts to reflect I think what Frankl was talking to, that there are things in situations that we can control, that there can be choices, where we do have some agency in how we interpret and respond to it. I know it's a complex issue and there are lots of factors going on and people, various people have very different experiences as well. And tomorrow the answer to those questions may be quite different. But nonetheless, it seems to reflect a trend.I also see this connecting to the idea of resilience that the literature talks about – where resilience is this capacity to bounce back from adversity or stress. And that seems to be what's happening here.I think in other conversations, I'm also hearing hints that for a lot of people, it's not just bouncing back, but they're actually finding that some good coming from it, despite the circumstances.Now, of course it would be much nicer to have the good come from it, to have the lessons learned, without the pain of having to go through all this and without the stress and challenges. But at the same time, it is these stress and challenges that have somehow become of being able to be used as a stimulus for positive change and growth.There’s a concept in the literature that's called post-traumatic growth. This was first named as such by Tadeschi and Calhoun in 2004. They talk about post-traumatic growth as a positive change that is experienced as a result of struggle, struggling with really highly challenging, difficult situations.Now, this is often talked about in terms of very serious traumatic situations, such as war experiences and end indeed Viktor Frankl’s story is a classic example of what we could post hoc label as post-traumatic growth. It goes back to what Frankl said about making choices and control. I know there's some debate in the literature around the concept of posttraumatic growth and the extent to which it's a real phenomenon in that it’s only ever been identified in terms of self reports and self-perceptions of growth. So it's unclear to what extent there may be real growth, but nonetheless, there is certainly a trend in the reporting of self perceptions of growth by many people.The common pattern in what's reported by people in the studies are things like developing deeper relationships, becoming much more open to new possibilities, having a greater sense of your own personal strengths and how you might use those strengths more, having a stronger sense of spirituality in the sense of existentialism, meaning in life and, spiritual belief. And also just fundamentally a really much greater appreciation of life. I know from my own experience and from talking to others - and I know my experience has been much easier compared to many others in other countries - I can see similar things about appreciating more what's important and getting different senses of perspective and priorities. I know that these circumstances over the last year have really helped me slow down and it's been a circuit breaker for some of the choices that I was not making all choices that I was making by default, just by rocking along that I'm going to be much more reflective about that. And I hear that from other people as well about finding out what's important and connecting to themselves and to others and in new ways.So how do we get on this growth path?One of the first things is actually facing the pain. In fact, that's really critically important. Our first tendency though, might be like, wanting to run away or avoiding thinking about it, or really negatively ruminating on it over and over again, or trying to brush off the stress and ignore it or withdrawing and isolating ourselves or playing out inappropriate, emotional responses, getting angry or blaming others… various maladaptive coping strategies.A much more adaptive response though, is to face it, really genuinely recognising for yourself that these are difficult times and that that's where you're at right now. This also connects to some of the self-compassion research we can talk about at another time. So acknowledging for ourselves that these are really rough times, and sometimes we just need to stay with that stress and in the feeling and allowing ourselves also to grieve, but with a greater awareness and acceptance of what's going on there and, and also a curiosity to explore it. And then moving on from that to the next step involves quite deliberate reflection and attention to really think about those experience - what's arising, what questions it's raising for you and thinking about what can be learned.Everyone will have their own particular ways of doing that. One example of a practice that some people advocate is that of journaling. You could reflect on the last period of time, say the last year and write down experiences that stand out for you, that have been important for you in some way in that time and making a summary note about it, to remind yourself and then think about how you've grown from those experiences, what you've learned, what sort of person you are now compared to what you were then. And also writing down and reflecting on what does ended. Like, what are you letting go? What are you not going back to? What are you leaving behind? What of the previous madness you're not going to pick up again?This is all in the sense of reprioritising and thinking across all of this thing about what it tells you about what really matters to you. What's important to you? What brings you joy? What's what brings you meaning? And what are you grateful for? So we’ve just looked at this growth work at a personal level, and we can also do it as a collective level and social connection is a key part of this growth journey.  Shelly Taylor talks about social connection in response to stress as ‘tend and befriend’ response to stress, in contrast to what is more commonly thought of as fight flight or freeze. She explains it in terms of the oxytocin hormone that we won’t go into here and argues it is particularly the case in situations where we don't have the immediate ‘in our face’ stress trigger like the lion or the tiger just about to attack us, but something that's more ongoing and more pervasive, like we have in the current situation, and triggering a response to connect and care.The point is that tend and befriend highlights social connection as another really critically important part of moving onto this growth path.And we're seeing ’tend and befriend’, I think in all sorts of wonderful ways and in the ways that people are caring for one another, looking out for one another, checking in on one, another sharing ideas, sharing experiences, sharing, teaching materials, running webinars, to help explore new ways of working together, neighbours, doing things for one, another colleagues, helping each other out and inspiring each other as well. So there are lots of ways that reconnecting with the social becomes an important part of this path, and it reinforces the importance of language that we should get away from talking about social distancing, to talk about physical distancing and social connecting.We can also talk about growth happening at organisational and peer community levels. We could all point to ways in which our faculties have so quickly adapted and developed to better enable people to work from home and to support remote teaching at changes that may persists persist in many ways and the way in which our peer communities also are rethinking the whole conference models.So this notion of growth as a response in the face of our, and in spite of, and as a result of going through stressful times, can happen at multiple levels.It points to the shift from reacting to adapting, the bouncing back, to responding and growing, and moving forward. And these stages will all involve varying degrees of awareness and reflection. Also a lot of creativity to explore the new options and the possibilities, and also some level of motivation and commitment to stick with it. While I don't want to ignore the fact that this has been hard for people and continues to be hard, but I also want to recognise and remind myself that in the midst of these challenging times, there can also be possibilities, not just for bouncing back and adapting, but also for growing and learning. It's how we interpret and respond to it. To bring in Frankl again: ‘when we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves’; ‘We always have choices to make’.So if this is all something that connects for you, how are you moving forward on this opportunity path, despite the pain and stress and challenges? My hope particularly for us as academics is that we can better keep academia in perspective and really connect to what's important, prioritise looking after ourselves and looking after each other and being connected to our peer communities, our families, our friends, because all of things will go towards making us better Researchers, better educators, better mentors, better collaborators. I’d just like to finish off and paraphrase something that Steve Taylor, a psychologist wrote in a blog for Scientific American and rephrase this as a collective wish, ‘that in the midst of the suffering and the challenge of our present predicament, may we develop a heightened sense of appreciation, more authentic relationships, and a new sense of resilience and confidence. May we slow down and learn to live in the present rather than filling our lives with incessant activity and constantly rushing into the future.’I really do believe that this is a unique opportunity for us, and it depends on the choices that we make.

In this bitesize ‘Related Work’, the first of the new year of 2021, I suggest using a theme for the new year and also connecting with your superordinate goals, your why, and to explore learning goals.Related work:Höchli, B., Brügger, A., & Messner, C. (2018). How Focusing on Superordinate Goals Motivates Broad, Long-Term Goal Pursuit: A Theoretical Perspective. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 1879. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01879Christian Swann, Simon Rosenbaum, Alex Lawrence, Stewart A. Vella, Desmond McEwan & Panteleimon Ekkekakis (2020) Updating goal-setting theory in physical activity promotion: a critical conceptual review, Health Psychology Review, DOI: 10.1080/17437199.2019.1706616TRANSCRIPT: CAL RelatedWork 1Jan 2021(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.(00:29):So welcome to the first related work bite-sized podcast. So you know that every academic paper has some section on related work or literature review section that draws out interesting other research that's relevant to the topic at hand so that we can imagine that the topic of our paper here is about changing academic life to be more sustainable and collaborative and effective. And so in these bite-sized podcasts I want to pick up on a research article or some evidence-based theme complemented by some personal anecdotes, as they make sense that might offer some insights to feed into this agenda of changing academic life. We might call, these are implications for design designing the academic life we want and need both individually and collectively and designing that change at personal levels at collective levels at institutional and structural levels.(01:31):So in this first related work, I want to pick up on the fact that it's the new year. And one of the things that we commonly hear about in the new is about making new year resolutions and good luck to you. If you're one of the small percentage of people that can make a resolution and keep it, I'm not, and there are various figures reported in the literature about, um, 10 to 40% of us or so who make new year's resolutions, don't, don't get, don't keep them in the longer term. And I think this gives our perfectionist selves just one more reason to beat up on ourselves when we fall short, because these resolutions often tend to be all or nothing type of goals. So resolutions might make more sense when they're focused and smart, the acronym specific, measurable, achievable, relevant time bound. But I think one of the big lessons for me from 2020 was just how little we can actually control. And we know that the world remains at this time, highly volatile and unpredictable, and so really uncontrollable. So what I'm going to try is having theme for the year and my theme for 2021 is about being the year of being bold(03:11):For me, this encapsulates the aspects about being brave, um, vulnerable, stepping up, even when I'm a little bit unsure putting myself out there because I have a tendency to not do that, to always be cautious to over-prepare or to be worried about failing. And so it will really be about being brave. And this is important for me as a theme against the broader backdrop of wanting to make a difference. And I know that sounds all very vague and aspirational, but I think I've mentioned on other podcasts that as I especially get to the pointy end of my career, and we have fixed retirement ages in Austria, I'm asking myself, how can I best use my strengths and experiences and passions to have the biggest impact on, especially on helping to change academic life to make it better.(04:13):For me being bold provides a sort of anchor or North star for then for making choices and starting this bite-size related work series is something that has come out of this thing of being bold, because I have no idea how it's going to land. If it will make sense or if it will connect, um, or how it will work. So I guess starting this related work is sort of like my new year resolution in a way, but it's more about achieving the larger purpose. I just mentioned. I think being bold for me will also play out in being bolder about what I say yes and no to, um, it would also be about it trying other new things. And that means giving myself permission that it will be a learning process. So it's never going to be perfect. It's always going to be okay to be doing better.(05:10):And this connects to some work in the literature that looks at goal setting and talks about how, uh, the, the focus on, um, just, just having goals like smart goals often don't work on their own and you can actually do better if you combine both what they call, what Höchli, Brügger and Messner call as superordinate, as well as subordinate goals. So in their paper, and I'll put links to these on the, on the podcast webpage, a superordinate goal is a goal that's more abstract. It connects to your why and, or some broader long-term challenge. And then the subordinate goals become the much more specific, concrete, challenging, actionable ways that you might achieve or move towards that broader abstract goal.(06:12):So an example might be a superordinate goal might be being the healthiest I can be. And then a subordinate goal might be that I'm going to start exercising and being very specific about what I'm going to do and when and how I'm going to do it. We might think about the theme then in some way as sort of like a superordinate goal. And then what might be some of the specific ways that, that plays out your subordinate goals.(06:52):Swann has also done research on goal-setting and, and Swann talks about performance goals and not just being performance goals where we can set the sort of smart criteria. But also, looking at learning goals. And I love the idea of learning goals because they're goals that are about seeing how well I can do sort of goals. Um, so rather than saying, you know, as a goal, I'm going to run five K in less than 20 minutes, a more open goal might be, I'm going to see how much faster I can run the 5k.(07:38):I'd also encourage us then to think about the sort of more open goals, more learning goals. Because of all years of all times we need to take the pressure off ourselves. We need to, well, I need to connect to something that's, you know, recognizing what's important and what I care about and, and think about doing the best I can in the circumstances that we have right now. And I love the idea of the superordinate goals that sort of set the broad theme or broad direction. And then just having open learning goals that just says, we'll do what we can and it's okay, whatever we do will be good enough. And we can go through a whole reflection cycle and so on and so on, but take the pressure off ourselves.(08:25):So I'll put links to the two papers that I've mentioned on the web page and asking what might be the implications for design, for your academic life. You can think about as your theme for the year, how are you going to take the pressure off yourself? We still might want to encourage and challenge yourself, but give yourself a break right now about doing whatever we can right now in the circumstances. And just to illustrate that I won't get everything right, when I talked about learning goals, I should have referenced Winters and Latham who first came up or one of the early people who came up with this concept in 1996. And the paper I'm going to share with you though is by Christine Swan and colleagues where they talk about updating goal setting theory and doing a critical conceptual review.Welcome to 2021 and whatever you’re going to make your year.(10:11) End

Here are some brief reflections from me on this VUCA year of 2020! I also announce a new series starting 2021 of bite-size podcasts that I’m calling ‘Related Work’, discussing a single topic or concept from both an evidence-based and experiential perspective. You can find the full transcript of my reflections below or you can download it here as a pdf.Image: ‘Hanging out together: Physically distanced and socially connected’ (Geraldine Fitzpatrick 2020)Related links:Leadership-related events for Informatics Europe including: Webinar on Creating the New Academic Normal for Informatics ResearchersAcademic leadership development course - Autumn 2020 - with Austen RainerCheck here too for the Spring 2021 leadership course (announced soon)DigiLeaders event - Supported by Digital Futures and KTH Stockholm GEC2020 Workshop - on ‘Red threads, choices, and the ‘good’ academic life’Transcript:(00:30):Welcome. So this is going to be my end of year reflection and what a year it has been, hasn't it, 2020, will we ever forget that? So many big issues, not just COVID 19, but political issues and environmental disasters huge weather events. So many people impacted in so many ways this year. So following up from my earlier reflections as well we are still in Australia unexpectedly, I would never have put any money on us still being here at Christmas or for the new year. And this is one of the characteristics of this year. Isn't it? That it's just been so unpredictable at every turn we thought we would be back in Vienna in a few months, in a couple of months, even, and the year has been full of lessons about that.(01:34):In the business world they often talk about how we live in a VUCA world, which is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. And if ever there's been a book a year, I think 2020 has been it. And I know that we've often talked about returning to normal or the new normal, and I'm starting to think that one of the lessons from this year is the reminder that everything is always changing and challenging. And it just so happens that we've got a concentration of challenges and changes this year, but there will never be any real stable time. There are always events that will challenges or changes in technology or changes in policies or whatever that we need to respond to or in our own personal life circumstances. And for me, I think one of the lessons for this year has been how to maybe just embrace that sense of ongoing change as just being where it's at.(02:45):So realizing things that never going to settle there are always going to be challenges. And part of that then is also that you're always going to be on a learning curve and that that's okay and can be difficult and challenging and uncomfortable sometimes, but we come out of it in some way better for having learnt the lessons of that time. I know that there have been lots of challenges and we've experienced them as well, but in different ways, I know that also that every one of you have experienced very different challenges. And that's one of the things that's been quite striking is that the experiences, your experiences, depending on what country you're living in, what city you're living in, what your family circumstances, what your living situation is, what your job is. And so I can only speak for myself. And one of, some of the things that I've learned this year are how much I really need to live with because we came over with a suitcase for a couple of weeks and here, we still are, and we haven't had all our things and we haven't had an oven and, and some practical things like this, but we've still had a good life. Really. We've had incredibly generous friends and family that I'm grateful for.(04:10):Also learnt more about what's important. It's been great. Being able to take the time to prioritize for me, time in the morning for just some time for myself to do something that I like to do some exercise to just spend some time sitting and enjoying a cup of tea before I start work, because I've been starting work a little bit later, so that I can overlap with European time zone for meetings in the evening. And it's actually been a great model too, to have a couple of hours in the morning before I start work. And I'm wondering how I can continue that. It's also been great, challenging, but also interesting to have meetings a lot time blocks towards the end of the day where the time overlap is. And I realized how much of my days normally broken up by meetings all through the day. And so I'm going to be looking at how I can continue to create better blocks and chunks of time to do the things I need to do and, and to, to chunk meetings together more. And of course, we've all learned lots of new things about new ways of teaching online, running meetings, running webinars, running courses having zoom meetings, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. 'Can you hear me?' Internet crashes. But we're still here despite all these challenges and we've done well enough. And I think we can really be proud of getting here no matter how hard it's been or how, what state we're in.(05:48):I'm also really proud of what our peer community has communities have achieved this year. I don't know about you, but I've seen countless acts of kindness and peer support. I know that we've also seen lots of also increasing aggression and agitation that may be associated with the times, but I've also seen people reaching out to one another supporting one another you know, heads of departments and faculties sending out emails, telling people it's okay, that you're not going to be working at your full capacity right now, given everything else has going on. I'm grateful for amazing colleagues in my own research group. Who've been so good at looking after one another and the morning hangout that is there for everyone just to drop into and the people who set that up and run it, I'm grateful to our volunteers and our communities. Who've had enormous jobs this year, responding to the challenges of COVID and the uncertainty, the bulkiness of it in organizing conferences.(07:03):I was a co-chair of one of our big conferences for 2019. And I thought that was a big job, but it's nothing compared to what I see my colleagues doing now, trying to work out whether they can hold conferences face-to-face or not, and then it hybrid, or do they go fully virtual and then all of the myriad of details involved in that. So a huge shout out and thank you to all of you who have continued to make our communities work in, in, in very practical ways. And, to keep us connected to one another. And that's been interesting too the language of this time, you know, where people are talking about social distancing, and I really wish we would talk about physical distancing instead of social distancing because of any time we actually need to be physically distanced of course, but more than anything, we need to be socially connected.(08:05):And that's what I see many of the initiatives going on about enabling that social connection and that peer connection to continue reflecting more personally, and thinking about this podcast series, changing academic life. Well, that academic life has certainly been changing, but my contributions to it through the podcast conversations with, with colleagues hasn't been very active this year for lots of reasons. I think in some parts, I was also expecting that I would be able to connect to people face to face, which is where I preferred doing the, the, the interviews, the recordings, but also just the challenges of time zone and just trying to keep the day job going with all of those other challenges. So we, we did have some interesting conversations, Pejman and Anirudha and Eunice. And I did also did sort of a 'musings from Australia' episode.(09:04):And hopefully, even though there are only a few, there were still some interesting insights there for you or food for thought around the podcast though. We've also been able to do some new things. So we, we ran a webinar looking at some of the challenges for academia in this current COVID situation. And also Austin Rainer and myself co-facilitated an academic leadership development course on behalf of informatics Europe. And the webinar was with Informatics Europe as well. And that was with a great cohort of people and also a very good learning experience for ourselves as well. And something that we'll be repeating in the spring running a different another version of the course, then there's also been the experience of running workshops for projects, for example, about bias in selection and diversity running workshops for the Greek ACM women's group for their conference on making a better academic life various keynotes, for example, talking to future Digi leaders, you know, women and nonbinary people at a Stockholm conference.(10:30):So there still have been lots of interesting possibilities to connect and make a difference and looking to looking forward to being able to do more in the coming year. And one of the things that I do plan to do that I'll announce here is that I, I want to start recognizing that I'm not getting the long form conversations done at the moment. Very often. I want to start a regular bite-size series that I'm going to call Related Work. And it's capturing, what I want to do is pick up a short, a small idea and reflect on it from both what the research evidence says about it and reflect on my own anecdotal experiences where relevant. So they will be short five to 10 minute episodes, I think on a single topic that will perhaps just provide different forms of food for thought as we're moving forward.(11:28):So thank you for listening to this. I'm glad that you're still around. I do hope to be able to come back with more and hoping that we're able to continue to find ways to change our own academic life for the better and academic life. More generally with the longer slower change things. And I love in some ways that COVID has given us reminders that there's more, that we can change and that's okay. To make changes and make mistakes and learn from them. And can we take those lessons forward in the future? So all the best as you continue to try to stay healthy and saying and well during this time and stay connected.12:57 END