Researcher Development Folks

A place for things aimed at folks who do a similar role to me

Moving blogs – from posterous to wordpress.com

/ Paul Spencer / 3 Comments

posterous-logoAbout two years ago I started my blogging journey, I wanted a way to reflect on the workshops I deliver to researchers – to jot down the context, share the resources used. I’m a reasonably confident and competent tech user but had no clue about blogging platforms. This is why I chose posterous.com as my starting place because it was pretty simple to use allowing me to focus on writing content rather than worrying about templates or html or css editors…

Then about a year ago, posterous announced that they had been acquired by twitter. It was at that point that I began to look around for alternatives because I had a sneaking suspicion that posterous would close down at some point…. and so it has now been announced that posterous will close at the end of April.

I have already made the jump from posterous to wordpress in August of last year – I know many folks will be thinking about doing the same so I thought I’d share my experience of doing so.

The first step is to export the content of your Posterous blog – you can do this right from your “manage spaces” panel in posterous by clicking on the “backup” button – see below

posterous backup

This could take a while but eventually you’ll get a zipped archive of your blog.

The next step is then to take it to another blogging platform, in this case I am talking about wordpress but before I carry on it’s important to stress the difference between wordpress.org and wordpress.com. The former is an open source website architecture that relies on you having your own webspace and domain name whereas the latter is both a website template AND a hosting space combined. If, like me, you want to keep things as simple as it was with posterous then a wordpress.com blog is what you’ll probably prefer!

WordPress.com offer a free blogging solution – this allows you to store upto 3GB of data (text, images etc) and gives you freedom to call your blog anything you like with the suffix .wordpress.com. For most folks this will be adequate. You can customise the theme of your blog with a diverse range of templates etc.

I chose to pay a fee for my new blog – thedigitaldoctorate.com – it cost $99 per year. This gives me an extra 10GB storage, makes my blog advert free and allows a few extra bells and whistles (like having a .com url).

Once signed up then importing your archive from posterous is easy, you use a dedicated import tool right from the control panel (dashboard) of your new blog; it will transfer across all your text entries, comments and hyperlinks. The official advice on this is easy and straightforward to follow http://en.support.wordpress.com/import/import-from-posterous/

Things I’ve learned

1) The embedded documents that you had in posterous won’t have come across in the import – you may have a hyperlink to the document which takes you back to the posterous blog (which won’t be there in May…!). This creates a headache for folks like me who tend to embed powerpoints/word docs/pdfs into all my posts. There’s no easy way to say this but you have to find all the original files and do one of two things–

(i) Upload those files to a 3rd party document store e.g. scribd – you can upload many files at once using the desktop uploader (handy!). The advantage of using scribd (or similar) is that you can edit the attributes of the file in terms of what folks can do with it (e.g. disable download/printing). Having your documents here is also handy for connecting up to LinkedIn etc – promotes your professional stuff across a number of platforms. Scribd also have a wordpress.com specific embed shortcode which makes it easier to embed docs into your posts. The downside is that this is a two step process and a serious pain in the arse if you have a couple of hundred files to upload and then re-embed into individual posts.

(ii) You can upload the files directly into your wordpress “media library”, this is easy enough to do and here is the guidance on that http://en.support.wordpress.com/uploading-documents/. Only note of caution here is that this could eat into your data allowance if you have many large powerpoints/pdfs, especially if you have the free blog which is capped to 3GB.

2) It is a pain in the rear to embed prezis into a wordpress.com blog (as opposed to a wordpress.org site). This is because WordPress.com does not support iframes because of security concerns. There is a workaround  which involves taking the embed code from your prezi and editing it to work with wordpress.com. I hated this. There are a couple of  simple web apps out there that can do that bit for you.

Update:

The following shortcode generators have stopped working correctly for new and recently edited prezis. The end result is that you can embed the prezi but it will not load. Hopefully enough folks will have complained about this for either Prezi or WordPress.com (or both) to find a solution to this.

Wordprezi shortcode generator

Prezi shortcode generator!

Simply copy the url of the prezi you want to embed, paste into the generator and click ‘shortcode?’ Then you copy the long string, paste into your blog – et voila problem solved.

3) Uploading photos into your media library is a cinch and it is easy to create a slick slideshow in your posts. Here’s the support page, it’s a piece of cake! http://en.support.wordpress.com/images/gallery/

4) Embedding youtube videos is also really easy – I find the easiest way is to simply grab the url of the video and click the add media (from url) button in the editing pane – paste in url and click insert into post. This works for most media types at the end of a url.

5) TED videos have a special wordpress embed shortcode – really easy!

There’s a few tips to be getting on with – if I think of anymore then I’ll update!

UWE Graduate School – One year on

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From: Neil Willey, Director of the UWE Graduate School

Party Cake

It’s just over a year ago now that UWE set up its university-wide Graduate School and then celebrated the launch, so I thought it might be a good time to reflect on how things are going. Personally, I think we’ve now got a pretty sturdy one year old and that we’ve already mostly done teething and walking! I’m pretty acutely aware, however, that walking is just the start and that, let alone running, we probably need to be triple jumping or something fairly soon. There are two things that particularly struck me during the year and which make me think triple jumping might be possible…….

The first is the great team of people that were assembled into the UWE Graduate School. I’ve realised how many people at UWE already appreciate this, and really do wish that all the research students and supervisors at UWE have the opportunity that I do to engage with Graduate School staff – because I think they would then realise the interest and expertise available to them. I believe that the Graduate School can be really helpful to PGR students and supervisors across the university but that we all have to, somehow, be in sufficient contact with each other for this to really happen. During the first year this was exemplified to me in skills development events for students and supervisors. The development events that I was part of seemed to be of great benefit to everyone, which is making me think a great deal about how we can extend the experience to more students and supervisors.

The second thing that spurred me on to believe that the Graduate School at UWE can really go places is the real importance of PGR, both generally and to UWE. Contact with lots of students and supervisors from across the university over the course of a year really emphasises what fantastic things PGR students and their supervisors do. I’ve learned about so many things from across all the Faculties that could really make a difference to the world. To me it seems crucial that UWE has signalled its intent to have a healthy PGR community, but I do wonder if we all realise how central it can be to all that UWE wishes to be.

So, after a year I’m confident that we’ve made a good start and that the UWE Graduate School can really be helpful to PGR students and supervisors. Contact across the Faculties has given me quite a clear picture of the UWE PGR community and how the Graduate School can help. It has, however, started me thinking that perhaps the more channels of communication are available, the more difficult it is to communicate.  It’s also been a reminder of the committee work necessary in a large institution! Overall, I’m happy that we’ve now got an overall focus for PGR at UWE that we can build on to respond to the needs of our research students and supervisors.

Neil

The Socially Innovative Researcher

/ Paul Spencer / 3 Comments

Social Innovation word cloudRecently I directed a course entitled “The Socially Innovative Researcher” in the Chancellors Conference Centre in Manchester. I was joined by a team of experienced colleagues from the University of Manchester (Dr Jim Boran, Dr Lynn Clark, Dr Emily McIntosh & Elizabeth Wilkinson) and the wider Vitae network (Dr Chris Russell, Dr Nathan Ryder & Janet Wilkinson) as well as some inspirational visiting speakers (thank you Andrew Thorp and Phil Tulba) to help me deliver aspects of the course and guide the participants through the programme.

This course was designed to help researchers understand more about social innovation and social entrepreneurship. These are relatively new terms to describe the discovery or generation of new ideas that work to solve social and/or environmental challenges. It is important to raise awareness of social innovation because I believe that social innovation is probably the most important factor in meeting the economic and social challenges of the future.

So why run a course about social innovation with academic researchers? I’ve got form in this area having co-produced development materials aimed at researchers on the topic of social enterprise, a short course designed to raise awareness of social enterprise, a different way of doing business. I know that some folks have heard of social enterprise but don’t really understand how it works, this article from the Guardian this week highlights the issue. In the UK and Europe, there are lots of organisations promoting social enterprise as an alternative way of creating sustainable ventures that deliver social change and there is a particular push for universities through schemes such as the social entrepreneurship awards offered by HEFCE and UnLtd.

However, for this particular course I decided to broaden the theme to social innovation because I believe that research is a pivotal strand of social innovation – researchers are fantastic at generating new ideas to tackle problems that society faces and are generally motivated by a desire to make a difference in society.  I used the prezi below to set out my vision for the course.

Socially innovative researcher course introduction

One of the most inspiring people I have read about is Muhammad Yunus, a former academic who proposed and implemented a socially innovative solution to help poor women in Bangladesh start their own businesses. The following video takes up the story and gives an overview of social entrepreneurship…

The theme of the course is encapsulated by a quote from the playwright George Bernard Shaw

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

I like this, it resonates strongly with my experience within academia, most researchers are passionate about what they do- they want to see their ideas make an impact in the world.

I decided to divide the course into themes covering motivations and values on day 1, creative problem solving and social impact on day 2 with the final day being about putting ideas into action. Here’s the programme that covers all that!

Day 1 – Motivations & Values

The thinking behind this theme for the day was to test the assertion that researchers are not motivated by fame and fortune; that there is a more altruistic driver behind this career choice. The following quotes sum up the day.

“People don’t buy what you do; people buy why you do it.” – Simon Sinek

“Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people” – W B Yeats

The first session focussed on communicating research in an authentic way. I like to use a model proposed by Simon Sinek, Start with why, because I think it works really well for the academic environment. I’ve written a fuller explanation here. The slides used in this session are below:

The afternoon session designed to explore the motivations and values of researchers, to think about what drives us to do what we do. Dr Lynn Clark facilitated this fascinating session and introduced a model that helps to focus on the positives; appreciative enquiry. The theme that resonated for me was her assertion that “diversity managed well leads to innovation”; here are her slides.

The first guest speaker for the programme was Andrew Thorp from MoJoyourbusiness who talked about the power of using stories to convey authenticity and purpose. What I liked about Andrew’s presentation is that he recapped many of the concepts explored earlier in the day with a slightly different perspective. His presentation is below…

I did film Andrew’s presentation but managed to overwrite the file (I had a rare technological disaster!). However, here is Andrew talking about similar themes in another interview.

Day 2 – Creative problem solving

This theme was reflect the changing nature of research, more research is inter disciplinary, more of our grand challenges require different perspectives and points of view to generate the kinds of sustainable solutions that are required. It is sometimes difficult to see this wider picture when immersed in the gritty details of our research. The following quotes sum up the day…

“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” – Albert Einstein

“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” – Linus Pauling

Day 2 started with a recap of the course so far and I showed two videos to join days 1 & 2 together. The first is by Steven Addis and was selected because of the nature of the story behind the pictures – how powerful it was that these were not just moments in time but a record of changing perspectives.

The second short video used was by Derek Sivers, for me it represented how easy it is for us to take our own perspectives of things for granted as being the way things are.

The first session of the day was introduced by Dr Chris Russell, from ThinkInspireCreate, to take the participants through a model of the creative process purportedly used by Walt Disney – Dreamer, Realist, Critic using some of the current affairs on the news that day. This was a good warm up exercise for researchers, many of whom are much more comfortable taking the role of critically appraising others ideas, by using topics that were not necessarily anything to do with research.

This led to the main exercise of the morning, led by Dr Jim Boran, to generate some research proposals/questions around a grand challenge of an ageing population using a process called the Research Sandpit. This is an intensive process often used by the UK Research Councils to generate interdisciplinary research ideas that are funded in response to broad areas of interest.

Here’s a prezi that summarises the activity.

After lunch was to take the outputs generated from the morning activity to explore the potential impact and the resources needed to achieve that. This is absolutely vital in preparing research proposals for funders who will want applicants to map out “The pathways to impact“ of the work that they hope to undertake, they will want you to demonstrate that you have accounted for the necessary resources to deliver on the project. The impact of potential solutions are also critical to social innovation, no good having an idea if it doesn’t achieve any kind of change. The session was facilitated by Janet Wilkinson from ThreeTimesThree using a a moveable mind mapping tool called Ketso (itself a socially innovative idea from academia) to help participants to interrogate their plans, to pose the right sorts of questions to identify areas for further scrutiny.

The second invited speaker was Phil Tulba, a social entrepreneur, to talk through a number of key concepts that are important in achieving social change using Adrenaline Alley as an example. The prezi that Phil used is below.

And here is the video of Phil explaining all…

Day 3 – Putting ideas into action

The idea behind day 3 was to draw all of the concepts explored thus far and bring them together in an activity that was designed to raise awareness of a different way of doing business, social enterprise. It is often said of researchers that they are not aware of how business operates and/or they lack the commercial awareness to see their ideas implemented in wider society. I think this is disingenuous, I believe that most researchers are all too aware of how business operates, they are just not inspired by it so pay it little attention. The purpose of this exercise was to show researchers that not all business is counter productive to good research. The following quotes inspired the approach for the day.

“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.” – Leonardo Da Vinci

“The problem in my life and other people’s lives is not the absence of knowing what to do, but the absence of doing it.” – Peter Drucker

To recap and to point to the activities of the day I showed a short video about doing, “The Path of a Doer” from the Do Lectures.

The morning session was focussed on generating socially innovative ideas in different setting to that of research, to consider ideas that could feasibly be launched as sustainable ventures. The skills, competencies, attributes and behavious that we explored on the previous two days all come into play in this exercise by bringing like minded individuals together to develop an idea. It was facilitated by Dr Nathan Ryder, a freelance consultant in the field of researcher development.

As part of this exercise, a video was shown of some social entrepreneurs who explain more about social enterprise and how it can help to change things.

The slides for the presentation used in this session can be found below.

The last session of the day was designed to provide participants with an overview of the practical steps of taking an idea from a concept through to a full proposal, in other words how to make things happen. Dr Rick Watson from NovoModo and David Smith from InnovationWorks in partnership with the University of Manchester Innovation Group (UMI3) gave a quick tour of a toolkit they call the Social Enterprise Brief Case to assist academic researchers to take their ideas forward. Details of the scheme they are promoting were circulated via e-mail to the participants.

Further resources

A number of participants wanted some further links to the background information and books referred to that underpinned this course, here’s a list:-

One or two folks commented on the eclectic range of music that emanated from my laptop during the three days:- for those interested here’s an approximate playlist on spotify 

Why? and the pyramid of purpose

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Why?At the end of November my good friend and colleague Janet Wilkinson from Three Times Three helped me to deliver a session for the UWE Researchers’ Forum. The theme for the forum was “toward a research active lecturing post”, a topic that concerns lots of researchers and academics. On the one hand there are staff employed on contracts to undertake research only but would like to acquire more teaching experience for their professional and career development. On the other are some early career academics who are battling with hectic teaching schedules and would like to redress the balance by devoting more time to research, again to enhance their career development.

So I asked Janet to facilitate discussions between staff from these two groups to help illuminate what they would need to think about and act upon to achieve their goals. I then asked Janet to write about it, so with permission here are her thoughts on how to frame that discussion.

I’m the kind of person who regularly craves change – I chase new experiences, new learning in new destinations and the opportunity to meet interesting people in new surroundings.  I’m really lucky that my working and home life accommodate this craving.

In 2012 I’ve noticed the emergence of a different craving – that of more stability and consolidation.  How to blend both?  Searching for a model to frame my future planning I’ve turned to books and blogs, friends and colleagues and a day spent at the Guardian TEDx in Bristol.  My work in progress is an adaptation of the ‘pyramid of purpose’ that I’ve been working with, adapting for my own needs and sharing with others – most recently at the Researchers Forum at UWE.

pyramid of purpose

Influenced by Paul Spencer’s recommendation of Simon Sinek’s TED talk and book I’ve been ‘Starting with Why?’.  Why do I want this change?  Why do I need this new experience? Why do I think I will find what I want in the direction I am proposing?  It has been helpful to start here as sometimes the lack of an answer has stopped me chasing a change that was ultimately a superficial whim; similarly it has helped me to clarify why I really wanted the change in the first place.  Drive and passion help you to get to where you want to go but are more gainfully employed when you understand why you want to go there in the first place.

Identifying why you want to do something or change something then facilitates the more practical questions of what constitutes that change and how you are going to bring it about.   If ‘why?’ is the bigger picture the ‘what?’ and ‘how?’ start to dig into the detail to start to make the change.  A big picture person by nature I’ve found that David Allen’s Getting Things Done book has helped me take larger tasks and goals and to consider them in more detail right from the start make them all into a project with the concept of next action fitting neatly with the questions –

  • What do I want to do?
  • What needs to happen next?
  • How am I going to bring that about?
  • How long will it take?

The ever more practical questions of Who? Where? And When? Start to put definite actions around my goals and plans and with a clear purpose help me to structure how I am going to bring this change or plan about and where I need to be flexible and include others in the plan.

I’m keen to think about the questions Who can help me? or who would I need to know better?  I find it difficult to ask for help and yet know that I am always happy to help those who ask me.  I don’t think I’m alone here.

I’ve added discipline to the pyramid of purpose as I’m fascinated by the success I see around me when discipline is added to drive and passion to bring about the change that people identify and focus on.  My observation is that drive alone can be a powerful force but when combined with the discipline to return to the purpose, and the plan it generates, and to follow through on the actions you identify can bring about achievement for you (and those you lead) that sticks to an understanding of why you were doing it in the first place.

More to work on in 2013!

What doctoral examiners look for

/ Paul Spencer / 3 Comments
A photograph of a hard bound PhD thesis with black cover

A PhD thesis

At a recent doctoral student conference hosted by the Department of Arts at the University of the West of England, Professor Gina Wisker  from the University of Brighton, author of the Postgraduate Research Handbook and The Good Supervisor, was invited to speak about her research.

The slides she used at the conference are reproduced here with permission.

What are examiners looking for? Supervisors and students learning from doctoral examining

Learning Journeys and success: Perspectives on conceptual threshold crossings for graduate students and supervisors- learning leaps and nudges

Social media for researcher developers: what’s in it for me? #vitae12

/ Paul Spencer / 4 Comments

This week, Emma Gillaspy (Vitae NW Hub Manager) and I presented a workshop at the Vitae International Researcher Development Conference  [#vitae12] on the topic of using social media. This time it was aimed at folks, who like me, are employed to support the development of researchers.

The background to this is that researchers are changing the way they use digital tools in the context of their research. There is lots of work going on as part of the wider JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme including work being carried out by Vitae to better understand the development needs of researchers.

I’m interested in the digital literacy of folks like me for a couple of reasons:

1) It surely makes sense to better understand how researchers using digital tools in the context of research so that we are better able to support them

2) I believe that the very same digital tools can help staff supporting researchers to engage in their own professional development (something that we all want more of!)

The slides I used to support this workshop are below.

In this workshop we had a good number of conference attendees taking part, there was a mix of experience in the room which is what I had expected. One of the first things we asked people to do was to identify their hopes and fears about using digital tools. I predicted that the fears would fall into three broad categories:

  1. Information overload – the fear that engaging in social media would be too much information to keep track of
  2. Digital Identity – concern over what to share about oneself, privacy issues and the blurring of private versus professional
  3. Data/intellectual property concerns – what happens if I share something that someone else exploits/stealing of ideas

Here’s what they said…

 

During the presentation I showed a couple of youtube videos to illustrate some points, the first was about the revolutionary effect of social media in general – the changing attitudes perhaps

The key points from this are:

Social media is not about technology or tools, it’s about people sharing things

We don’t have a choice about whether we do social media only how well we do it

The second video I used was Zella King talking about how social networks are important – researchers already know this but this video talks about how we can better understand how to makes networks work for us.

The key thing from this video to take is that one needs to understand who is in our network, both close ties and weak links which can be used for different purposes.

Remember that the use of the tools only make interacting with our networks a lot easier.

We used a lot of examples throughout the workshop about how researchers and researcher developers use tools at their disposal to make things easier. I talked a bit about what tools I use to compartmentalise my private versus professional life. I also talked about why I blog – I started a blog for myself, it was to reflect on the skills development events that I have run so that I can get it out of my head. It also serves as a repository of what I have done so I can refer back to it. A pleasing side effect of this is that others have found that useful and have begun to interact, comment and feedback which is fantastic for informing how to do things better – to improve ones professional practice!

I think we touched on something important for the attendees, many expressed an interest in using more digital technologies to improve on what they do which can only be good for all concerned.

Emma and I would be interested in knowing what you think about it, what hopes and fears do you have?

Further resources

Handbook of social media for researchers and supervisors (2012). Open University/Vitae

Social Media: A guide for researchers (2011). Research Information Network

If you build it, will they come? How researchers perceive and use web 2.0 (2010). Research Information Network

A guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities (2011). LSE Impact of social sciences blog

Social Media for Research Administrators

/ Paul Spencer / 1 Comment

Today I am running a short session with UWE colleagues who support researchers who are applying for research funding. There are three main reasons why I think this should be explored:-

  1. Social media tools can really help with horizon scanning – keeping up to date with what funding calls are out there etc.
  2. The ability to keep up with a professional network outside of conferences/meetings
  3. To understand why researchers are increasingly using social media in the course of the work to better support their needs

We will be hanging around under the hashtag #druwe.

I’ve edited down a prezi that I have previously used with researchers themselves to provide the framework for today. The main points to cover are:-

  1. Social media is radically changing the way we think about publishing information/sharing knowledge in perhaps the same way as the printing press revolutionised information distribution in the past
  2. Lots of folks have concerns about putting things online w.r.t. a digital identity. Thinking about what other people can see about you is important, even to the point of being in control of your professional self online
  3. Twitter is an obvious tool for many in terms of maintaining contact with a professional network, need to have an understanding of how to make it work for you
  4. Linked to that is the idea of using filters to prevent being swamped with information – we will talk about portals and aggregators to help manage information streams
  5. I will focus on why researchers are increasingly using social media tools to help them in their research activities, important to know for those who support researchers in their endeavours
  6. Blogging. This for me is an interesting way of sharing knowledge within a network, keeping yourself engaged with the topics you’re interested in (professionally) and providing a much needed space to reflect on your work.
  7. Some advice on an etiquette for the internet? How to avoid some pitfalls.

Here’s the prezi I’m going to use.

Can Social Media use help Research Administrators #druwe on Prezi

Links to blog sites on research funding support

There are some other examples out there of research support staff who run either single author or multi author blogsites around the funding of research.

The Research Whisperer – A blog written by research support staff at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia. Full of great advice which is just as relevant in the UK

Cash For Questions: Social Science research funding, policy and development – A blog written by Adam Golberg; a research manager from Nottingham University Business School. Lots of advice as well as commentary on the wider contextual debates in UK HE

Research Fundermentals – A blog by Phil Ward, a research funding manager at the University of Kent. Well written commentary on topics relating to research funding professionals as well as the wider debates.

Bournemouth University Research Blog – A comprehensive repository of advice, links, information relating to research activity at Bournemouth University. One could say that this a complete solution to the conundrum of how do you have a joined up apporach to research support in a website.

Northumbria Research Support – Another comprehensive blog covering all aspects of research support at Northumbria University.

Managing Working Relationships

/ Paul Spencer / 1 Comment

This is an interesting workshop that I ran at the beginning of the week; the title is more inclusive than its predecessor which would be something like “The Student-Supervisor Relationship”. Ostensibly what I set out to do was to help researchers (both students and staff) understand a little more about their preferred ways of working and to talk through some strategies that I’ve used to balance my own relationships in my working life (although I’m pretty sure that some of the following insights help with other avenues of life as well).

Disclaimer time:- I’m principally talking about the Myers Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) here and I’m not a certified expert. I’m not a fanatic of personality typing and generally I steer well clear of schemes that classify folks into ‘types’ or those that make value judgments about competence based on typing.

Having said that, my experience of MBTI in the context of working relationships (particularly that between a research student and their supervisor) is a useful tool to help understand that other folks have different preferences when approaching certain things which can be infuriating if your preference is not at all similar. Just by understanding that these approaches are driven by our preferences instantly reduces that feeling of frustration because it makes you realise that it isn’t a conscious choice in the most part.

I used some slides to illustrate the dichotomies as described by MBTI, as opposed to administering the MBTI instrument, no pronouncements were made other than for me to reveal that I am an ISTP.

EDIT: If you want to find out more about your own preferences using this tool then the UWE Careers Service has a subscription to a type dynamics assessment . You will need to physically be on the UWE network to use it. If you are not from UWE, maybe your own Careers Service has a similar scheme? Why not ask and find out?


I think folks spend a lot of time thinking about the difference between an “Introvert” and an “Extravert” – there is an important difference in MBTI parlance from that of the everyday use of the terms. Put simply it is about where your focus is in terms of energy, I once heard it described as the difference between being battery-powered or solar-powered which I think is a neat way of putting it.

However it is described I can safely assert that I am very much an introvert. This is both wonderful and, at times, exhausting. I do have to spend lots of time interacting with people, standing up and talking, talking and more talking but I do love my reflection and recharging time.

I think Susan Cain sums it up well in her TED talk (Can you tell I like TED talks…!)

The other area in which I demonstrate a pretty strong preference is in the dichotomy termed “Judging” vs “Perceiving”. I am strongly the latter. Some people earn the label “Mr Last Minute”, well I am the Captain of all last minutes; in fact as a PhD student I wrote up the bulk of my thesis in a matter of weeks because there was an immovable deadline. But here’s the rub, since I’ve become more aware of my preferences I now know that I can’t behave like that all the time, there are many situations where I have to resist my urge to wait/to gather more information/holding off on committing/it’s never too late to have another good idea- because I work with other people for whom that approach frightens and stresses them. I care about the state of health of my colleagues so inevitably I work at minimising the stress I cause others.

Another important element of working with others is the giving and receiving of feedback. In Academia, there is a notorious lack of sugar coating anything and quite often a lack of clarity about things to improve. So I spent time on how feedback should be done…


A couple of things to point out here. I used JoHari’s Window only to illustrate the conundrum around feedback. I’ve seen this model misused so many times where folks have been left feeling dysfunctional because of the misunderstanding around the “Blind Spot”. Basic concept here is to try and increase your public facade. This model demonstrates that in order to achieve that you have to do two things that make most people feel vulnerable:

  1. Disclose more about yourself (decrease the amount that is private and hidden from others)
  2. Seek feedback from others (decrease the amount that is unknown to you – blind to you)

Once this becomes clear, then JoHari’s window isn’t quite so scary and just becomes another of putting a vocabulary to ones own development.

But I think the best thing to take away from feedback is to realise the analogy of it being a a gift. Some gifts you receive from family are useful and some not so. You would always thank someone for giving you the gift even if you chose not to make use of that gift.

Last thing I touched on was about Eric Berne’s concept of transactional analysis as a way of explaining how sometyimes it’s easy to predict a reaction from others depending on how we approach it. If we communicate like a parent, this model suggests we should expect the receiver to react in the exact opposite state, i.e. to react like a child.

I can’t say that I’m really into these models but they do provide a way of engaging in a discussion about how we work and collaborate with others which is, after all, what I was trying to do…

What do you think?