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 Researchers
• Academic leadership development course - Autumn 2020 - with Austen Rainer
• Check 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