Gantts vs Zombies

Zombie fare (Photo by Tseen Khoo; Cake+decoration by Shayne Smail)

As my experiences of university functions move beyond ‘plonk and cheese’ to gigs that involve sushi rolls, mini-quiches, and chocolate eclairs, I felt like it was time to write something about the slippage between the intimate and the professional in academia.

I’m particularly interested in the way that staff negotiate the grey area of social participation and personal revelation* as part of a university’s everyday rhythms. This is a topic that fascinates me, and the ‘and another thing!’ nature of this post probably reflects this.

I’ve often joked with my peers that my most enduring trauma in academia was watching colleagues boogeying on the dance-floor at the tail end of conference dinners. It is my scholarly primal scene. It is also another very good reason not to attend conference dinners, but I’ll save that invective for another post.

I mention the dance trauma because it’s an example of a time when I felt that I got to know too much about colleagues (you can tell a lot about people from the way they dance).

If there’s one thing I learned early in my academic life, it’s that many academics are extremely good at not-participating in institutionally sanctioned events. Being the introvert that I am, I appreciated this culture because I’m a picky participator. If there’s the faintest whiff of ‘team-building games’, I’m hard at work getting out of it. If anyone mentions a themed university event, I’m suddenly booked up…all the time, anytime.

At most of the functions I attended, academic staff were poorly represented, and the ones who were there tended to bemoan the heinous crime of being forced to attend when they were already the most wronged in the university ecosystem (i.e. they were humanities academics, or quant social scientists adrift in a sea of qual boffins, or a constructionist pitted against a school full of positivist educators, or …).

Picking up the pieces

Gingerbreak man (Photo by Tseen Khoo)

So, you’ve lost out on the major grant rounds for last year. It only took about eight months to find out, right?

Often, you’ve waited with all of your career possibilities riding on the outcome.

And you got nothing.

As the congratulatory emails, posts, and drinkies ramped up, it was easy to get a little bitter and twisted about the whole thing. Of course, you’re happy for your diligent and savvy colleagues who were given recognition but…what about you?

I can say that I truly understand how you feel. I threw my hat in the major grants and fellowship rings many times; very few times was I successful.

I’m writing this post for you to read after you’ve had a few weeks to get over the angst and disappointment of not scoring a grant, hopefully had a break, and been able to take a step back.

If you’re going to persist in the academic caper, it’s very useful to find a constructively destructive way to channel that post-grant-announcement frustration and anger, that feeling that you’ve been cheated. I would suggest gardening or metal-smithing; anything that allows you to wield tools or make loud noises.

There are no guarantees about winning the grants race, but you can do your best to ensure you make it through the heats.

Top 5 things to pick up the pieces, post-grant-unsuccess:

Five ways to make a difference

Impacts, by Jonathan O’Donnell on Flickr

We aren’t here just to generate papers, people.

We’re here to make a difference, to improve things.

Heaven knows, there are enough issues out there that need our help!

If your research sits within the academy, being cited by other researchers, then you might get a promotion. But you probably won’t make a difference.

Here are five ways you can get out there and help put your research into action.

Leaders – what are they good for?

Cat herding (Photo sourced from http://www.flickr.com/photos/ceardach/)

Everyone seems to think that there’s a dearth of academic research leadership.

From the Group of Eight (Go8) in Australia to the most modest research universities, this seems to be a common and constant refrain.

Can this desirable species of academic be that scarce? Are they endangered? Do we need breeding populations in academic zoos?*

Once upon a time, while I was cloistered with a pride of executive research leader-types, I thought a lot about this. Partly out of necessity because we were pinned by the exhortive gaze of the facilitator, and partly because it was a good opportunity for revisiting my own experiences of ‘being led’.

What is good research leadership? How do you define, produce, and replicate it?

What did I find most effective in academic leaders when I was an early career researcher (ECR) and trying to find my feet in the shifting sands of academia?

I’ll tell you about that soon, but what I realised when I started on this post was this: there are two sets of ‘leaders’ I appreciated, and they drew from a pool of similar, but not identical, traits. They also operated at different levels and had contrasting goals.

Don’t just throw your keys in the bowl

Still from The Ice Storm
(Source: http://img2-2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/080321/must-list/the-ice-storm_l.jpg)

The 1997 movie The Ice Storm (which I remember being rather depressing) depicts a 1970s ‘key party’. A key party, in case you missed this piece of 70s pop culture, was a way for suburban couples to engage in sexual experimentation, particularly swinging.

Stay with me here, because I think the swingers’ key party has a lot to tell us about why some research collaborations can go so terribly wrong.

The idea behind a key party is simple. Couples are invited to attend a party with a bunch of other couples. One of the partners leaves their car keys in a bowl. Later (presumably after large amounts of booze and whatever else), the other partner selects a random set of keys from the bowl and goes home with the person who owns them to…engage in certain activities.

Anyway, we’re all adults here so I don’t have to spell it out for you.

Moving along.

Why do I offer the key party as an analogy for research collaborations? We know that building good research collaborations is hard but, sometimes, I think we don’t give enough attention to how difficult it actually is, in an emotional sense.

Stepping out from the screen

#shutupandwrite (Photo by @thesiswhisperer)

Many of us are very proud of our virtual lives; some smugly so. I love social media, and am a great advocate of building a convincing and professional digital identity.

The transformation and enhancement of academic networks – whether you develop them over the years or hours – is there for the taking. Anyone with a bit of  initiative to explore and develop their presence consistently and astutely can ‘make it’.

Social media has fast-tracked my profile-building and sector expertise in a whole new profession in unprecedented ways; it has been immensely fun, and satisfying to feel as if I have a handle on the field after a year and a half in it. A small handle, it must be said, but a handle, nonetheless!

In Inger ‘The Thesis Whisperer‘ Mewburn’s case, her online profile and expertise has garnered professional rewards beyond her time in academe. As she has said:

I have had access to opportunities usually reserved for more experienced players. It would take me at least 10 years to achieve this kind of status and recognition through the normal academic ‘fame’ channels of citations and conference attendances. (On the right side of the digital divide)

When done with the right level of engagement, these kinds of interactions can easily become the majority of our networking and collaborative activities. Indeed, among colleagues in a single unit, it can be their prime form of communication day-to-day, with nary a glimpse caught of each other as they rush from class to meeting to working group to seminar.

There are times, however, when I wonder whether the case still needs to be made for regular face-to-face time (what’s that graphic and memorable term, gifted to us by cyberpunk fiction – meatspace?). Could it mean the difference between resolving and exploding certain situations?

Do you have a card?

Star Trek Business Cards by The Rocketeer on Flickr

I know a bloke who works for a bank. Let’s call him David.

David is senior enough that he authorises his own business cards. As he was filling out the form, he realised two things:

1. The people who care about his business card are never going to see the form, and
2. The people who see the form don’t care what goes on his business card.

So, in the box labelled ‘Position’, he carefully wrote “Dilettante”.

Sure enough, when his business cards arrived, David found that the bank was paying him to be a dilettante.

I’ve just run out of business cards, so I’m thinking about what I should put on the form. It seems to me that my business card and my e-addressbook (where I keep everybody else’s business cards) are a bit behind the times.

Life, death and collaboration: How to find research friends

Found zen (Photo by Tseen Khoo)

For the first years of my academic life, I only ever published as a sole author. I worked on projects as a sole chief investigator and, for the most part, started projects by myself. Coming from the humanities of the time, this was not that unusual.

In my later years as an academic, almost everything I wrote or worked on was not as a lone researcher. I co-wrote, co-edited, was part of project teams and event committees.

In academia these days, the collaboration factor is huge. Perhaps even de rigueur. Track-records with no history of working with others are viewed with a suspicion. Heads of Schools and grant assessors may well wonder: is it because you don’t work with others, or because you can’t work with others?

While some ‘collaborations’ can be nightmares that you try to get over and done with as quickly as possible (therefore, aren’t collaborations in the holistic sense…), research collaborations can be the absolute best things in your academic life.

And, because you’re not an Emperor penguin, you don’t have to ‘mate for life’ with one collaborator. You can work with various groups and individuals off and on throughout your career, finding more along the way. Train that creative sensibility to find ways to work with people you respect and like; it will make your working life a happy place.

As with many things in life, the best way for these things to happen is organically. A forced research relationship makes the baby sloths cry.

With this in mind, then, what’s the best way to find a collaborator? First, remind yourself about what academic networking can mean.

Then, check out my top strategies for finding good collaborators:

Cheap and satisfying: Building a research network on a shoestring

Heads down, by Jonathan O'Donnell on Flickr

Do you feel theoretically lonely? Desperate for focused intellectual companionship? Do you keep having to explain what your study area is, and what it isn’t?

That was me in the late 1990s while I was a doctoral student. I was at a good institution that supported postgraduates well, my supervisor was fabulous and lovely, and I had a savvy cohort of peers.

Why the whingeing, then?

There was no-one in my department, or faculty, who worked even broadly in the area that I was in. That’s part of the joy of being a doctoral student: you’re pioneering new fields, making connections that no-one else has done before, and creating new knowledge (to use an academic weasel-phrase). What this often means, though, is that you don’t have the specific kind of intellectual support and critique that you may crave.

I know I craved it. Along with a steady wage. And job options; just one job option would’ve been welcome, really…

ANYWAY, moving on:

This post is about how to build and maintain a successful research network when you don’t really have any money attached to it. Why would you bother running a research network when you’re already overburdened with Other Important Things?

• If you run a good network that embraces community/creatives as well as academics (at all levels), the spin-offs in terms of community engagement and connections is big. Not to mention much more fun.
• Running a network well demonstrates skills in project management and planning, liaising/negotiation and initiative.
• Setting something up that puts your research area on the map is academic leadership; the most important part of this is sustaining it until the area has a chance to establish.

Those are the benefits that I’ve accrued, in 20/20 hindsight.

This is how it actually happened:

Making co-writing work

From 'Writing like the wind' by snigl3t on Flickr

Writing with your colleagues can be as fantastic as it can be abysmal; it’s all about who you’re playing with, and what kind of experience those dynamics create.

Academia in general appears to be increasingly geared towards multiple authors and team-based research, even in the traditional bastions of sole authordom such as the humanities. Most of those in the sciences co-author and team-write as a matter of course, though many admit that the process can still be a fraught one. Susan Cain, in her recent New York Times article, “The Rise of the New Groupthink“, focuses her criticism on the context and implementation of that collaborative work.

While performing a critique of prescriptive collaborative work cultures, Cain notes: “recent studies suggest that influential academic work is increasingly conducted by teams rather than by individuals. (Although teams whose members collaborate remotely, from separate universities, appear to be the most influential of all.)”

This post is about the process of intensive co-authoring. I’m not talking about the formality of including a research team on a publication, where only a handful of the listed researchers may have actively worked on the paper. Nor will I cover the situation where one person does all the work and then feels obliged to add a senior colleague’s name on it.

ALL successful intensive co-authoring requires:

• A feasible, agreed-upon schedule for drafting and deadline for completion.
• A strong leader for the paper, someone who takes final responsibility for its proofing and submission (even though the actual tasks may be devolved to someone else…).
• Proper version control. That’s why I emphasise the serial process of sending it around the team. When X has done their bit, they send it to Y (cc’ing the others), who then sends it to Z (cc’ing the others). Don’t fiddle with the writing till you are the one the document is sent to.
• All members of the team to be committed to adding value to the publication, and doing their bit.

The three approaches that I’ve experienced (for which I’ve committed the sin of neologism) are: