Tag Archives: praxis
Are we there yet?
Six months since we launched our Community of Practice and there is a sense of movement and progress. But if my objective is for it to be a self-sustaining buzzing network of ideas and initiatives, we are probably still a long way from that. The energy mainly comes from me in the centre. But what is […]
The story of a Community of Practice: Baby steps towards the destination
Riding on the wave of enthusiasm of the plenary session on gender-responsive research at the beginning of Bioversity’s Science Week, after three years of scoping and defining, it was time to actually do something. For once I took my own advice! Back in 2013, writing about how to set up a community of practice for […]
The story of a Community of Practice: Planning it into life
We had decided that a Community of Practice was what we needed at Bioversity to raise the bar of our gender-responsive research. But what now? What could we do to tranform that abstract decision to concrete action? Not that life was statically waiting for us to move. In the meantime, Maria conducted some hands-on workshops on ‘making gender […]
Sisyphus rocks
In my last post, I was thinking about what we do when we do what we do when we do performance management. And I concluded that the way we manage performance at the moment takes loads of time and does nothing to improve performance. (If you want some reflections on what ‘manage’ means anyway – […]
Sisyphean tasks at work
King Sisyphus was punished in Greek mythology for chronic deceitfulness by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this action forever (thanks Wikipedia). And this is what our performance tools at work feel like. No sooner have we completed one set of […]
How are you managing?
Many years ago, when I joined the management team at my previous workplace, I was sent on a Management Development course (Years later, once I changed career, I would follow a Development Management course too, but that’s a different story). I remember how it felt like the antithesis to the way I work. Manager as […]
Becoming Better 