While you may think you know a lot, most surely you also DO NOT know many things. On the other hand, while you may think you are a small player in a group, quite often the bigger players of the group have just as many small-time interests and petty, unimportant thoughts as anyone else does.
I attended a meeting of the professoriate (and me, as Graeme likes to point out every time the professoriate meets) regarding one of our research groupings (I'll leave it nameless) at work. Topics of discussion were supposed to be things like vision and future of the group, leadership of the group, etc…strategic things I guess you would say. We spent about an hour on the presenters second slide, basically bickering over a name for the group. I think it was me saying "can we suspend this very important discussion for a later date, acknowledging that the name may be an issue, and move onto slide 3" that finally allowed us to move on.
On the "not knowing things" side though… We were discussing the structure of the group itself and how it would be clustered and organised. A thought that has long swum around in my mind is that there should be broad clusters at the top that are flags or tag words, and then under these there should be "research groups" eg "mathematical biology group", "industrial mathematics group", "medical/biostatistics group" and so on. Each with a leader or champion, and various members. This is good, and basically what we settled on, but while I had a good idea I didn't have the understanding of the broader research picture to be able to articulate this as appropriate. Tony (former head of maths Tony) did this beautifully (in my opinion). Essentially as a result of his vast experience in the research sphere I think. He was able to pose this as tagging our work to the Fields of Research classifications of the Australian Research Council. This makes a lot of sense.
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