Tag: mentoring

My new years resolutions for 2025

Lost Gravity at Wallibi

Following my review of last year… here’s my New Years Resolutions for 2025 which follows on from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 ones.

  1. Find a new position of employment
    The word is out, I’m leaving BBC R&D after almost 21 years. I’ll be taking a few holidays and breaks but ultimately will be looking at new positions of employment. I may do something else like consulting, academia or develop one of the many side projects further.
  2. Finish my dating book
    Another throw back to 2024, The dating book is so close, self publishing is the way forward, rechecked with Grammerly again (avoiding the AI stuff, which I tested and it turned the chapters into something very middle of the road and not my voice) and I’m aware the first edition will be bad. But I’m very close but struggling with a book name, subtitle, cover, etc. I also made a stake to publicly release before Hannah finishes her PhD. The race is on!
  3. Head even further a field with the scooter
    Now I will have lots of leave and holidays, I’m thinking this is a good time to finally get this one crossed off. I could easily drive over to Hull or even Newcastle and get the ferry to Rotterdam or even Ijmuiden (Amsterdam). Maybe a week would be perfect and I could finally use those side saddles I bought.
  4. Learn to drive a car
    So with more time, I could actually start booking driving lessons and book a test. I’ve been told in the past, I likely won’t need many lessons as my road sense is high driving a motorbike for 27 years. I did pass the car theory once before and was flawless in the hazard perception test. Plus I now know my full bike licence gives me a car provisional.
  5. Listen to 25 Audiobooks in the year
    As mentioned in the review from 2024, this was quite easy which surprised me. There were some great books and I do like how it expands my mind. I’m going to expand it to 25 as there were a few shorter books last year.
  6. Go to a new country
    This is always a good one and honestly there are some key countries which I have passed through many times in the airport but never left. I’m looking at you Switzerland, Czechia and Austria. Although I am also thinking South Korea after needing to cancel in the pandemic and part of me is still regretting not heading to Hong Kong and feels like Taiwan should be higher on my list before its too late?
  7. Go to a new Rollercoaster park
    A regular resolution but a good one and if I head to another country, its certainly high on the list that I will find a way to check out what options for a day of pure rollercoasters.
  8. See more of my friends further a field
    My friends are diverse, interesting and great to be around; especially right now. During the Covid pandemic, I would call them up on the off chance and have some incredible conversations. It was amazing and some went on for 4 hours. So in 2025, I’m going to catch up with more of my friends I haven’t seen in years. Be it on the phone, online, in person, what ever works.
  9. Personal knowledge management and task rethink
    I’m a little annoyed with the way I’m managing my notes, tasks and projects. I liked using Trello but don’t like the closed nature of it, I like Obsidian but it is closed source also puts me off. I’m also using  Todolist for tasks which is insane but I had to move from todo.txt which was just too basic for my uses.
    I like what I’m seeing with Anytype & Tagspaces but also seen some interesting uses of markdown with Logseq? This whole personal knowledge management or as I use to call it personal semantic stores.
    So now is a good time to relook at everything especially since I finally got Nextcloud working on my NAS (finally!).
  10. Be more active about my personal health
    Especially over the last few months, I have been pushing my health too much. On top of this, I am getting older and need to be better about things like sleep and exercise. More Volleyball, more consistency and more investigating those problems I keep ignoring.
  11. Create a new social event
    It’s been a while since geekdinner, barcamp, hackday, geeks talk sexy, 2nd degree dinner, Manchester futurists and much more. I’ve been hovering on creating a new type of social event post pandemic and come across a few good examples recently. 2025 is a good time to do something different and unique I feel, especially as it would be good to get back into the swing of things.
  12. Do my bit for others in the community
    One thing I certainly will miss after I leave the BBC is mentoring. I mentored quite a few people and even been involved in reverse mentoring (where I was mentoring someone further up the hierarchy about diversity and inclusion). I was part of Million mentors but struggled with work commitments, so now seems like a good time to do similar or potentially look at other things I could do, like helping people to manage technology?

#blacklivesmatter, here comes the difficult part!

Canary in the coal mine

I found this guardian opinion piece pretty apt.

Everyone applauds a movement for social justice until it “goes too far” – when it starts making “unreasonable demands” in the service of its “political agenda”. This moment, where sympathetic onlookers start shimmying away from their earlier expressions of solidarity, was always inevitable. It is easy to agree that black lives should matter. But it is hard to contemplate all the ways the world needs to change to make them matter – and for most people, it’s simpler to say that the goal is admirable, of course, but that these particular demands from these particular protests at this particular moment are just going too far. We project our failures of imagination on to the movement, and we decamp from the cheerleading stands into the peanut gallery. “Defund the police”? How about we come up with a less provocative slogan, for a start? These Black Lives Matter protesters, they don’t make things easy for themselves, do they?

We tend to think that protest is confrontational, and change is consensual – first, a painful moment with marches in the streets and impassioned orations, followed by something less dramatic, a softer path of negotiation and adaptation. But the opposite is true. Protest is the easy bit. More specifically, protest is a smooth part sandwiched between two very rough ones.

The momentum to change things for the long run is always the issue. How do you make sustainable change? This is part of the reason why I’m interested in the public pledges by companies.

You didnt come this far to only come this far
Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

Me personally, I have doing other things in the background. For example I took the opportunity Tech for good put out on twitter to record 3 podcasts with other people of colour.

I along with other noble colleagues have taken up the challenge of reverse mentoring the all white all male senior management at work. I’m taking it very seriously as its a great opportunity to actually make some long lasting changes.

There’s more happening but I need to keep that quiet for now. Hope to have more details to share soon!

Intersectionality and the real problem of diversity in silos

Audre-Lorde-single-issue-1024x387

Many companies still consider diversity policies solely in terms of dealing with separate categories of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, socio-economic class, religion or disability. However, a better awareness of how these strands overlap — a concept known as intersectionality — can improve an organisation’s understanding of its staff.

– FT

I can’t tell you how many times I have expressed this problem with traditional diversity to people. Most thing they are doing a great thing focusing on diversity, and I never want to stop that. However they miss the point of true diversity…

As the FT piece points out (found via Jonathan Ashong Lamptey)

Treating people as individuals is key to improving this perception, she says. Taking an intersectional view means recognising individuals can have multiple identities that overlap, for example an Asian LGBT woman or a white disabled man.

Looking at the law, the example which I would use to demonstrate the importance of intersectionality is Baylis-Flannery v. DeWilde.

In the case of the complainant, who alleged discrimination by her employer on the basis of sex and race, the Tribunal found that the discrimination she experienced was intersectional, and observed:

While the findings of discrimination made in this case are of sufficient gravity that Ms Baylis-Flannery could succeed on either enumerated ground of race or sex, or on both grounds, one set following the other, the law must acknowledge that she is not a woman who happens to be Black, or a Black person who happens to be female, but a Black woman. The danger in adopting a single ground approach to the analysis of this case is that it could be characterized as a sexual harassment matter that involved a Black complainant, thus negating the importance of the racial discrimination that she suffered as a Black woman. In terms of the impact on her psyche, the whole is more than the sum of the parts: the impact of these highly discriminatory acts on her personhood is serious. (2003 HRTO 28, para 145)

But as Jonathan points out lets look beyond legal discrimination, as its easy to see the problem. He uses a good example of himself to show how in certain contexts he has advantages and disadvantages.

…he says: “Being a 6ft 2 man has its advantages in the workplace but being black has disadvantages, at different times and different places.”

This also gets more tricky once you have a number of people who share similar categories. My example I always use is if you have a large number of white women from a middle class background, how does this effect the inclusion or culture of the business for other non-white or working class women? Outside the workplace I have no issue with women in tech initiatives, but I really do like what Sarah Lamb did with the Girl Geekdinners, which felt a lot more inclusive due to the 50% invited rule.

Its complex but thats the point, diversity and inclusion isn’t a thing you can throw magic dust/money at. Likewise training is good but its not something you think about away from base then come back and forget.

The way to build empathy, foster inclusiveness and create trust in the workplace, according to Mr Ashong Lamptey, is to discuss difficult topics in employee groups or staff networks that share a common identity. “Instead of guessing, ask the people who are having those experiences,” he says.

…

“Organisations should make this part of a long-term strategy,” Mr Ashong Lamptey says.

I have to say I especially like the idea of the reverse mentoring whereby managers are mentored by a minority staff member.

If only we could take a number of these practices and group them into something we could test and write up the studies of?