Working on RESILIENCE’s Compass: the Human Factor

The Human Factor

Building a research infrastructure is not only about plans, structures, and deliverables. It is also about the human factor: how do we work as a team? What is important to each and all of us? How can we put the common elements to good use and how do we make the right decisions as persons? This human factor was key in the two-days’ workshop offered by trainers of CocoonPro and hosted by KU Leuven.

Sense Making and Aligning

The two days of sense making and aligning have been intense.  A lot of thought and exchange took place. Much of the work involved building, sharing insights and reflecting on them, relying on the group intelligence. The building was done among others via playing and gaming, powerful tools that helped us visualizing and describing what is important to each of us and to the team while building the research infrastructure. The specificity of this was that now personal motivations and “hidden concepts” could be shared. By zooming in further, key elements of the RESILIENCE compass remained that can be worked on in the future.

Putting in practice will be the next step to take, and for this each of us can count on the whole team. Besides, as one of the participants said: “We will keep learning while driving the vehicle of RESILIENCE.”

Reactions

Executive Director Roxanne Wyns, after the first training day:

“The sense making compass gave me a better insight into the expectations we have for the infrastructure as a community and each of us as individuals. As we continue to design and build RESILIENCE over the coming years, values such as openness, inclusiveness, and quality will central to our approach. For me, the most important outcome of the workshop is that it brought us closer together and strengthened our resolve to move things forward as a team.”

Executive Director Francesca Cadeddu, after the second training day: