A How-To in Reverse — what not to do.
The GIN Project goal is to showcase the environment of global indices and bring transparency to the field. In that spirit, we want to be transparent about the leadership of the GIN Project. We are the graduate students who ran the GIN Project for Innovations for Peace and Development (IPD) and it’s co-Director Dr. Weaver. In fact, graduate and undergraduate students in large part run IPD. We want to share some of the lessons we learned the GIN Project to help you better understand what it takes to run the GIN project, our progress so far, and GIN’s future trajectory.
We learned as we went along. We would like to say we always made the right move. We would like to say that we knew what we were getting into. But this wouldn’t quite capture the reality of the project. This is not to say we failed to accomplish what we set out to do. But we learned that producing work and leading are two different things. This post is our way of acknowledging the mistakes we made and where we have room for improvement. We are airing everything out and preparing the way for the next task team leader (TTL). This post is our way of saying goodbye.
Katherine
First, when Dr. Weaver offered me the co-lead position, I never questioned whether I was prepared to lead this project. It didn’t occur to me I had no comparable experience. I liked the work and I planned to volunteer for it anyway; at least with this position it would be paid work. Plus, I was impressed that I would get to be a TTL. When I reflected on the fact that I had never led a team I realized that I had unknowingly jumped in the deep end and had a crisis of confidence.
I questioned why Dr. Weaver chose me. When I didn’t understand all the technical components Ryan talked about, I thought I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to lead. It didn’t matter that the data coding team was my area and the technical components was his. When I wasn’t sure the team would meet the deadline, I blamed myself and worried I was failing everyone. I let the feeling that I was letting my team down consume me. It didn’t matter that Dr. Weaver said she choose me and believed in me. It didn’t matter that no one ever said anything negative about my leadership. I made the mistake of losing faith in my abilities.
When the team was able to meet an important deadline, I started to understand I wasn’t hopeless. I looked around and realized I must have done something right. I realized that my leadership, abilities, and hard work had helped my team meet the deadline. In order to regain faith in my abilities, I had to get out of my own way. I had to to realize I was enough and I deserved to lead this team. I will never be perfect but I am capable. In the future, I may question my abilities but I will never lose faith in them. I will hold onto the knowledge that I can do anything I set my mind to.
Second, I never realized how much effort management takes. It took all of my energy and focus to stay on top of reviewing indices and keep projects moving forward. I never had time for solo projects and I had to learn not to over promise. This did not lead to a crisis because several team members were skeptical of how much I thought I could do myself and always asked for more assignments. In November, I realized what was going on, accepted my time limitations, and created more balance. This led to a more productive team and work plan.
Third, I let small to-do items fall through the cracks. Small cleaning projects were forgotten and not every document was given as thorough a look as should of been. Each unfinished task was insignificant alone but collectively they added up. This summer, as we were cleaning and transferring indices, we found all the leftover to-do items. Simple fixes, that would have taken a few minutes to deal with when they initially came up, added up to hours of extra work. There was more moments of “oh, yea I meant to get back to that” and “oops, I never looked that up,” than I would care to count. I let the big picture of a looming deadline overwhelm the small but important details. Learning to step back, breath, and double check my to-do list is a skill I’ll take from this experience.
Last, I forgot to laugh and enjoy the people and the work. It was important to me that the people I was working with enjoyed being on the team. I accommodated their schedules, took into account their commitments, and paid attention to their stated goals for joining the team. I did not give myself the same courtesy. A leader should put their team first but there is a reason that airlines suggest putting on your own oxygen mask before assisting others. I believe in leading by example and, in several respects, I didn’t successfully model mental health and selfcare.
Ryan
The physicist Niels Bohr once said that an expert is a person who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field. It is in the spirit of this quote that I can claim that my time working on the GIN project has been a quest for expertise. I’ve made mistakes both small and large, grammatical and mathematical, incidental and consequential. From the very beginning, as we were working on protocols to deconstruct global indices, my unfamiliarity with these profoundly influential rankings foiled plan after plan.
As the problem space became clearer, less of the work resembled stumbling around in the dark. The nature of my mistakes began to change. Instead of obviously misrepresenting the internal structure of an index, I was making subtler errors involving conditional variables buried in subindices. I was also discovering how difficult it would be to code the little Python script that built the network graph. Most of the mistakes I made at this stage were conceptual, not in the code itself. This led to a series of network graphs that were 80% correct. Challengingly, the remaining 20% was wrong for different reasons each time I rewrote the script.
After finally resolving the issues in the script, I was excited to have a graph representation of all the coding the team completed. The graph, however, turned out to be an unwieldy monster that only really helped us address 50% of the questions we had. As you can see below on the left, the thousands of nodes and edges in the graph made visual inspection tedious and obscured the actual phenomenon we care about: cross-index borrowing. It wasn’t until I understood the inadequacy of this format that I was convicted to do more coding and produce the graph on the bottom right. This was a clear demonstration to me that mastery can only follow a multitude of mistakes.
Finally, I think my biggest mistake, and only regret, when it comes to the GIN project is not being more ambitious. I wish that I had been more enthusiastic, advocated early and often for the project, and worked to build a better relationship with our incredible group of coders. When I reflect on where the project is right now, I realize that the only reason we hadn’t reached this stage months ago was we hadn’t yet made enough mistakes. Of course, it is quite difficult to balance a project like this one with the demands of ‘real life’ and graduate school. Even so, I see now that this project has the potential to move the needle in the development space and promote better practices that could impact millions of lives.
Katherine and Ryan:
For better or worse those were our overarching mistakes. There were plenty of small mistakes too; slips of the mind, conversation the went in circles, and not enough note taking. We didn’t do enough preplanning but we learned and improved throughout the year. None of the mistakes were intentional and all are learning experiences.
As Caleb Ray, the next Task Team Leader, steps into his role we are confident in his abilities and the direction of the project. It was a privilege to lead this team and work with Innovations for Peace and Development. We are indebted to Dr. Weaver for the opportunity and thank you to everyone who worked with us. Under Caleb’s leadership we plan to continue our involvement as consultants.
Goodbye.
Kat and Ryan
Katherine Whitton graduated with a Master in Global Policy Studies from The LBJ School of Public Affairs. She joined LBJ and IPD after two years as an education volunteer in U.S. Peace Corps Ethiopia. She served as co-task team leader for IPD’s Global Indices Network (GIN) Project from August 2017-June 2018. She lives in Washington, D.C., and continues to pursue opportunities in the International Development field.
Ryan Williams graduated with a Master’s in Global Policy Studies from The LBJ School of Public Affairs and a Master’s of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He served as co-task team leader for IPD’s Global Indices Network (GIN) Project from August 2017-June 2018. He lives in Austin Texas.
