In 2018 Greg Wilson presented the Keynote “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Ike Quebec” at the 2018 CarpentryCon meeting, after he made the decision to move on from the Software Carpentry project he had founded in 2010. His talk is available on youtube, and this post contains my notes.
Greg has help numerous positions in his professional life, and tackled many large projects. While there are many books providing advice on how start endeavors, he realized that there was little guidance on how to best exit them. Reflecting on his personalexperience with transitioning out of roles -
including leaving Academia thrice - led Greg to formulate and share the following ten rules:
- Be sure you mean it.
- Letting go is hard.
- Don’t be in-and-out.
- Do it when others think it’s time.
- You will be the last person to realize that it’s time to move on. They are probably right.
- Tell people the what, when, and why.
- Communicate that the succession plan is.
- Don’t pick your successor by yourself.
- Avoid picking somebody like yourself, avoid forming an old boys club.
- Diversity matters.
- Change is good.
- This choice belongs to the community that will work with your successor.
- Train people before you go.
- If at all possible, arrange for some overlap.
- Take a vacation to identify information that needs to be transferred.
- When you leave, leave.
- Continuing in another role confuses people.
- Leave a clear space for your successor.
- People will contact the person, not the role.
- Have some fun before you go.
- Some back burner project, something you never got around to - if not now, when?
- Reflect on what you learned.
- Don’t beat yourself up about things you didn’t get right.
- Write down what you did well.
- Remember the good things, too.
- Give yourself some credit (even if you are Canadian).
- Do something next.
- Have a plan what to do next (not just a job).
- You probably don’t deal well with being idle.
- Academia conditions us to believe that only novel things are valuable. But many tools we use and teach are old - and useful! Measure yourself by usefulness, not novelty.
- Greg believes that the biggest impact of the Carpentries will be that They taught participants how to teach, build curricula, build communities, etc.
- Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight. You have to be on the right committee to get the decision you want.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.