050 – The Role of Observation in Shaping IDEMS

[00:00:00] David: Hello and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m David Stern and for this special 50th episode I’m here with my co-founder Danny Parsons.

[00:00:17] Danny: Thanks David, nice to be here.

[00:00:19] David: Yes.

[00:00:20] Danny: Yeah it’s impressive getting to 50 already it seems like only the other day we were starting so.

[00:00:26] David: Absolutely. It’s a good time to reflect, actually. A landmark. It’s a small landmark, but it is a landmark. And so this episode is really about reflection and observation, I suppose.

[00:00:40] Danny: Yeah I think we’re going to talk about maybe observations we did even before starting IDEMS and reflecting on those experiences a bit and how that relates to IDEMS and us now.

[00:00:54] David: Yes, I think in other episodes we’ve mentioned how when we met, it was really your observation skills that I picked up on and that led to our collaboration sort of starting. And you, I think at that point, didn’t value them as much as you do now.

[00:01:11] Danny: Yeah, definitely. It was you observing me observing, I guess. And I didn’t feel that as being very useful compared to the people who are rushing around and doing everything, which seemed much more important. Which I guess maybe speaks a little bit about sort of short term and long term, I guess, you know, that people rushing around with getting things done right now. And I was more observing, which benefited me in the long run, but maybe I didn’t realize it as much at the time.

[00:01:44] David: And the key is it didn’t just benefit you. That level of observation meant that you gained a deeper understanding and when you were then doing, you were doing in a way which was more thoughtful and more measured in a sense.

[00:01:57] Danny: Yeah, again, I don’t think I was doing much of that consciously in a sense, or thinking about that aspect consciously. But yeah I think that’s, that definitely sort of helped to be in that sort of observer position and, and have this kind of space, I guess, to not just observe, but to sort of process it and think about it and reflect on what’s happening and gaining that deeper insight, I guess.

[00:02:24] David: Exactly. And I think part of the key things is that we are certainly not critiquing the doers, so to speak. You know, if there hadn’t been the doers running around doing everything, you’d have got sucked in and you’d have become a doer.

[00:02:35] Danny: Yeah, absolutely. They were getting the immediate stuff done. And they were much better at it than me, was sort of my thinking at the time. I mean, we’re talking about the time we were together in Kenya and we had activities like maths camps going on, which are these very intensive one week programs for students. And so, yeah, a lot needed to get done. And I was sort of coming in as less experienced than many of the other people, really good people involved in running these, and they’d been running these for a while.

[00:03:06] David: But I think it’s important to state that many of those people who were running them at that point, and who were involved, who had maybe a little bit more experience than you, because you were able to step back and observe, within a few years, you were the one overseeing. And it’s that sort of combination which is so important and so I guess part of what I think is a really good reflection for us now is not on the relative importance of sort of doing against observing, but it’s on the mutual benefits of there being this combination and there being this space for observation.

[00:03:40] Danny: Yeah, I mean, I felt sort of lucky at the time just to be able to go into something where, you know, there was lots of people who were running the activities and I was able to observe, and I came in through another organisation and able to do that. And so that’s quite a luxury to have essentially more people than you need to get things done, which is not a luxury that you often have in especially small organisations now like IDEMS.

[00:04:07] David: This is, I think where one of the things which has come up for us is we are concerned that we are not giving that space to our team to be able to be part of things where they can be observers and to be growing themselves in that sort of way and, and gain, I think, experience.

[00:04:24] Danny: Yeah. And when I reflect on it, the longer period of time that we then started working together after those initial activities, it was that I was fortunate to have that space, I guess, to be in that observing and being able to go to things, even small things like meetings or events where I wasn’t under pressure to deliver or to contribute necessarily, but could just participate and observe and gain quite a lot from that.

These are sort of things that maybe it’s harder at the moment for us to give to members of our team because people are coming in and having more responsibility straight away, which is also very good in other ways, they’re getting a lot of experiences that I didn’t get at that point.

[00:05:11] David: Absolutely, but you then did get opportunities where you then were given responsibilities, you had that combination of the two. So I don’t think we’re saying it’s bad to come in and have responsibilities. We’re saying that’s good as well. But I think the observation we’re sort of having is that it’s also good to have that time to be an observer.

[00:05:32] Danny: Yeah, it was observing, and then also, you know, we’re getting involved in things where I wasn’t sure if this was something I was good at or I would enjoy or I’d do well. And so, that space as well to kind of explore different aspects of work and find out a little bit more about what I was good at, what things I could work on and get better at and what things I just thought, actually, no, I can see other people are much better at this and I can focus on other things and sort of work with these other people.

[00:06:08] David: And this, I suppose is, you know, one of our principles, this is transdisciplinary, it’s this element that you will put out of your comfort zone into things and opportunities where you didn’t necessarily have the explicit expertise, but you were put in a position where you could see, can you make yourself useful in that position?

Again, it’s that privilege to be able to go in to those sorts of contexts without the pressure, to be able to observe and spend time when you’re not under pressure to deliver. Although maybe it wasn’t just that you weren’t under pressure, because there were some pretty interesting situations you found yourself in.

[00:06:49] Danny: Yeah but I think it was certainly, you know, I wasn’t in a position of working for specific clients and we had customers that needed this to be done and we had these hard deliverables and so on. So, we had pressures in other ways and I think I got involved in many things that I hadn’t thought of getting involved in terms of, you know, thinking about finances and stuff like that, how we were going to fund the fact that I was on this sort of stipend internship kind of role in Kenya. We did things like go and look at office space when we were thinking the team was getting a little bigger and deciding is this a lot and can we afford this and so on. That was not things I expected to get involved in, but that really gave me a rounded experience because it was that kind of stuff, but also very detailed on them going to work with us, you know, a specific school and having to plan an activity with a school or with a university club in a very small scale thing.

[00:07:48] David: Let’s be clear, let’s reiterate, this was sort of five years pre IDEMS in some sense?

[00:07:54] Danny: Yeah.

[00:07:54] David: And one of the things that we’re sort of saying here is that that exposure and experience you had in really varied ways is very similar to what I’d had maybe five years or a bit more before that when I’d landed in Kenya as a local lecturer and just seeing the range of opportunities that were there.

I’d, of course, grown up in Niger and West Africa, and otherwise I don’t think I’d have been able to seize those opportunities. And just as you’d already had experience and exposure in Kibera and South Africa and elsewhere, so when you came in as well, you weren’t coming in without experiences. But both of us, I think, when we came into our respective opportunities there, we were very much in the observer role first, and then found ourselves in a doing role.

[00:08:49] Danny: Yeah, I also feel, I don’t know if you feel this, but there’s a sort of aspect of not just coming in in an observer role, but coming in a little bit under the radar or in a sort of don’t know quite how to put it, but in a sort of, not quite in a junior role, but not in a sort of big way, not coming in with as a person from a big organization or someone with a big job title, it was just a person coming in. I guess, you know, you were just a person coming in and I was just a sort of person coming in.

[00:09:19] David: Yeah, exactly. And I was just another lecturer to be given courses like everyone else. But it allowed me to understand and learn about the systems. And of course, I was a bit different from other lecturers who were there, but, yeah, I wasn’t there to do something.

[00:09:35] Danny: Yes. And of course, you know, you are treated differently and it is different coming in from the outside, but it’s sort of coming in and embedding yourself a little bit, and just being kind of within the systems, I guess, and within…

[00:09:50] David: This is, this is important because this is something which I’ve believed about for a long time, which is this brain circulation.

[00:09:54] Danny: Yeah.

[00:09:55] David: You know, we talk about what are the things to go against brain drain, which is a big problem in a lot of African contexts in particular, but also elsewhere, where real talent gets good international opportunities and you don’t want to stop them, but that means that your environment is missing that talent.

And this idea that actually good brain circulation, to me, requires people to come in from the outside, not just with expectations on them to be different, but just expectations to be part of the system.

[00:10:25] Danny: Yeah, and I guess also not on expectations coming in as the expert who’s going to show, do this, this and this. I have the experience from here and I’m coming into here and, you know, for me especially, I was learning much more than I was contributing, is how I saw it. And so I think you come in more as a peer, and so on, with other people. The experiences you get can be kind of different, I just feel you do get treated slightly differently, I think, as someone who’s, you know, coming to live there and stay there for a long time, versus someone who’s coming to visit for a while. And that’s sort of subtle things that…

[00:11:01] David: No, no, no, but that’s really important, because there’s this intermediary thing as well. So I remember explicitly, when I came in, I was a very junior lecturer. And so my mentors were the staff there, who were more senior lecturers. And so I was coming in, as you put it, in this junior role, and there to learn. But I brought expertise, which they valued, and so it was this mutual collaboration, this sort of collaboration of peers.

But the point that you’re making about not just coming in for a short time, once I’d established myself that I was part of the team, but I wasn’t always treated differently because the expectation was I wouldn’t compete for progression within the institution. So actually coming in as somebody who was there for a long time, but not somebody who is a threat for people who are looking to progress within the institution gave me a lot of opportunities to collaborate and to work well with others.

And I think your situation was a bit different, but it was similar. But you were never a threat to anyone. You were always seen as support.

[00:12:08] Danny: Yeah. I guess mine was a bit different, not coming into a sort of institution like university. But yeah, I think there’s parallels there. And yeah, it’s hard to maybe put your finger on exactly what it is you’re getting, but you are just seen more as a peer than someone who’s coming in, you know, if a lecturer came in from Oxford, even for a month or something like that, that’s very different to someone coming in at the same level and lower levels than other people on the staff.

For me, I was sort of coming in to work with AMI, the local NGO. I was sort of representing SAMI, I guess, the charity in the UK, but not coming in from an organization to support this small organization. I was coming in to work for AMI and I wasn’t running it. And there was other people, you know, the board of AMI and so on, who were in charge, so I was working for them.

And yeah, it is that sort of, you get those insights and that allows you to observe in a different way and sort of get insights that you can’t easily get, not just, I think on the work side for me, it was also very much on the sort of lifestyle and lives and sort of understanding what it’s like for people there. And I guess for me, it was easy, as a starting point to sort of understand people from their education background, you know, I was a mathematician and a lot of people I was working with were mathematicians. So we could sort of compare notes on studying and I’d only just come out of my degree. There were a lot of differences there. But that was sort of something that we could easily kind of share and I could learn a lot about, and I think informs quite a lot of still my kind of thinking today, because it’s understanding that education side.

And that came even before when I was working at AIMS. I don’t know if we’ve talked much about AIMS on the podcast. It’s the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, which I was working in their centre in South Africa. There was 48 students, master’s students when I was there from over 20 different African countries. So that kind of experience was a whole, you know, another level.

[00:14:18] David: Exactly.

[00:14:19] Danny: And the things I could sort of learn and observe from all those people was incredible and from countries I never thought I would ever meet someone from, let alone even go to. It was things like these people coming in to do a master’s and I was seeing that I was coming in just having done a master’s being younger, I think, than everyone else on the program and finding out about that and the struggles of people to get to finish their degrees, opportunities for studying even at degree level and in master’s level was not, you know, as automatic almost as it was for me. And lots of little things like that, which kind of inform a lot of how you think.

[00:15:06] David: I’m really glad you brought up AIMS, because I still feel this is maybe the most impressive mathematics initiative on the African continent. What they’ve managed to do in different ways, they’ve had their problems, we both know, but what they’ve managed to do in different ways has been, at a scale, which no other maths initiative I can think of is, for the African continent. It has its critiques, and it has people who really support it. And I would argue we are both.

[00:15:37] Danny: Yeah, sure, yes, yeah, I think critical friends.

[00:15:41] David: Critical friends. Yes, exactly. We’re huge supporters.

[00:15:43] Danny: Yeah.

[00:15:44] David: But we can be critical and we have been and…

[00:15:46] Danny: But yeah, offering a world class master’s education you know, centres across Africa.

[00:15:52] David: Absolutely.

[00:15:52] Danny: For students across Africa for free. It’s, yeah, incredible. Plus alongside then all the other stuff they do in terms of research and education and outreach.

[00:16:01] David: Exactly. And the thing which is so… This is one of my inspirations, always, and I think, as you know, and you share in some sense, one of the inspirations for IDEMS was that it’s not clear what their sustainability plan is. You know, they have ideas on this, they’ve worked towards it since I was involved in 2013. And as long as you’ve been around, they’ve been talking about how to make it sustainable. But the issues around making such a set of institutes sustainable is incredibly challenging. And what we would love to do is actually in the long term, you know, maybe be that critical friend who becomes part of enabling that sustainability.

[00:16:36] Danny: Yeah. And supporting them. I think we kind of continued to support in our small ways in terms of supporting the programs, and so on, and teaching…

[00:16:44] David: And teaching on their programs, and also the doctoral school.

[00:16:46] Danny: And getting other IDEMS staff now involved in teaching and sort of taking over some of the things, which is really nice. So yeah, and maybe in the future we can continue to support them even more in bigger ways, maybe.

[00:16:58] David: We will see. But I think the point and the reason you brought that up so nicely is they have been really good at this brain circulation. You know, not just developing talent from across the continent, but bringing people from the outside in, like yourself and many others, who then get exposed to the incredible power of interacting in the African continent with these really strong mathematical scientists, who are going to be leaders in the future, many of them. And that’s such a privilege to be part of that environment.

[00:17:32] Danny: Yeah, and I think the other thing that, you know, very kind of pan African as well, bringing lots of students from lots of different African countries together, who wouldn’t normally get that exposure necessarily in their countries to meet so many different people from their neighbouring countries or further away countries on the continent.

And that sort of collectiveness, and that sort of power of, you know, being together is really kind of, you know, inspiring and not just sort of I’m on my own in my little place. And having that connection then, you know, in the future, they talk about the AIMS family, which I really like, which is sort of your cohort, but you interact with the cohorts in the centre in Ghana and in Senegal and in Rwanda, and then the cohorts from all the previous years. And that’s the sort of network that you have to draw on.

[00:18:18] David: I have a very concrete instance of this, when we were in Bahir Dar last year, in Ethiopia. I was talking to the new head of department, who I’ve known for a long time because he went to AIMS.

[00:18:29] Danny: Yeah.

[00:18:29] David: And he was roommates with a student who is now the head of department at Maseno, he’s actually the dean now in Maseno University in Kenya, who was my former student.

[00:18:37] Danny: Yeah.

[00:18:37] David: These sort of linkages which come in, and into these positions of power, who have had that experience and have those connections across countries.

[00:18:44] Danny: And I think this is something that we’ve touched on a lot. It also really kind of promotes that collaborative sense. I feel that AIMS, it can be, you know, very easy when you’re looking in, your education, trying to get your master’s, trying to get your PhD, very competitive, very few places, you know, very few opportunities to get ahead. But when you’re thinking of the sort of AIMS family and the kind of network of people, you’re sort of there to support each other. And you have this common experience together that you don’t have in so many other ways.

I could imagine, you know, then, these sort of departments in the same or different countries can maybe easily more collaborate, you know, based on their experience at AIMS and what AIMS is trying to achieve in terms of development in Africa is, yeah, is another interesting aspect.

[00:19:36] David: I didn’t expect this to be an AIMS episode. I guess the two of us discussing, we’re so passionate about it, it doesn’t surprise me.

I want to finish by coming back to this sort of in this reflective episode, thinking about observation and the privilege we’ve had to be in these positions of observation. And the observation that we’ve had that we are not necessarily providing enough opportunities for that within IDEMS.

[00:20:01] Danny: And I think it was sort of recently we recognized how important this was when we were thinking about the principles of IDEMS and how sort of naturally we share them and why that is. And a lot of it comes from that experience and those observations and those insights that we kind of gained from that. And so I think that’s also why we’re thinking that this is so important, that other people in our team…

[00:20:29] David: Not just our team, though, and this is the thing. In the world we live in, everybody’s talking about how fast things are going. You’ve got these billion dollar AI Startups who are already going bankrupt because although they raised the money just a couple of years ago they can’t compete with the big things. Everything is so fast, we need to be able to create space where people aren’t always rushed. We’re not saying it’s bad to be rushed. It creates creativity in all sorts of ways, but there should also be space for observation. That’s part of what we’re saying and part of the reflection that we need to bring to our leadership role.

[00:21:04] Danny: Yeah, and observation is, you know, in another sense, it’s learning as well. It’s sort of putting yourself in a position of, I’m mainly here, you know, to learn in this aspect, and I can contribute a bit. But I’m observing and I’m learning and I’m, you know, advancing myself. That’s a really nice sort of luxury to have, thinking ahead then of how you can contribute later.

[00:21:29] David: Well, and not just how you, but how that learning contributes later. It’s that taking the time, it’s not always having the short term, it’s also recognising that you need observation to do better in the long term, because otherwise you can get stuck into cycles where you’re not moving forward. The observation, this is what allows you to leap ahead. And it is a privilege, but it’s a privilege which we should be enabling more than we do.

[00:22:00] Danny: Yeah. That’s a nice point to finish on.

[00:22:02] David: Thank you. This has been a good 50th episode, I think. I’ve enjoyed the discussion.

[00:22:07] Danny: I’ve enjoyed it, and we’ve got more to think about and more to do.

[00:22:11] David: Absolutely. Thank you.