Tjelvar Olsson

Forward, Anyway Sometimes uncertainty can feel overwhelming and become debilitating. One year ago I decided to start my own business.

Sometimes uncertainty can feel overwhelming and become debilitating. One year ago I decided to start my own business. The decision came with a lot of uncertainty. Here are some reflections on dealing with uncertainty.

www.linkedin.com/pulse/forwar...

How I Use Energy Levels to Organise My Work Do your energy levels vary throughout the day? About a year ago I started organising my work based on regular patterns I observed in my energy levels. I can’t remember where I heard about this idea, b...

Do your energy levels vary throughout the day?
About a year ago I started organising my work based on patterns I observed in my energy levels.
In this post I describe what emerged from that exercise.

www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-i-...

The Lonely Side of Being a Manager Sometimes being a middle manager is a pain in the butt. I remember one situation in particular many, many years ago.

Sometimes being a middle manager can feel lonely. Particularly when things are going badly and you are getting grief from above and below. Often it is not clear what is and isn’t appropriate to share with your team. What can you do in these situations?

www.linkedin.com/pulse/lonely...

The Power of Computers This week I finished a project that would have taken me 25 years to complete if I didn’t know how to code. The project involved identifying and classifying objects in images extracted from video recor...

This week I finished a project that would have taken me 25 years to complete if I didn’t know how to code.

😩 Classifying images manually and entering data into a spreadsheet
🤩 Seeing 13M classifications completed in 15 hours

www.linkedin.com/pulse/power-...

Going Off On My Own Last year I decided to start my own company. At the time it wasn’t completely clear to me what the company would do.

Last year I decided to start my own company. At the time it wasn’t completely clear to me what the company would do. But I reckoned that the only way to find out was to give it a go.

Here's where I’m at now, and how the name and logo materialised.

www.linkedin.com/pulse/going-...

Developing Experience A couple of days ago I encountered a mysterious behaviour when writing data to an external hard drive. A compute job expected to produce less than 0.

A compute job expected to produce less than 0.5TB was on track to generate 8TB — and I only had a 2TB hard drive.
How could I be generating 8TB from a subset of 2.3TB? www.linkedin.com/pulse/develo...

Things That Have Helped Me Deal with Change and Uncertainty It was the middle of the 1990s and pharmaceutical companies were merging left, right, and centre. My dad had just found out that the headquarters of the department he was heading up was relocating to ...

Change can be stressful, particularly if it is associated with uncertainty, and a lack of control. How can one deal with that?

www.linkedin.com/pulse/things...

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff In a previous post I wrote about the benefits of putting expectations into writing. That post was concerned with high-level fundamentals of how the team should operate.

There are usually many ways to solve a problem, and they come with different types of pain. If the people in your team are the ones that will feel the pain, it makes sense that they should have a say in the matter. www.linkedin.com/pulse/dont-s...

Increasing Autonomy by Putting Down Boundaries When I was first put in charge of a team I ran into several surreal situations that I could not make sense of. For example, some people seemed incapable of asking for help.

When I was first put in charge of a team I incorrectly assumed — that people could read my mind — and knew where the boundaries were. This post describes my journey resolving that. www.linkedin.com/pulse/increa...

It's a Star Wars TIE fighter 🤩

5 Generic Lessons Extracted From 20 Bioimage Analysis Projects Whilst working at the John Innes Centre I was involved in many bioimage analysis projects. My work involved talking to biologists and creating Python scripts to analyse their image data.

5 Generic Lessons Extracted From 20 Bioimage Analysis Projects www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-gene...

Asking for Feedback Getting feedback is an amazing way to learn. In fact, without feedback it is very difficult to learn at all.

In theory asking for feedback is simple. However, in practice I’ve found that there are several hurdles to overcome. The linked post discusses some of these hurdles, and how to overcome them. www.linkedin.com/pulse/asking...

3 Sources of Friction in Collaborations, Even Successful Ones Collaboration is a process that allows us to achieve more than we could on our own — that’s pretty awesome! The textbook answer for creating a successful collaboration is to have a shared goal, clearl...

What is it that introduces friction and strain into collaborations?

www.linkedin.com/pulse/3-sour...

5 Approaches for Getting Better Scientific Support At the beginning of my scientific career I had great admiration for the professors and researchers above me. However, whilst I was busy looking up in admiration I failed to notice all the core machine...

Some researchers shout and complain until they get their way. Then on the other hand there are the researchers that never shout, and get support that goes above and beyond. How do they do it?
Here are five things I’ve noticed successful researchers doing.
www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-appr...

Misconceptions around the pain of constantly changing priorities My heart sank. I was in a leadership meeting and I was being told my team would have to switch focus again.

Have you ever suffered from the pain of constantly changing priorities? www.linkedin.com/pulse/miscon...

The Power of Open Questions The lack of air in the room was making me lethargic. I grasped my coffee cup, but it was empty, as was the plate of biscuits on the table.

Open questions are questions that cannot be answered with simple yes or no. Open questions encourage reflection — this makes them powerful! www.linkedin.com/pulse/power-...

Congratulations! 🎉

The Interactive Effect of Pesticides, Heat Stress, and Population on the Performance of a Mite Pest, Tetranychus Urticae Global warming is a cause for concern and is predicted to diversely affect agricultural systems. One aspect of the predicted effects is the susceptibility of pests to chemical pesticides. It is there....

The first publication from my group is out!
A first attempt at teasing out the possible effects global warming will have on agricultural pests.
Much more work to come.
Please read all about it here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

How I made reflection part of my routine I was exhausted, it had been non-stop all day. However, if you asked me what I had accomplished I couldn’t answer you.

How I made reflection part of my routine www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-i-...

Celebrating More Almost 40 years ago my parents took me to Legoland in Denmark. I was obsessed with Lego, and the experience exceeded my expectations.

Celebrating More — strategies for dealing with Negative Bias www.linkedin.com/pulse/celebr...

Overcoming the limits of the human brain – lessons from software engineering Have you ever felt good about completing a complex task — only to find yourself waking up in the middle of the night realising that you forgot a crucial detail? $#!+! I can't believe I forgot about th...

Overcoming the limits of the human brain – lessons from software engineering www.linkedin.com/pulse/overco...

Unsolicited Advice The other day I was ranting to my wife about something that had upset me at work. She politely listened.

Check out my latest LinkedIn post: Unsolicited Advice www.linkedin.com/pulse/unsoli...

Making effective use of words In the late 1960s Albert Mehrabian showed that words only account for a small fraction of communication. That tone of voice and body language have a greater impact than the actual words used.

Check out my latest LinkedIn post: Making effective use of words www.linkedin.com/pulse/making...

6 leadership activities to promote learning Building a high-performing team requires you, as a leader, to help the individuals within your team learn and grow. However, you soon realise that what has worked well for you does not necessarily wor...

6 leadership activities to promote learning: www.linkedin.com/pulse/6-lead...

How to create a culture of paranoia, cynicism and self-interest Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like you were in competition with a colleague or a neighboring team? Even though you were meant to be working towards the same goal! What is up with th...

Check out my latest LinkedIn post: How to create a culture of paranoia, cynicism and self-interest www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-cr...

BBSRC launches refreshed Forward Look BBSRC has unveiled a bold vision to harness the power of bioscience with the launch of its updated Forward Look for UK bioscience.

The BBSRC's refreshed forward look www.ukri.org/news/bbsrc-l... (released yesterday) reads like it has been heavily inspired by the JIC's HP3 vision www.jic.ac.uk/about-us/hea... (launched 4 or 5 years ago)

7 techniques I've used to get out of arguments The other day my wife told me: "You value your friends' advice more than mine". My monkey brain immediately rejected the idea, and started racing for counter arguments to show that it was not true.

Check out my latest LinkedIn article: 7 techniques I've used to get out of arguments www.linkedin.com/pulse/7-tech...

Three activities for building a high-performing team What does it take to build a high-performing team? What activities can you take as a leader to help your team outperform expectations and deliver superior business value? Here are three activities tha...

Check out my latest LinkedIn post: Three activities for building a high-performing team www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-...

Ensuring your team gets the credit it deserves If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? There are layers to this philosophical question. Does something exist without being perceived by consciousness? Can o...

Check out my latest post: Ensuring your team gets the credit it deserves www.linkedin.com/pulse/ensuri...

Expert Generalists Being an Expert Generalist should be treated as a first-class skill, one that can be assessed and taught.

NEW POST

Increasingly our industry favors deep specialists. But we've found our most effective colleagues have a broad-based skill that's based on spanning many specialties. Unmesh, Gitanjali, and I write about explicitly recognizing this as a first-class skill

martinfowler.com/articles/exp...