Associate Professor
Anna Wiewiora

Biography

Anna Wiewiora is an Associate Professor at QUT Business School and is affiliated with the Centre for Future Entreprise (CFE). Anna is using applied research to solve practical problems with the focus on navigating competing priorities within complex and time - limited work environments, such as projects. Anna’s research on paradoxes focuses on managing paradoxical tensions in complex environments, with a particular interest in the tensions affecting organisational learning and innovation. She is also interested in helping leaders develop paradoxical thinking. Anna has successfully led a number of externally funded projects that have produced practical outputs for organisations including a process model for innovation adoption in mining, training manual to help project managers’ manage ambiguities in their projects, a catalogue of learning mechanisms to enhance project learning. Anna has published over 50 articles in journals and conference proceedings across a range of disciplines including organisational learning, paradox management, knowledge management, project management, and innovation adoption.

Anna led and sucessfully completed a number of externally funded research projects:

• Project Management Institute (PMI) funded program (2019 – 2020; external funding $69,532) on managing tolerance of ambiguity in project managers;
• Collaborative Research Centre for Optimising Resource Extraction (CRC ORE) funded program (2018 – 2020; $600,328) on improving innovation diffusion in mining;
• CRC ORE funded program (2019 – 2020; $324,244) on developing a risk management to support technology adoption in mining;
• PMI funded program (2015 – 2017; $65,000) on multilevel learning in projects.

As a lead and co-lead CI on the research programs, Anna have been engaged in a range of leadership activities, including leading the recruitment of research staff and conducting formal performance evaluations; leading development of industry reports, papers, research instruments, and data collection, and presenting research findings to the Board level, at the industry forums and assemblies. Anna led design of management tools to support diffusion and overcome behavioural barriers to innovation in mining, which contribute to solving significant problems of slow adoption of technological innovations in the mining sector.

Anna’s research on building learning capabilities in project organisations attracts attention from academia and industry and has been used by professional project management body, PMI to upskill over 40,000 of project managers and project workers. The webinar Anna delivered on Building Project-Based Learning Organisation to the PMI members (Nov 2018) is now formally used to certify project managers in that it allows project managers to earn professional development points and retain their PMI certification. Anna’s top 8 published papers on building project-based learning capabilities been cited over 700 times making a significant contribution to the research on project learning. Anna is fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA) since 2017. Anna is a Study Area Coordinator for Postgraduate Management Programs (BS37 and BS11), (since 2017 – ongoing). She has lead redesign of the programs, introduced several improvements to the program to help strengthen its identity, and co-led refinement of the School of Management L&T short-term strategy post COVID-19. Anna’s research interests include:

• Navigating paradoxical tensions in complex environments
• Organisational learning and knowledge management
• Development of soft skills for managing projects such as tolerance of ambiguity and paradoxical thinking
• Paradoxical tensions in project-based setting
• Development of management tools to enhance innovation diffusion