Weeknote: S2, Ep2

Good things

I’ve been more ruthless with my focus this week and I can see tangible progress as a result. My Trello board is reflective of my current workload. This requires a little bit of love and attention every couple of days, but having a single point of truth where I can see all the things is helping me to curate my time more effectively. I know what I am doing and what I am not doing now. The trick is to keep this up to protect myself from the pointy end of overwhelm.

We said goodbye to Emma on Friday. She’s leaving us to take up an exciting role at the Ministry of Justice. As part of her exit conversation, we reflected on all that she had achieved over the last six months. She’s led some of our most complex work, navigating challenges and forging new territory with tenancy, good humour and clarity of vision. She’s been a first class line manager to Beth and Greg, supporting them to find their feet and thrive in their new roles. I’ll miss Emma a lot, but she’s helped to shape our work and culture and we’ll benefit from this over the weeks and months to come.

Learned things

Shaan, our service designer, designed a really effective ice-breaker that successfully introduced people to using a Miro board while also building a lovely rapport between himself as the facilitator and the participants. It quickly established psychological safety and set us up for a productive workshop. Which in turn reminded me of this pocket gem from Amy Edmondson (via Helen Bevan and Tanmay Vora)

Difficulties

The flip side to focus is saying “no” or “not yet”. But I’m learning this is better than over promising or leaving people rudderless without a response. Neither are things I set out to do, but are a consequence of too little time and being over committed.

Achievements

I’ll be putting on my delivery manager hat over the next few weeks to support our cloud migration work. I’m pleased that I got my head round the project which is layered and complicated.

We delivered our scoping workshop with Street Services on Friday. We agreed on the shape of our discovery and an entry point which we believe will bring the most value. Paper processes and poor technology are a barrier to working effectively as a service. There’s no shortage of creativity here — teams and supervisors have found colourful workarounds over many years. We are standing up a multidisciplinary, blended team. It’s clear there is a genuine appetite for learning together. Covid permitting we are going to try and co-locate for some of the time. We’re starting by shadowing supervisors and bin teams, exploring how they organise shifts, teams and route patterns.

Read/Watch/Listen

My close read this week was Cate McLauren’s blog focusing on radically rethinking our attitudes and approaches to Cinderella services (internal bureaucracies). Too often these teams are treated as lazy scapegoats, parodied as “all that is wrong with the public sector”. Cate’s work seeks to reframe and revitalise these functions, shifting our collective understanding of them as being gatekeepers of black box bureaucracies to enablers of an entrepreneurial state.

I enjoyed blogs from Richard Smith and Laura Church, both muse on being new to an organisation and cultures that support learning.