67% of accessibility issues originate in design
This gets quoted all over accessibility circles, and it comes from a single Deque case study that measured something quite different. Worth knowing before you put it in a slide.
80 percent of failures can be avoided in the design phase
This figure is peppered all over design literature. I've pulled at its threads before; this time I take it at face value and ask whether it even holds up.
Seductive statistics and design
80% of a product's impact is set at the design phase. Design errors cause 80–90% of construction failures. Our field is full of these confident numbers, and most fall apart the moment you look for the source.
Thoughts after reading about design systems
Notes from the pre-reading for a design systems course: where the various authors agree, where they split, and the distinctions I thought worth pulling out.
BAU doesn’t have to be BAU
Inflexible models of BAU set out a false binary: “business as usual” vs “transformation”, asking leaders to choose between forever-beta and what is essentially disinvestment. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Letter to my future bosses
I'm looking for my next role, among all the openings the Great Resignation threw up. Too many of the organisations I've looked at have a long way to go on gender and race, and this is what I need to see.
Self-care in chaotic times
Plenty of people have asked how I avoided burnout at NHS Test and Trace. The first thing I tell them is that you can do less than you think you can, and certainly less than you plan to.
Reflections on 25 years
An unordered list of things I've learned on the job: hundreds of single malts (since forgotten), that my skin can't take washing dishes for eight hours a day, and rather a lot that shaped how I work.
On rejection
Rejection can be hard to hear - but that doesn’t mean you should manage the hurt by only applying for jobs you’re overqualified for. Women tend to apply for a job only when they meet every criterion - whereas men go in at around 60%. We need to change this - women, it’s a numbers game. Let’s reframe rejection, and get more women into the jobs they' deserve.
If your senior accessibility consultant sits below middle management, your org doesn’t (yet) care about accessibility
Every organisation has to start somewhere. But if your whole accessibility effort rests on one junior person, your org doesn't really care about accessibility yet, whatever it says.
If you’ve made DEI HR’s job, you’re doing it wrong
Equality and inclusion consists of thousands of tiny decisions made all over your organisation, every day. It’s not an impact assessment document, checklist, or HR’s job.
Future retrospective
I've been coaching since 2007, and this is the exercise I reach for most, with executive teams and individuals alike. You stand in an imagined future and look back, and it reliably shifts what people do next.
Take back control of your diary
You can't run your diary until you're honest about your own priorities. Once you are, whole meetings reveal themselves as optional. Begin by hunting down the pointless ones.
Seeing apples and oranges, not just “fruit” - on build vs buy
We treat all our services as if they're the same thing, and waste a fortune doing it. Some solve tidy, well-defined problems; some really don't. Best not lump them together.
“Social class no longer exists in Britain”
I snorted cornflakes at that one. I grew up in relative poverty - believe me, social class exists. Here's what the people who say it have never had to notice.
Making an impact
Almost every woman I know has been told, at some point, that she needs to "make more impact". It's vague and maddening, and rarely comes with a definition of what impact would even look like in her context.
This is my #OneTeamGov, what’s yours?
I joined the civil service in 2003, a freshly graduated idealist sure she'd fix the world. The idealism drained away over the years, and a community called OneTeamGov is part of what put it back.
Design backgrounds are overrated
For strategic, systems and service design, a design background is overrated. Insist on it and you shrink your talent pool and your odds of finding people who can actually deliver change.
Digital sucks
Digital sucks, as a word. In one week I heard it used for scanning documents, automating processes, redesigning a business, and buying software. When a word means everything, it means nothing.