Week 42
Work
Another week of creating clarity and momentum by taking masses of complexity and uncertainty and turning into things that are simple and just certain enough for people to get going with. Training workshops, slide decks, job descriptions, spreadsheets, checklists. All designed to help people understand the space they’re working in and provide them with something to start with. Reflection: It’s often so much easier to get going with a straw man than a blank sheet. And I know more than most about what we’re trying to do here, I thought I’d start filling in some of those blank sheets for folks. And it’s going down a treat - people are really taking this stuff forward at pace. They just needed a foothold. It also meant a bumper show-and-tell this week, as it feels like so much has come together at roughly the same time.
I built out the training session further and delivered to other people, people who will be the trainers in future. I iterated my first version too - making the revealing of the complexity of the legislation more progressive, so less overwhelming. Workshop participants have the opportunity to learn and practice with a simple version of the calculation - then they consolidate this initial learning as they learn and practice a moderately complicated (fake) case, before doing the same for a very difficult one. Reflection: I could actually write a blog post about just this training design. When I was leading the curriculum materials discovery and alpha for DfE, I learned a great deal about good curriculum design and pedagogy - and so know quite a bit about how to design effective learning and really nerded out applying that learning this week. And it showed - I’ve had rave reviews.
After a little time spent trying to establish ownership/accountability for something, I finally found the right leader for it. It’s hard for new leaders in an organisation to know who to go to for answers outside of their own teams - especially if their teams are gatekeeping just a little too effectively. As luck would have it, the leader in question called me up to talk about something incidental to the main thrust of my work, so I took the opportunity of that conversation to achieve what I was looking for more widely from them. Reflection: the chance appeared when they asked a question and, within a minute or so, I offered a phone call to talk something through. I should have emailed them and offered a meeting the first week they joined: I know how important it is for us to work together, even if they did not. No matter - end of week two and we still got to where we needed to be.