Week 49
A little work, mostly fun
Youngest’s birthday party - I took a group of 7 of them to Puttshack. They’re bigger now, heading to secondary school next year, so I assumed they’d manage two games of mini-golf without any problem. I was wrong. Reflection: I remember being astonished at how much babies’ moods are ruled by their bodies - and it’s true for us at any age, to some degree. We know that the closer to lunch it gets, the more favourable a judge’s ruling will get; and any facilitator will tell you how painful it is to run a session during the room’s collective post prandial dip. The girls, at Puttshack, they were hungry and increasingly less focused on the game, and this started to make them hangry. It went downhill from there. I’ll remember to choose a better time of day next time. It’s also a good reminder for me generally to pay more attention to human needs - we may feel too busy to schedule a comfort break, or grab snacks and water, for ourselves or for the people in our meetings and workshops, but the outcomes we seek depend on our focus, our moods, our mindsets - and it rarely makes sense to compromise those things in the name of gaining a few extra minutes. Similarly, I hate to think of how often I’ve worked late to “just get this thing done” - and returned the next day to kick myself at not having realised that I (and so the quality of my work) had been flagging the night before. I’m all for taking advantage of a flow state when I find one - but that’s different to crawling over the finish line in the name of completion. Gosh, this turned into a bit of a rant. Moving on.
I had a couple of days of work at the start of the week. Work has a policy of not allowing folks to carry over annual leave - and over the course of this year I’ve not taken as much time as I should have. That, with a bit of time off in lieu for good measure, means three weeks Christmas break for me. Work was quite frantic. Loose ends I thought I’d tied properly last week had managed to work themselves loose again on Monday, frustratingly, so I was pretty much fully focused on those. Reflections: I observed some things that reminded me of my time in previous government departments - and it really crystallised my thinking around power dynamics in the policy space. How, so often, if we could get the right six people in a room, and not let them leave until they agreed on a way forward, we’d save ourselves weeks of mistakes and miscommunication. But getting the right decision-maker from the centre of government (Treasury, Cabinet Office), in the same room as the right decision-makers from policy, legal, delivery and operations, is especially hard. Operational colleagues in particular bring reality into the room - conversations with them can be uncomfortable because they force policy folks to compromise the neatness of their policy positions in order that they can be implemented; they force legal advisors to find pragmatic ways through because there is always ambiguity and risk; they show service delivery teams that it doesn’t matter if X is on their Jira backlog right now, because it is already being delivered by frontline staff and so is already part of the user’s service experience and so is already part of the service. This is also why cross-functional multidisciplinary teaming is so powerful, of course - because you have a group of individuals whose job it is to find a way to actually achieve those policy outcomes, rather than just represent their corporate function or profession.
I took Olive to the vet. She had a lump on her head. My eldest was losing sleep over it, so I eventually caved and got an expert opinion that this was indeed just a raised hair follicle. Confirmation we’ve a happy healthy dog - £60 (ouch). Reassuring anxious teen - priceless.
I was going to see Cyrano at Park Theatre in Finsbury Park, but it got cancelled on my train ride into London because of cast sickness. There’s some really awful virus going around - my eldest’s Sunday afternoon Aladdin performance was cancelled for the same reason (lead and understudy both ill). I’ve some relatives up in Scotland desperately sick, particularly bad cases of RSV in already frail bodies. And the boss is unwell too today. Stay safe out there folks. Get your vaccinations (if you don’t quality for an NHS flu/COVID vaccination, maybe your work will pay for a private one. It doesn’t hurt to ask). Mask up in busy confined spaces (I’ll still change carriages if I find I’m sitting near a sneezer). Take a COVID test if you’re seeing vulnerable relatives over Christmas. And wash your hands well and regularly.
I did some festive Karaoke on Saturday. I don’t normally duet, but after a successful singsong with Pete Chamberlin the other week, I agreed to sing one or two with a friend lacking in the confidence to sing on her own. It was a great deal of fun, and a welcoming crowd. And really nice to have someone to go with. I’ll always choose to go somewhere on my own over not going at all - but it is much more relaxing to have someone to go with because I then don’t have the social awkwardness of introducing myself to strangers and wondering if they’re talking to me out of politeness or not…