Week 20
A great week. Sure we could have had better weather, but I’m only knocking off half a mark for that.
Work
Had a good roadmapping session with a client, but didn’t allow enough time so let’s called it half a roadmapping session. Reflection: I’ve been thinking about the many times otherwise flowing conversation and planning has slammed to a halt when I’m roadmapping with folks for the first time. I think it’s because their leaders are yet to demonstrate the stakes are not as high as people fear. Traditionally in a bureaucracy, when you create a plan mapped against a timeline it becomes fixed and you’re held to account for delivering it, with very little room for change. That becomes the basis for budget bids - and so you worry that anything not visible on the plan won’t get funding. Sure, you can tell people that a roadmap will change in response to what they learn, and in response to changing user needs and business priorities. You can tell them that this isn’t the business planning round, and that other activities can go into the backlog - that this is the strategic stuff they need to do to achieve their high level outcomes, it’s not everything. But until you’ve shown them, until they’ve seen it with their own eyes, you’re asking a group of risk-averse people to trust you. Once they’ve seen the roadmap in use, once they’ve seen they were right to trust you, that you kept your word, roadmapping becomes much easier. The real risk is continued inertia - choosing to do everything and nothing because you don’t feel comfortable committing to what you’ll do first and next.
Started work on a big new engagement. It’s exciting and daunting in equal measure - but the team on it is absolutely stellar, both on the client-side and on our own. A group of talented, kind, open, emotionally-intelligent, humble people - no-one is precious, everyone is mucking in, all eager to do their very best for service users. It’s what we’re going to need, working on this huge, fast, intense project. Reflection: project kick-offs are incredibly important, we all know that. But people are busy and time is short - so it’s common to have quite short kick-off sessions with clients, or to stagger elements of them over a week or two. Having a full-day kick-off in week one, with the entire team and most of its key collaborators and stakeholders in the room, feels like a luxury - but it has given us such a strong sense of shared vision, injected so much energy into everyone, that it will be more than worth it.
Thinking about case management systems and chatting with some colleagues about the challenges in this space. Lots of patterns coming out - and also deepening my own understanding of the technology diversity (and lack of) in this space. Reflection: A great deal of what government does involves keeping track of things that relate to other things. It doesn’t matter what the things are - criminal investigations, water leaks, benefit claims, grant applications - the technology part of the services are the same: a set of business rules on top of database. In terms of information architecture, access controls, fields, UI, most case management systems are really, really similar. It’s not complex technology at all unless you choose to make it so - but people often do because they see their challenge through the lens of system implementation rather than service design. They need to stop doing that.
Not work
Chatted to some women from other agencies. I still do coaching - often women returning from maternity leave, or struggling with low confidence, or trying to progress in their career. We got talking about project scheduling - the process of matching people to projects. The people involved in making decisions about scheduling are usually quite senior and busy. The organisations often don’t have lots of people ready to deploy quickly because carrying a large “bench” eats into company overheads - after skills match, availability seems to be a primary drivers of matching decisions. Beyond skills and availability, though, these women worry that a whole load of biases are influencing the decisions of perfectly well-meaning folks (availability bias, exposure effect, frequency illusion, confirmation bias, choice supportive bias, stereotyping, anecdotal fallacy, authority bias, attribution error, in-group bias, halo effect, cheerleader effect, attribution errors, trait ascription effect and more). This creates fear and anxiety among people who feel they might not be as good a “cultural fit” as others because they’ve a different background; people who’ve been doing a great job quietly; people who made a mistake once and worry that’s all they’re remembered for; people with caring commitments or chronic conditions or other reasons that require flexibility too often unfairly seen as unreliability. Reflection: some agencies seem to work much harder than others to guard against these biases (if you name it, you reduce it), but assignment decisions in agencies are often made at pace and under pressure, conditions that don’t typically get the best out of people. It’s like a microcosm of the challenge on recruitment in some ways too - how quickly your mind goes to particular people you already know and trust when you need a safe pair of hands and fast; how invisible do the genuine advantages of bringing in new and diverse talent feel when you’re facing what can end up a much slower recruitment process. Recruitment, I think, is a good comparison - because after hiring I reckon project assignment is the next frontier for progressive inclusive workplaces.
I had lunch with an old colleague. I wanted to ask her about her experiences as a trustee and how she got into it. I’m going to be looking around for a trustee role this year - so it was incredibly useful to hear from her. I know what I can bring as a trustee - but I need to think a bit more about what I want to learn as a trustee.
I went to Interesting Conference 2024. It was great. I had fun, learned loads, left inspired. But I did leave before it ended, sadly, because I had an early start the following day. Ben’s a great opener and his talk on Taps was fab. I was genuinely tempted to try composting thanks to Sonia - something I never thought would be the case. I have looked at my inadequate pension, prompted by Anna’s talk. Dug through my cupboards to find my matcha after Gianfranco’s tea ceremony. And exceeded my lifetime’s quota for conversations about dust this week http://www.reasonablyinteresting.co.uk Reflection: the dust talk, I feel, held masses of unrealised potential. Jay made some really intriguing points, but did so in the style of an author, rather than a presenter - her incredibly vivid, rich oral descriptions could have been very easily (and more quickly) shown and I suspect would have had equal or greater impact.