Week 20
A good week, perhaps even a great one.
Work
A few of us had a session looking at the operating models we’ve recommended to different clients, spotting patterns and clusters, looking at outliers. Initially it felt slightly countercultural as an exercise: the advice we give our client organisations is bespoke, our models tailored to their specific situations and challenges, and so many of us are quite cynical about the value of cookie-cutter recommendations. Nonetheless we believed the learning that we’d get from reviewing them would be significant. And we were right. We saw what was true irrespective of org size; what we varied according to digital maturity, degree of service orientation; what routes out of existing operating models we’d recommended depending on the power dynamics between digital, technology, mar comms and the corporate centre. And we reflected on a few things that hadn’t taken so well, where readiness had been missing, so we could tweak our collective mental models. Reflection: We’re stuffed to the gills with incredibly experienced leaders who have seen what works and what doesn’t over and over again. But we’re scaling as a consultancy and bringing in some slightly less experienced colleagues - folks who will undoubtedly appreciate having some of this expert implicit knowledge turned into heuristics they can use going forward.
I had the second half of a roadmapping session with a client team. It went really well. It seems that, in between the first session and this second session, much of what I’d been saying about graduated certainty and lowering the stakes of decisions had sunk in. Reflection: sometimes folks just need time to process what they’re learning. Mental models don’t shift in one conversation. The practice of making trade-offs, scoping first experiments, figuring out where value can be delivered most quickly, sizing roadmap items - that stuff shifts thinking fastest of all.
I kicked off a big and intense new engagement this week. I’m really enjoying it as it has a great team, really solid pace, strong client team engagement and availability - and it’s for an incredibly important service. It’s also in a bit of a sweet spot for me in terms of activity - because (a) it draws on knowledge I’ve gleaned from pretty much every job I’ve had in my incredibly wiggly career, (b) I get to work on puzzles. Reflection: that last point - working on puzzles - is what really floats my boat. I have a “broken comb” capability profile so, as well as managing client relationships, and leading engagements and teams, I can be a great individual contributor. Taking complex policy and figuring out what we could build to deliver value as early as possible. Playing around with complex logic flows to design a best first-guess to test with users. Designing trauma-informed user research to get the insight we need to design a service that meets needs without retraumatising users. I love doing this stuff. And it has been a while since I’ve been on a project that has let me get this deep into a state of flow. It’s lush.
Personal
I went indoor skydiving. I didn’t really know what to expect. I’d been so busy with work, and it has been in the diary for so long, that I hadn’t really given it much thought. There were no pictures in my mind for indoor skydiving. Skydiving was something that has been on my bucket list for a good 20 years - but it was always from a plane. For some reason I expected this to be like what I’d imagined that to be. It wasn’t. It wasn’t bad - I quite liked the sense of weightlessness, learning how to move and what positions to hold. I’ll go back again and take the kids - to both the skydiving and the amazing Italian restaurant we went to for lunch, overlooking a beautiful lake. Reflection: I left disappointed, which I wished I hadn’t been because it was a good experience. I ought to have thought about it more as a sporting activity (like visiting a dry ski slope). It also leaves me questioning the experience of jumping from a plane - and whether or not that would be as enjoyable as I’ve been imagining all these years. I realise now that skydives really don’t last very long - a minute of freefall, then maybe another 5 minutes after the parachute is deployed. The reality of it unlikely to match the fantasy. In fact, paragliding might be closer to what was in my head. Given this, I wonder what else on my bucket list isn’t what I’d imagined it to be - and perhaps the experience I’d like from it can be achieved through something more accessible to me?
My youngest saw the paediatrician. She’s been going over on her ankles and dislocating her joints a little too often and easily, and so I suspected she has hypermobility like me. She doesn’t - the consultant concluded that she doesn’t have the flexibility you’d associate with hypermobility, she only has joint and muscle weakness, and they can be addressed with physiotherapy and exercise. Reflection: I can’t help but feel guilty that I assumed she’d inherited the same (inheritable) condition as me. If I hadn’t made that assumption might I have pushed her to do more exercise to build up muscle strength? How much stronger might she be now if we’d treated her the same as her sister? Reading that back to myself, this is just another version of parental guilt - something I’m feeling quite acutely in relation to secondary school options for my youngest (she’s automatically eligible for the same great school as her elder sister, because of their sibling rule, but that’s not where her friends are going).
I’m finding myself a little frustrated and a little melancholic. I’m trying to pinpoint why - I think there a few things I’ve been putting off confronting, there’s definitely some procrastination happening, and I’m spending too much time in my head. I’m an introverted reflector and so definitely overthink things. And right now I’m overthinking the future. Reflection: I need to instead enjoy the here and now. The present moment is all we ever really have. So I’m going to revisit my gratitude practice, and then DO more to smell the roses and live in the present. My upcoming trip to Copenhagen is a lovely opportunity to do that.