Work hard, play hard.

Work:

• I don’t normally send work emails at the weekend. But I had the opportunity to give some really short, targeted feedback on a proposal that I knew someone was mulling over. The timeliness of my feedback meant I was able to help them evolve their thinking and so they returned to work on Monday with a much clearer idea of what they wanted. Reflection: I don’t like to encourage weekend working, and I don’t like to set expectations that I’ll work/respond at the weekends - but if you know when someone is going to be doing some serious cogitating, a small and well-timed intervention can have an outsized impact. Then when can be as important as the what.

• I found myself getting impatient. As a firm, we’re always telling our clients to take a “start small, test and learn” approach rather than agonising over small details before they’ve tested the wider concept. Just as arguments over Googleable facts have disappeared from my life, our ability to prototype and run tests to varying degrees of fidelity means we should see far fewer speculation-based disagreements because we can JFDI and roll it back if it doesn’t work. It took me too long to realise in one instance this week that colleagues weren’t instinctively resistant to an experiment-based approach - they were simply trying to anticipate and respond to concerns of a leader who doesn’t have much experience of test and learn. Reflection: even in places where 95% of an org is culturally aligned, if you’ve a leader in that 5% then you still have to grow their confidence in your ways of working if you want their teams to feel safe working in these new ways. This feels especially true for corporate function teams like finance, commercial, HR - though I’m sure it holds more generally.

• I showed a client team how to conduct some basic usability testing on a survey. It wasn’t anything ground-breaking - mostly a combination of Caroline Jarrett’s advice, and my own user research and research ops experience. But for client teams, it’s a great bundle of knowledge and skills to share. Reflection: even when there isn’t time built into an engagement for formal shadowing or pairing, this “working out loud” is incredibly valuable. Client orgs run surveys for lots of different purposes - so showing how to test and iterate to boost a survey’s usability is a great low-effort high impact piece of knowledge transfer.

Play:

• I went to a daytime party on Sunday. I’ve decided this must surely be the way forward. Why choose between having a great time on the dance floor, and settling with a mug of cocoa and a book in the evening, if I don’t have to? Reflection: where else have I been accepting, or unnecessarily setting things up as, false choices? Spotting these false choices and thinking more laterally could unlock a little extra joy.

• Our dishwasher stopped working so on Monday we fixed it - turning it on its side and replacing a £25 part. Unfortunately the process of righting the dishwasher caused water to flood into the motherboard and fried it, writing off the dishwasher :/ On Tuesday a new dishwasher arrived. It’s a bottom-of-the-range model because cost-of-living-crisis - nonetheless everything is coming out properly clean - no greasy glasses, no fork tines crusted with food for me to rewash. Reflection: I’d stopped noticing the sub-par performance of the old machine, even though I was having to handle the rejects each day. I wonder what else I’ve stopped noticing - where am I spending precious time compensating for or working around something that ought to just be replaced or redesigned?

• I had breakfast at The Breakfast Club in Angel on Friday. It rarely happens and so feels really indulgent to eat breakfast out. It’s also significantly cheaper than eating dinner out - and doesn’t require a babysitter. Reflection: what other lovely things might I get to do more often if I just changed the time and place for them, or did them on my own? Karaoke-lunch anyone? Early-morning spa?

• I had a really bad bout of delayed onset muscle strain at the start of the week from my time in the gym at the weekend, and so I didn’t get back to the gym until the end of this week. Reflection: I do have a track record of jumping into things over enthusiastically and demanding so much of myself (time, emotional energy, physical strength, attention) that I struggle to maintain it. This time it was physical muscle damage and I’ve since recovered. But what harm do I do to myself when it’s emotional or psychological harm? Or harm to my confidence, or to my other priorities? Am I making sure I take the time to rest, recover and repair then? Could I have an IFTT rule that forces me to consider how much/how quickly to take up something new in order to minimise harm and maximise my chances of sticking with it.

• I want to do some embroidery to relax. I have some fun patterns I’ve designed but need to nail the basic stitches first. I just started working my way through chain stitch, fishbone, bullion knot, fly stitch, weaving stitch, french knot, satin stitch, turkey stitch, and long/short stitch - and came unstuck with the first one. I really struggled to reproduce a neat chain stitch - the instructions I was given didn’t help, so I watched how-to videos, and I practiced with scrap thread and material many, many times this week. I started to feel a little useless - it’s a basic stitch, it shouldn’t be this hard. I thought about giving up (I hate not being good at things - yes, I know, that’s a really unattractive trait). But I persisted and this morning I finally found a Youtube clip that explained the stitch well enough for me to realise where I’d been going wrong - and suddenly I had it nailed. There was a tiny detail I hadn’t had explained to me, but it made all the difference. Reflection: when explaining things that are second nature to them, people often leave out really vital information that it doesn’t occur to them to include. Even if (especially if) you’re teaching or communicating something basic, always test your instructions/material with beginners to find what’s obvious to you that really isn’t obvious to them.

• Husband and I have been arguing about holidays and money. He told me he’s always wanted to go to Copenhagen. We can’t afford to go to any of the destinations I’d selected for a holiday this year. So (feeling reckless) I booked an Easter holiday to Copenhagen last night. In the past, when we’ve had too much time to think about it, we’ve talked ourselves out of it. Or we’ve delayed booking and then found the costs had become entirely unaffordable in the interim. Reflection: we’ve never spent so much on a holiday that we’ve come to regret it - so we need to stop overthinking things, trust our instincts, and seize the (holi)day.

Reflecting on the week.

Work

• Reflecting on how truly unresilient change efforts can be if you have rapid leadership turnover. Just shy of 10% of senior civil servants (SCS) left the civil service last year - with the figure jumping to 20% for DDaT SCS. And, of course, that’s an average across departments - there are some places where the leadership flight has been closer to 1 in 4. This often means departments and agencies are carrying leadership vacancies and already swamped leaders are “acting up” on temporary promotion or in interim roles. So when, in this context, another board-level sponsor announces their departure, what are the options for a digital or technology leader keen to push forward with significant change. Do they wait for the new leaders to be in place? But for how long? And surely given turnover rates there’s always someone with their hand on the doorknob, whatever time you choose. Reflection: the instinct to wait for things to “settle down” and become clearer before investing time and energy on communicating change is an unhelpful but understandable one. If you accept that your org needs to move to “the last operating model it’ll ever need” because you’re moving to a model of continuous (not discontinuous) change, then your work to communicate change, recruit champions, bolster allies and build the digital literacy of those with their hands on the levers of power will never be done. Sounds exhausting, I know - but if your model for change is a continuous one then your model for change leadership should probably be too.

• I enjoyed a really great workshop with a new client leadership team. I forgot how effortless it can feel to get good work done when you have a well-designed session run by a great facilitator for a group of leaders who, because they don’t work in a toxic culture, respect and trust and collaborate sincerely with each other. Reflection: momentum and genuine progress aren’t hard to build and maintain if the cultural and relationship conditions are in place. Though clients largely aren’t buying consultancy to help them get on with each other better (can you imagine the business case for that procurement?), it’s a success factor they ignore at their peril.

• We had a fantastic Design Community of Practice session this week - where we all shared our different experiences of prototyping. I think this is the first workplace in a while where I haven’t felt at least a little inadequate because of my lack of “proper” design training or qualifications: my experience instead is of prototyping policy, strategy, governance, operations, services, ways of working - and that’s all incredibly relevant to the challenges we’re supporting our clients with. Reflection: I think finding my niche was more about matching my unique knowledge/skills to the right contexts/problems - and not about labels or specialisms. This combination of knowledge, skills and experience is why I was able to contribute so much to the drafting and development of The Radical How (published this week by PD for Nesta): my experiences at NHS Test and Trace were a perfect case study for new ways of working; and my deep knowledge gained working at the centre of government on governance, performance management, finance, assurance and risk is incredibly valuable for people trying to create the enabling environment for sustaining continuously improved services.

Personal

This week has been about balancing.

• I’ve taken a number of steps so far out of my personal comfort zone that I’ve lost sight of where I started, though I’m confident this is the direction I want to head in. And I’ve had two ill kids on my hands over half-term - with the usual parental guilt attached (when we had a day out, it felt like I was asking them to do too much when they should have been resting; when they had a duvet day I felt like I was being a neglectful parent, not making the most of what could be quality time). Reflection: there’s a work programming version of this too, isn’t there? When things are busy, you worry about capacity and burnout - and when they’re quiet you’re anxious to make hay while the sun shines. It’s just a professional version of the “should-ing” many of us do in our personal lives.

• I had dinner and spicy margaritas with a truly beautiful soul; completed some more extreme dot-to-dots (I’m starting to see them in my sleep); and started a new jigsaw puzzle.

• I’m trying to persuade myself to return to the partially drafted skeleton of the book I’m writing (on optimistic leadership) but seem to have lost my writing mojo for now it seems. So I’ll likely spend today in the garden office, doing a bit of a spring clean.

Another week flies by.

Work

• Another week in which I’ve been reminded by colleagues that I’m really good at what I do, that I have knowledge and skills that span disciplines and contexts and they are immensely valuable and transferable. Some days I think I’ve transitioned from being less of a jack of all trades and more of a polymath (clearly on those days in which I have the confidence of a mediocre white man). Reflection: I should be more disciplined in noting down these affirmations to look back on - because I’m choosing to be much bolder professionally and expect the years to come to be filled with situations that could shake my confidence;

• Balancing momentum, deliverability and ambition can be challenging sometimes. I’m currently wrangling with the scope of a programme and I can completely understand why we’re being pushed to widen the scope on an engagement. Reflection: we can often kill two or even three birds with one stone - e.g. use an exemplar to both deliver the thing and show new ways of working. But if you don’t yet have good aim maybe don’t be more ambitious than that - and certainly don’t try and kill ten birds with a boulder you can barely lift. Because you won’t hit any birds - and you’ll probably pull a muscle. [no birds were harmed in the writing of this weeknote]

• I was in a meeting where a colleague I adore decided to confront an issue in a way that let her feelings known. She was respectful, intentional, and focused on how we would best achieve the outcomes we all shared, and in my mind she handled it perfectly. But washing up after it was clear that she - and many other successful professional women - struggle to believe they won’t be penalised in some way for revealing emotions like frustration, anger, sadness or disappointment in the workplace. Even in workplaces like mine, where “it’s okay to…” (IYKYK). I feel very differently about this - I believe workplace relationships can only be kept healthy if we’re able to communicate how we’re feeling and don’t have to hide our emotions. Our colleagues want a good relationship with us, so if they’ve said or done something that generates a strong emotion in us, the good ones want to know. Emotional regulation skills are important and valuable - the challenge isn’t to pretend that we don’t have feelings, it’s to communicate them when it is beneficial to do so, in a manner acceptable for the context. Reflection: workplace relationships are still relationships. They have cycles of rupture and repair - and the strongest relationships are typically where people have developed the skills and emotional maturity to work through occasional knocks to trust that comes from working closely together. And workplace harmony is only resilient if it’s reached through hard work, not avoidance.

  Home

• This is the first year my daughters have made me pancakes on Pancake Day. I was comfortable with it - they both now can be trusted (a) to use a frying pan, and (b) to hold their arm under cold water, while they yell for an adult, if they accidentally burn themselves. They didn’t though. Burn themselves. Reflection: this feels a bit like when they were learning to ride a bike and I taught them how to stop, and how to brake safely, before I was willing let go of the back of the saddle. I’ve learned I can more quickly grow my confidence letting go and giving them more autonomy when I focus on making sure they know how to fail more safely. This also feels like a potential strategy for the control freak leaders to get themselves more comfortable loosening the reins in the workplace.

• Art class this week was starting a new piece - a mixed media fox that is currently just a blur of colour and patterns. I started off on a scrap canvas, experimenting with mark-making and textures with different tools and paints. This then gave me the confidence to indulge in messy exploration as part of creating my fox. Unlike with my watercolour fish, I’m not trying to recreate a specific painting - it only needs to look fox-ish. And that instantly removes any pressure I’d put on myself, gives me a freedom to play, which had me leaving art class feeling light and joyful. Reflection: in life (as for work) - the less specific a desired outcome is, the more space we have to explore and play and have fun.

• My inner world is tumultuous at the moment. I’ve always been someone who thinks and acts rationally in the moment, but then needs time to process things emotionally after the fact. It means I’m calm under pressure. But it also means that if I’ve a lot of change going on in my life, I find myself more introspection that I feel is healthy for me. Reflection: I need some more triggers for asking myself if it’s now time to get out of my own head - and a list of highly engaging activities I can immerse myself in to escape the rumination when it’s time.

Another week - sometimes they really fly by.

Work

• Ran a retro with a group of people who want to be better at getting things done together and it took a lot longer than it normally would have done - and we didn’t come out the other side with crunchy actions in the way that I’d hoped, but did build trust and a shared understanding of what they’d like to do differently. Reflection: the first retro for a struggling team unaccustomed to retros needs to be quite a bit longer than the same for a high performing team that routinely reflects together. And it is absolutely critical to spend a hefty chunk of time creating psychological safety through discussion of the agile prime directive, agreeing group norms for the session, and sharing what worked well and what they appreciated from each other. Because retros like these aren’t just retros, they’re relationship-resets.

• Spent quite a bit of time thinking through research design for a new engagement and found it really quite frustrating for my usual reason: the amount of user research I think is needed doesn’t match the time/budget available for it. I know that poor research can be worse than no research - if it ends up giving false confidence, false information or leading people to false conclusions. So rather than try to do #AllTheResearch poorly, we needed to identify the highest impact research and figure out how to do that most efficiently. Reflection: I know we can only ever be partially informed, but deciding which parts to go and get informed about (effectively choosing which gaps to ignore) isn’t comfortable. In the past I’ve often relied on a really great Delivery Manager to force me to take a knife to the plan and descope the lower value activities - I think because I find it easier to “kill my darlings” when the person I’m working with has a laser focus on deliverability.

• Facilitated a full-day workshop - so in addition to the day itself, I spent a lot of time with the team planning and preparing for the different sessions in advance, as well as making sure logistics were in hand. These workshops are a monthly occurrence and I’m struck by just how much effort and thought we need to invest in order to make sure the sessions are attractive, interesting/fun, and high value enough for participants to come and keep coming each month. For a small engagement this level of investment means the workshops can’t just be “about the work”, they need to be “the work” itself - because if we can’t deliver through these sessions, these monthly workshops are just too high an opportunity cost to justify. Reflection: when you’re working in the open and collaboratively across siloes you can find yourself with the opportunity to make progress on research, design, strategy, policy, stakeholder engagement and comms all at once. But you need to invest the time to seize that opportunity - if your sessions are boring, and attendance drops, it becomes just another time-suck.

• Wrapped up an awesome engagement. Just the best team, and a great client. I love it when I leave an engagement having had loads of fun and confident I brought my A game. Reflection: this didn’t happen by chance - I asked to work with this team and this partner; we made having fun an explicit objective; and and I scheduled the time I need to do a good job into the diary so it didn’t get crowded out.

• Leaned into a potentially awkward but necessary conversation with a client. It’s one of those situations where you don’t know if they’re aware of an issue, if they care, if they want to do something about it, if they’re willing to prioritise putting the hard work (time/emotional energy) to fix it, and if they’ll appreciate you raising it or feel you’re overstepping. I worry about making these calls sometimes as I’m more of a risk-taker (in pursuit of outcomes) than many of my colleagues, and though I’m happy to have a reputation for being bolder in my approach, I don’t want one for poor judgment. The gamble paid off - the client bit my hand off to work with them on the issue, and so now we’ll get the chance to grow the conditions for success of the wider engagement. Reflection: I trusted my gut and raised the issue, sensitively and showing that I genuinely care about helping them as a leader to get the results they’re looking for. Over the next six months I want to move from self-doubt (but doing it anyway) to solid confidence that my judgment is just fine and my default high-empathy non-avoidant approach is a super-power not a liability.

Home and personal

• My youngest has figured heavily in my thoughts and activities. This week I recognised her leg pain symptoms as shin splints, and realised she’s probably inherited my hypermobility - so I took her to the GP to get a referral to be checked out. Reflection: Hereditary health issues are a weird sort of parental guilt, aren’t they? She’s happy though - I can tell because she’s currently singing in the shower (my kids, like me, sing to themselves when they’re happy).

• Our 18 year old base-model Honda Jazz’s head gasket got a crack in it last month, so I used the work salary sacrifice scheme to lease an electric vehicle. It arrived this week. It is weird driving a non-manual car - and the risk of pedal confusion has me more than a little stressed. Reflection: muscle memory is a powerful thing - it won’t take me long to get used to the controls on this car. Where might I have developed muscle memory at work - and it is helpful or hindering me? Thinking in terms of ingrained habits and defaults, where would more muscle memory be useful - and how can I start building those muscles?

• I found myself worrying after a report from the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association that said that the minimum income required for a comfortable retirement is £43,000. I don’t know precisely how much my pension is currently worth, because it’s dotted around in some many different places - I do know I’m not on trajectory for a comfortable retirement. But money is tight right now and it’s going to get harder still, over the next few years, to increase my contributions. Reflection: this is wasted emotional energy. I need to go and find out what I’ve built up, cut back on our spend more, and consider returning to a five-day working week (possibly on a trial, to see how it affects my well-being).

• Perimenopausal weirdness led to astonishing levels of blood loss this week - movie crime-scene levels - causing a crash that sent me to bed at 9pm a number of days in a row. Reflection: I’m more emotionally self-aware than physically self-aware. I shouldn’t need massive blood loss as a trigger to check in with myself physically and realise that I need rest/water/food. I’ve been lucky so far with my health - but I’m getting to an age now where this meatsack isn’t going to be up to the task if I don’t look after it better.

Work:

• In the office two days this week - Monday and Wednesday. Monday was fun - a few of us around, working hard and having a bit of a laugh with each other at the same time. Wednesday is always the busiest day in the office, but this week it was next-level busy - I think a combination of CEO update, everyone wanting to wish someone farewell on their last day, and the evening event we were running. Everyone was good-humoured about it and made it work (because they’re cracking humans), but it’s quite a small space so the background noise, and the distraction from the (literally) toppling coat-racks and the musical chairs, made it hard to be on calls and facilitate the remote workshops I had to run. Reflection: our org has more than twice as many people as desks (not including network members) - so if I’ve a remote workshop in the diary, I need to not host it from our office if it’s a predictably busy-office day.

• I’ve been loving a couple of the engagements I’m working on. One engagement is a dream set-up when it comes to coaching leadership teams - because they’ve welcomed us in to help them work better as a team, in contrast to a request for “stealth” coaching for someone, or teams having coaching imposed upon them. Another engagement is with an incredibly organised and efficient programme leadership team who week after week have been consistently making things quick and easy (well, the things that don’t involve working with SAP, they’re not magic). Reflection: the circumstances of how, why, when, and by whom you’re engaged are not only constraints on how effective an engagement can be but also how enjoyable and rewarding. And I have a strong preference for WYSIWYG, even if I have a talent for handling dark matter contexts.

• I hosted and spoke at a panel event on Inclusive Services with Connie Van Zanten, Piali Das Gupta, Alistair Duggan and Julian Thompson. I had the privilege of designing the session and was able to weave their three distinct lenses on inclusion into something that felt coherent and compelling. Learning how to design and run an event was one thing I’d said explicitly that I wanted to learn as part of this job - so getting the chance to collaborate with Christine Draper on this was invaluable. Reflection: I’m good at collaborating and curating and storytelling - and really ought to do more of it. I’m also very good at thinking on my feet. I knew this, but it’s nice to remind myself.

Fun:

• I did some stand-up comedy yesterday. A day-long workshop ending with actually doing the short set I’d designed. It is run by a marvellous organisation called Funny Women which organises more than 100 events every year. It was set up more than 20 years ago to disrupt the (still) male-dominated industry and to act as a talent pipeline for women in comedy - and has had some real success (just look at this list of household names who’ve benefitted from their platform: https://funnywomen.com/awards/lists/halloffame). Alas it is also a non-profit that struggled hugely during COVID and is trying to get back on its feet after some cash-strapped sponsors pulled out last year - and this year’s awards won’t go ahead unless they can find sponsorship or raise the money other ways. If you can I’d highly recommend attending one of the workshops - I went because I want to be funnier and connect more with my audiences when public speaking - folks always remember how you made them feel, right? But if you can’t, do consider donating a little and accessing some great content through their patreon https://www.patreon.com/funnywomen/membership. Reflection: there are lots of non-profits out there that might feel like they’re permanent features of the cultural landscape but are so, so vulnerable financially and if lost we’ll struggle to get them back. What can we do to bolster their resilience?

• I also saw some comedy - Priya Hall at the Soho Theatre, in her show Grandmother’s Daughter. She’s a Welsh-Indian woman who ended a long relationship with a bloke when she fell in love with a “tiny little lesbian with toxic masculinity” - and she was absolutely hilarious. Coming from a small coal-mining village in South West Scotland, I can totally relate to the experience she shared of growing up in Wales. Reflection: I want to see more live comedy. More comedy, period. And I want to try and tell some of my own stories. I might find some of them a bit depressing - but that’s the beauty of comedy, you need the dark to appreciate the light. It could really work. Growing up I was always a big of a wise-ass. I’d say part-Stephen Fry, part-Chandler Bing. I used to love a dry, sarcastic quip. But as I’ve aged I’ve realised it isn’t especially kind. I don’t care about nice, but I do care about kind. I don’t like comedy that makes some people feel good by making others feel bad. And so I stopped - and started taking everything (waaaay too) seriously. My 2024 resolution to prioritise connection - and my stand-up workshop this week reminded me how much I like to make people laugh. I still love clever jokes - a good wordplay one-liner, or a story that takes you on an ambiguity-filled journey and dumps you somewhere hilariously unexpected. I just don’t like jokes that make me (or someone else) look clever at your expense. So I think I’m on a journey to develop my own comedy style. Reflection: The opposite of mean isn’t humourless - kind can be funny too.

• Art class. I promised you a photo (see below). I’m really enjoying it. Mixed media next. Reflection: without fail, every Tuesday at 6pm I struggle to persuade myself to leave the house - and every Tuesday by 8pm I’m very pleased I did. When will it be less of a battle with myself? I also tried to join a gym, twice - payment rejected. I want to get back into swimming as I’d like to be doing open water swimming by the end of the year if I can build my swimming strength enough. But if I’m still struggling to persuade myself to go to art class, what hope do I have with the gym?

• I finished watching Percy Jackson on Disney+ with the youngest. I’m sad because I was enjoying it and could happily watch a dozen more demi-god adventures, and also because it was a reason to snuggle up with Zoe once a week. I’m going to need to find the next “family” show we’ll both enjoy. She’s thinking Queer Eye (sure) - but I quite like action-adventure so any recommendations?

Less fun:

• Mum has a cold and chesty cough that isn’t shifting. Clearly everyone is concerned about the risk of pneumonia given how vulnerable her health is.

• The junior school has decided to shift the start and end to the school day forward by 15 minutes. Making the dash between the 12yo drop-off at the school bus and the 10yo drop off at school - just about manageable now - impossible. So figuring that out before it kicks in is going to be…interesting.

Alt-text, because I’m writing this on my iPad and the option didn’t come up for some reason. This is a watercolour painting of a tropical fish - blues, pinks, oranges, yellows, on a slightly paint-splattered background.

Mum is out of hospital (hooray) - but not after spending more than a day with a COVID patient in the ward (booo) and so has the week testing every day so that, if positive, she can get treatment before it sticks. We were all extra nervous about her getting out because it turned out my Dad (also vulnerable) hadn’t had a COVID booster since the beta variant: he hadn’t caught COVID and so had convinced himself he was naturally immune. Of course I frogmarched him down to the drop-in vaccination clinic as soon as I found out, but it doesn’t kick-in right away, hence the anxiety. Another revelation from all this was hearing my Dad, when asked by a medical professional what health conditions he has, say “I’m in good health”. Then, when pressed, he said he’s got a touch of arthritis. It’s only with me standing there and asking a different question - “what medications do you take each day?” did they find out that he’s on statins and insulin and half a dozen other pills for quite serious health problems. Reflection: there’s still quite a distance to go on medical record access before health professionals don’t have to rely on scared, confused, forgetful people to be reliable witnesses to their own health. But, until then, I’m going to have to figure out how to be a better remote/long-distance advocate.

Storm Isha meant getting from Prestwick to Newcastle was interesting. Trees, sheds and trampolines on the track meant Scotrail was checking every line thoroughly before running passenger trains on them - so they were opened up one-at-a-time as each was cleared. This meant I did not manage to catch my 7am train to Glasgow. As I wasn’t in a rush, I decided to challenge myself to enjoy the journey instead of stressing about it. I knew that if I couldn’t reach Newcastle the same day, I’d still be able to get a hotel room in any of the cities I was transferring through. With my worst case scenario still entirely manageable, I chose to focus on connecting with nature and staying in the moment. I watched the wind whipping through the trees, the waves crashing over esplanades, I enjoyed my hair being blown around and blowing the cobwebs away (until I got sand in my face, that was less fun). I did some people watching. The coastline between Edinburgh and Newcastle was stunning. It really helped me switch off from the stress of my parents’ health and move into a completely different mindset. Reflection: reframing things can utterly transform how I experience my day. I need to be this intentional more often, especially as things at home get more upsetting.

Newcastle was great. I love it when I get to work with clients saying “help us adopt new ways of working”, rather than clients saying “help them adopt new ways of working”. Being volunteered for coaching, or being unwillingly or unknowingly coached, is usually ineffective and feels quite shady. Stepping up as a leadership team, self-aware and open-minded for coaching together, is refreshing and impressive. And my colleagues were fantastic - whip-smart, bold-as-brass, deeply incisive, massively productive, team-building and storytelling geniuses. Reflection: teams with a strong sense of agency, self-awareness and a growth mindset can achieve pretty much anything. Oh, and in order to raise your own game you need to surround yourself with people better than you and watch how they do what they do.

I was pleased to arrive the day before the first workshop - I’m really not at my best when I’m exhausted from travelling. Rested, I was able to bring the Audree-esque contributions they keep me around for, rather than being just another helpful body in the room. On the way home I had enough energy to power through a great deal of work on the train - massively productive time - and get a jump start on the rest of the week, removing what would otherwise have been a significant source of cognitive load. Reflection: I have unique and valuable skills, knowledge and talent that I can bring for my colleagues and clients if I can create and protect the conditions I need to do so.

My colleagues have been pretty fantastic over recent weeks - incredibly supportive, checking in on how I’m feeling and what help I need, arranging things so that I can work flexibly or be less available if I need to. We had a project kick-off with clients on Thursday and, though I’d dipped into the planning for that 3 hour session, the team had it handled without me. Though I spent time the morning before the workshop putting some cherries on top, it was so reassuring to see that if I had needed to stay in Scotland with my mum, the team would still have managed to squeeze a huge amount of value out of that workshop. Have I mentioned how much I love working with talented people? Reflection: I chose to work in a company where people genuinely care about each other. Where folks will insist you go home to bed if you’re ill. Where people will remind you that “it’s just work” when you’ve lost that perspective. And where they won’t hesitate to pick up the slack so you can be where you need to be, without client work suffering. When I eventually move on, it must be to somewhere with a deeply caring culture like this - or a place I can nurture one - because it’s too precious to not have this in my life.

I got my hair highlighted in October. I was getting annoyed with the greys that were springing up and thought if I got highlights it would naturally mask them as they multiplied. Since October I’ve had at least 6 people in the “friend/family” category tell me it makes me look ten years older. Yeah, I see that. It’s also not very me. So I’ve returned to my natural colour. And I like it. Reflection: sometimes the long-term fix isn’t the right one, or the right right-now one.

Inspired by Sharon O’Dea sharing details of her recent stand-up workshop experience, I signed up to the “Funny Women” winter warm-up at the Groucho Club next Saturday. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Since my last weeknote my mum has been re-admitted to hospital, discharged and re-admitted again. Staff shortages meant that the “Hospital at Home” cardio nurse support she was supposed to have to help her stabilise at home didn’t appear - and the fluid in her body quickly built up. A few reflections:

• the paramedics who collected her shared that they’ve both lost hope that the NHS is going to improve - that it could improve even - and so neither plan to be in their roles this time next year. I find that deeply, deeply sad. I still believe it can be turned around over the coming 10-15 years if the right decisions are made. Reflecting more broadly - what can we do when people stop believing that improvement is possible? How do we restore the optimism needed to restore our public services?

• the nurses in her ward are angels. And - people just don’t listen closely enough to their patients. Even when her breathing was better, Mum has struggled to sleep properly for a year or so because her extremely dry mouth means her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth, waking her up. It also means she takes lots of little mouthfuls of water she wouldn’t otherwise need to take, in order to try and relieve it. One of her nurses yesterday actually listened to her and today brought her a tube of gel (a bit like Bonjela) that provides instant relief that last hours. My mum, if she could get up, would be jumping for joy. It’s a small thing - but a massive quality of life improvement and will definitely help with her recovery. Broader reflection - what small painpoints, if improved, would bring outsized benefits to staff, to service users, in our service design? Are we listening closely enough to even notice them?

• you can’t help but think big and distressing thoughts when you’re in hospital visiting an elderly relative. About their declining quality of life. About prospective bereavement. About the loneliness of the people they leave behind. About the burden of elder care and how it’s distributed (in communities, in families). About dignity and pride. About what it means to live well and die well. About your own health, your own support networks, and whether or not you’ve made enough provision for your own Autumn years. About your priorities and whether you’re spending your remaining weeks the way you’d like to (I’ll have maybe 1500-2000 left). I never have good answers to these questions - moreover, I find they often push me into an unproductive and pessimistic headspace that makes the present (where I actually spend my time) less enjoyable. Broader reflection - what methods or habits can I cultivate to stop myself ruminating unhelpfully and extensively?

Being “back home” generally:

• I’m finding myself indulging in what I’m going to call nostalgic comforts. Foods, music, smells, etc that remind me of my earlier years. Today it was the small of Vosene and Imperial Leather soap - ever-present in my childhood bathrooms - and the memory of Mum gently massaging shampoo into my hair when I was younger, before settling down to brush and dry it in front of the Antiques Roadshow and the A-Team on a Sunday night. What nostalgic comforts do I want to create for the future - for me and for my daughters? What rituals do I want them to remember? How do I want them to remember the experience of being loved as a child?

• There’s an emotional distance in me that wasn’t here before. My family’s political beliefs have lurched so far right that we can’t even have basic conversations about current affairs now. The pro-Trump argument put to me was “better the devil you know, because who knows what skeletons are in these other politicians’ closets - at least we know Trump and BoJo are rogues” ::HeadExplodesEmoji:: And my Dad went off on a homophobic rant about how repulsive he finds Alan Carr and Graham Norton just as I was readying myself to come out to him. Reflection: what does it mean to love one’s family when you’ve grown so far apart that your value sets are unrecognisable to each other?

• I needed to get out for some fresh air - so I went to my favourite place, the beach. The view of snow-topped Goat Fell over on the isle of Arran was stunning - and the grand buildings that line the sea-front are so impressive. Reminders that alongside its thriving fishing industry and coal mines, this town was once a major tourist destination in Scotland. Today though even the charity shops are closing down - it’s a depressed and depressing place to be. There’s even a popular Youtube video about the nearest big town - Ayr - called “The decline of a seaside town” - https://youtu.be/fB9d4Eetc9Q?si=Z7u86pe1POBsO_2D - telling the story that’s achingly familiar around coastal Britain I’m sure. Reflection: how does a community start a positive spiral of improvement - how do they rebuild the optimism they need to do so, when life is so very hard?

• Dad mentioned wanting to go to the cinema to see The Beekeeper - but decided he felt too guilty to go to the movies while Mum was in hospital. To an extent I know how he feels - there are a few social things in the diary last week/this week and it has felt a little wrong going out and having fun while Mum is so very ill. But, key difference, I haven’t let it stop me. Broader reflection: guilt in relationships - it is hard to take things easy, or have fun, while people around you are struggling or suffering. We might worry they’ll be envious, feel like they’re missing out, or resent us for not sharing the burden or pain. But it isn’t a zero-sum game: you need to look after yourself so that you can look after others. People who love you will realise that (though not always in the moment). #PutYourOwnOxygenMaskOnFirst

And then in the life I’ve chosen:

• Tuesday art class - I’m nearly finished my tropical fish and will share it in my next weeknote. I saw my perfectionist tendencies emerge this week because I started to overwork it - the paper surface began to suffer, the colours got muddier - despite my classmates and teacher really liking it how it was. It seems I’m still struggling with knowing when to stop tweaking, when it’s good enough, and moving onto something new. “Overdelivery” may not be as problematic as under-delivering, but beyond a certain point the benefits are marginal and the costs (and opportunity costs) get significantly steeper. True for art, life and work.

• I went to a comedy club on Monday evening. I didn’t know anyone, having gone alone, but it was a great night. Lots of reflections from it. First - having met the comedians in the bar before the show, I saw how the stage completely changes the perception of the performer. The audience is primed to find the comedian funny - they’ve chosen to be there and they’re eager to laugh: just like in public speaking, the audience wants you to succeed, for them, not for you. Small things like being well-rehearsed, knowing your material, and working on your physicality can turn you from someone seen as anxious and shy to someone with a confident swagger - irrespective of what you’re feeling inside. And that’s important because they won’t remember your jokes/talk, but they’ll remember how you made them feel. I’m sure this is true for life more generally and I ought to focus much more on how effectively I’m connecting with the people around me (without overthinking it), and how I’m making people feel - as that’ll live on longer than any slide decks or reports.

• I loved the in-person client sessions I had this week. They were only possible because Steve’s office is being renovated and they all had to work from home - so I didn’t need to be on childcare/dogsitting duty. I love it when a workshop comes together well - this week I was reconnecting people to their mission and high level goals, to the change they want to make in the world, and how that is (or isn’t) being delivered through their customer’s service experience. The sessions were really energising, I think we all “feel” aligned more viscerally in person - I ought to use in-person sessions more intentionally where poor alignment is hindering momentum.

I’m aware these first few blog posts have been quite long. I’ve been very reflective over recent weeks. I’m sure the posts will shrink down and focus more on work/professional challenges in the near future. But I’m going to continue writing these for me, not for you, so they’ll be what I need them to be when I write them.

What a difference a week makes?!

Both my mum and my father-in-law have shuffled back from death’s door and have returned home from hospital. My father-in-law has a long list of diagnostic test appointments to attend over the coming weeks and months, as well as a weekly anaemia check with his GP so they can spot if it gets worse before they’ve found and treated the cause (assuming they can). My mum is as well as she’s going to get because she’s slowly dying of heart failure; her challenge is to live as comfortably as possible in the time she has left, which isn’t easy when breathing and sleeping are getting progressively difficult. But she’s home, and feeling back to normal, so it’s a win. Naturally I have a load of reflections on my own health challenges, but we can have that conversation a different day.

I wanted to come back from holiday feeling relaxed, refreshed and reinvigorated to get back into work - but found I was anxious about my return. That’s because there were some big challenges for which the question “how are we going to get this done?” had been left unanswered before the Christmas break. Combine fog of returning to work with the fog of new project mobilisation and the fog of discovery, add a dash of overstretched colleagues and undercommunication, and you too can find yourself the proud owner of some fresh mild panic. Fortunately in our place if you share how you’re feeling, folks typically rally round you. And, of course, with all of these types of fog, it dissipates as you move forward. I can see the path forward now, so I’m feeling much lighter.

Thinking about this - my cortisol levels have dropped, so my fight-or-flight response has switched off. This means I’m able to be more optimistic, more open-minded and more creative as a result - which makes it more likely I can solve the problems I encounter because I be able to think strategically and laterally. And the optimism makes a difference. To mangle a Henry Ford quote: “whether you believe this will go well, or go badly, you are right”. I wholeheartedly believe this to be the case - for projects, sure, but also more widely. In my mind optimism is the single biggest influenceable* determinant of my success or failure in most of my endeavours. So I’m going to be thinking and writing a lot about optimism in 2024.

Other reflections:

• art class. I’ve started a watercolour tropical fish this week. I found I learn more quickly, and am more confident and disciplined practicing and developing my skills (a) in a group, and (b) with a teacher in the room to answer the occasional question or nudge me when a small change will make a big difference. My takeaway: expert feedback, and sharing the journey with others (for fun, for accountability), is key when you’re trying to learn something new. We know this already - it’s just nice to be reminded.

• working in the office. I did Monday and Wednesday this week, normally just do Thursday. They were both great days - I much prefer to kick-off a new project with a client team in person, nothing beats getting round a table with some of your favourite colleagues to get sh*t done, and strolling to Leather Lane food market for lunch is so much better than a slice of toast at my desk. So I want to do more of this. But I need to remember how much it takes out of me - the commute lengthens the day by a couple of hours at least, and as an introvert I find being around people for such long stretches really zapping. Both days, when I finally got home, I just wanted to time alone whilst my kids (who’d missed me) wanted a couple of hours with me before their bedtime. It’s fine - I just need to tweak my energy management to make those sorts of days work.

• sustainability of our work. It’s a joy when I come across something I’ve worked on in the past and thought had failed to land, or fizzled out, when actually I’d planted a seed and created the conditions for it to come to fruition a few years later. Or where something didn’t work - but it did work elsewhere because when we work in the open our ideas and ways of working spread. Or because we’d been building in-house capability over the course of the project and when they moved on they applied what they’d learned to other problems in the system. But we do need to plan this in consciously - creating those conditions, sharing widely, building capability - because it’s too easy for the learning, the insight, the approach, the assets, to be lost. That’s when you find a client suffering discovery-itis; or running duplicate research; or finding a consultancy has sold the same model/framework/approach into different parts of their org multiple times. Knowledge management in the public sector is still broken. Working in the open makes it (at least a bit) better.

• sharing and snarking. I believe wholeheartedly that people should share publicly their views and opinions and ideas without worrying too much that someone has said it before, or that no-one will be interested, or that it’s too obvious to write about. I wrote a blog post about it. [ https://www.audreefletcher.co.uk/blog/2023/2/4/yeah-buti-dont-really-have-anything-worth-sharing ]. But I need to act more consistently with that belief - which means working hard to avoid doing/saying/writing things that might discourage others from sharing. This week I failed on that - some of my inner snark escaped, I’m usually much better at keeping a lid on it - and I’m sorry.

• confidence. I’ve found myself reflecting on this multiple times already this year. I’ve had a few people (friends, colleagues) remark on how much more confident I have appeared recently. Professionally my confidence is what it always has been - but my self-esteem linked to my appearance (for various reasons) has taken a steep dive. Perhaps naive of me, but I hadn’t expected the choice to significantly increase the effort I put into my appearance (to wear make up, change my hair, wear more colourful and flattering clothes, and diversify my shoe collection) to be interpreted as a function of greater confidence when it’s actually me trying to compensate for the opposite. I guess it makes sense though - and it’s proving to have a virtuous circle effect because when someone is treated as if they’re confident, they start to feel that way. Leaning into that as an idea, I decided to do some modelling for a life drawing class on Friday - hoping to try and feel more accepting of my body and more comfortable in my own skin. I was surprisingly at ease having all eyes on me during the modelling itself; but I did feel myself squirming when I caught myself in a mirror, and then again when the other models were up, as their bodies were more Botticelli than Rubens. I’ll definitely do it again.

• connecting. My daughters and I are enjoying each others’ company much more this week. Maybe we just needed to get back to school/work? E and I found ourselves cooking at the same time last night (me paella, her tofu veggie noodles), and chatted and laughed while we were doing it - she told me she’s winning a challenge from her friends to communicate in Shakespearean prose for a week and it is hilarious, though her teachers finding it less funny. She doesn’t typically share much about her friends or school life with me so it felt special. Reflection here: connection and quality time may happen more organically if we just spend more time in each other’s company - rather than trying to force it with distinct/planned activities labelled “quality time”. Definitely a hypothesis to test there.

  Okay, laters gators.

  (*I say “influenceable” because my endeavours are situated within the context of patriarchy, capitalism, misogyny, ableism, homophobia/biphobia, ageism, classism, populism, as well as my own past, and my genetics etc).

No slow entry into 2024 for me, as the year kicked off with double grandparental hospitalisation.

Both mineral-related in a way. The first - sudden and severe anaemia; the second - a potassium challenge. On the anaemia - a few things to reflect on:

• How things that feel like they come out of the blue have likely been building for some time, without anyone really noticing (the boiling frog problem). Everyone thought it was just age - and now, 7 units of blood later, it’s like he’s ten years younger. And how much shame his loved ones feel having failed to spot the problem.

• How the symptom of not having enough of something can be because it isn’t being consumed, isn’t being absorbed, isn’t able to be effectively used, can’t get to where it needs to be, is being lost, or is being destroyed. And how simply consuming more only fixes the issue for one of these causes.

On the potassium - it’s actually more of a fluid challenge. She’s got pulmonary oedema caused by heart failure - and her symptoms took a turn for the worse. When she went to get treated, they realised they couldn’t increase her diuretics without taking her potassium levels perilously low. She was hospitalised, put on a diuretic drip and lost many, many bags of fluid through it - clearing her lungs and enabling her to sleep for the first time in weeks.

• How important is balance - and experimenting (safely) until you achieve it. She couldn’t leave the hospital until they’d adjusted her meds in a way that allowed her to have a higher dose of diuretic whilst keeping her salts balanced. They tried a few adjustments - watching closely - until they got it just right for her. And now she’s out and happy.

• How important questioning how things have accumulated over time, and zero-basing things every so often, can be. While talking to her about her meds, the pharmacist took the opportunity to adjust some of the other pills she’s on - spotted some unintentional contraindications, and switched a few things out. This reduces the total number of pills she takes daily and should get rid of a few annoying side-effects for her.

I didn’t have a huge amount in the work diary for the two days I was expected to be in this week - and, as you’d expect, work was really good about me not being at meetings. I did, nonetheless, do work - mostly to distract myself. I finished reading two books: “Modern Grantmaking” by Tom Steinberg and Gemma Bull; and “It ain’t what you give it’s the way that you give it” by Caroline Fiennes. And I read through reams and reams of documents sent over by a client ahead of a kick-off next week.

I also:

• dismantled some Lego Christmas Houses (a gift to my future and present self, as it’s quite meditative and makes building it next year much easier)

• took down the Christmas decorations but decided to leave up the fairy lights in the back garden, at least until the days lengthen

• had some time reflecting on my year. I found myself thinking a lot more about my personal relationships than my professional direction or side-project ambitions

• facilitated a family retro-and-year-planning workshop - a first for the Fletchers. The girls are old enough now to be able to more reflective and intentional. They’re being given more responsibility - and it’s only fair that they get to shape how we spend our family time together

• found and completed some Extreme Dot-to-Dots

• listened to and enjoyed a podcast about the History of English

• continued learning about witches, magic, astrology and runes. I went to a “Witches of London” tour in December and found it *fascinating*. And as I’m fast heading into menopause, I’m quite strongly identifying with the “crone” stage of a woman’s life - and finding myself wanting to embrace that identity. I expect I’ll write more on this at some point

• played around with some watercolours I got for Christmas. I need to adjust the balance between watching Instagram videos of watercolour painting and actually experimenting with the paints myself - I can see my inner perfectionist getting in the way, so I need to give her a kick.

My life this year is going to be about living bigger, bolder and braver than ever before.

And about connecting - more intentionally, more frequently, deeper and more meaningfully, with myself, with friends and family, with new people personally and professionally. What is life, after all, without connection?

I miss you all.