Work

• Still very much enjoying the project I’m on. Sometimes feel hyper-focused on achieving a sprint goal; but most recently I’ve been a mix between a safety net catching things that wouldn’t get done (all hands on deck), and a sweeper in a game of curling, ever so slightly ahead of the curling stone, laying some foundations for what’s to come. Reflection: it’s easier to feel productive when you’re focused on delivering X by Y, or when you can see your contribution translate into someone else’s delivery pretty much right away. I love the buzz I get from that. But I need to remember the other stuff I do is important too, possibly moreso - because it helps make sure the next sprint has the right, tight scope, because it helps address blockers before they affect the team, and because it involves dealing with the noise/running interference so the rest of the team can focus. 

• had some really great in-person time with the wider client leadership team. It was a great reminder of how powerful face-to-face workshops (I don’t just mean meetings) can be - because of the trust that is built up exploring issues and working through problems together. And this leads to much more organic collaboration outside of the room. Reflection: something really underestimated is the relationship leap required to get to the point where folks are asking you their questions as and when they arise. It’s all very well giving a new director an induction, but most people will forget most of what they hear in their first fortnight I reckon. Being on hand to answer questions while people are doing their own sense making, having them feel comfortable throwing questions at you ad hoc so they can absorb information at their own pace, is really high value. 

Home

• I didn’t get round to working on my SDinGov talk last weekend. The scavenger hunt was a huge success (E’s friends have been raving about it - and their parents are cursing me for raising the birthday bar!). Reflection: I don’t regret putting all that effort into something that I’m sure will be a core memory for E. But I am nervous about finding the time to get the first draft of that talk together. I have a lot of material to whittle down. And it isn’t going to get any easier over the school holidays (which started…today).

• We have a summer party with a group of families whose eldest children were born around the same time as E. It’s now a very large and rowdy crowd. There’s also a Sunday lunch with extended family, celebrating some July birthdays. And we also have a sleepover arranged, because didn’t have the heart to tell my youngest she couldn’t have her friend round, what with all the focus having been on her elder sister and and Z feeling so left out. That means this will be another weekend where I’ve overcommitted myself. Reflection: I need to keep remembering - these are my choices. I don’t have to do any of these things. I choose to sacrifice this time and energy for the people I love. And if it gets too much, if I need to step out, they will support me too. 

• I messed up a couple of times. I booked summer camp for this week, not next week - and didn’t realise until Thursday night. Fortunately the camp organiser was understanding and let me transfer them to next week’s camp (for free!). And then yesterday, worried about my credit card bill, I paid my credit card balance down manually - forgetting that I already had a direct debit set up to do exactly the same the following day! I’m lucky (??) that my current account doesn’t have enough money to pay out more than once, so it wasn’t taken twice - but I am expecting to have to pay a fee for the failed DD. Reflection: I think I might need to schedule in payment-related life admin for Fridays when I have actual brain space - it’s clear that remembering last minute and sorting these things out in the evenings is not going well for me. 

Work

• My main project has been really intense this week, topped off with with Thursday as a 6.30am to 11.30pm day (the working day itself bookended by long train journeys) - so I’m shattered. This isn’t standard on the projects I work on to be honest, so I’m okay with it. It also helped that I was able to sleep until 10.30am this morning. Reflection: I’m expecting to be forced (by my financial situation, not by my boss) to have to return to a five day working week. Let’s face it, I’ve been in a very privileged position to be able to only work four days since my COVID response jobs. Most weeks I use Fridays to work on my book, catch-up on chores, write weeknotes, and prepare for the weekend; occasionally, like this week, I use the Friday to recover.  When I return to full-time I’m going to have to be really careful with how I use that fifth working day, so that I don’t end up burned out. 

• Overall vibe on this project is optimism - the client leadership team is a great set of talented new hires genuinely open-minded and up for taking a test-and-learn approach on a new service; all of them now have a much better idea of what we’re talking about in practice (not just conceptually) - and none has baulked. Reflection: I’ve found myself suppressing my optimism on some projects until I know how justified it is. We’ve all been in organisations where leadership nods and agrees and says absolutely we want that challenge, and yes, let’s work differently, but when push comes to shove they aren’t willing to leave behind the false certainty, leadership and management habits, and comfort blankets they’ve clung to throughout their long careers. I’ll always give new clients the benefit of the doubt on their intentions - but you won’t get true excitement from me until I see them actually doing things differently or having really brave conversations.

• The rest of my work consists of small, niche contributions on large projects led by others. I often find myself feeling guilty that I haven’t been able to give them as much of my time as they or I would like - so it was nice to hear a couple of them this week describe my involvement as short but intensely high impact. I might start being a little kinder to myself.

• PD has a new office - not too far from Aviation House in Holborn, for those who know it. I’m excited to see it - for various reasons I haven’t made it in yet, though I’d planned to have been in at least three days by now. Reflection: the up side of not having been in yet means I’ve not had to experience the frustration of the inevitable snagging that comes when you move into a new commercial space. Though the PD folks handling the move have been so fast at addressing issues as they emerge.

Personal

• This weekend is *two* family birthday parties, and for the one we’re hosting for E (and her friends), I’ve committed to running a proper puzzle-based scavenger hunt. This - and working on my SDinGov talk - is what I’ll be doing today. Reflection: I love creating puzzles and scavenger hunts (I think in another life I’d create escape rooms) - and I love creating and iterating talks I want to give. So I need to make sure I experience these both as enjoyable activities today. There’s a risk I won’t, because I’m still tired. So I’m promising myself now that if I don’t find my flow within 30mins on the talk, I’ll work on it on later in the weekend. And I’m going to start with an MVP scavenger hunt, so that if I run out of time or energy, I haven’t failed to deliver for E.

• The kids have been watching Traitors (US) with me in the evenings. It’s nice to have something we regularly do together as a three (we tried badminton but it didn’t stick). Though I’m getting more than a little annoyed at the incessant mocking of Alan Cummings’ accent from E, and Z pointing out the hilarious Panto-levels of overdramatic on the show. Reflection: sometimes it’s more about spending time together than it is about activity itself. This time next year I won’t remember anything at all about the show, but I’ll remember these two girls descending into fits of giggles together, and fighting over whose turn it is to make the popcorn.

• I missed Pride London, so I’ve instead decided to attend my first Pride event and go to my first ever music festival - in Brighton at the start of August. Yes, I’ve lived a very sheltered life. I’m very excited. If anyone has any tips - for Pride, or for music festivals, or for women doing either of these things unaccompanied, let me know.

Subdued - is how I’d describe this week. Partly a mix of family/personal stuff, and partly having started the week a little under the weather and ended it with a COVID vaccination.

Work

• Research interviews and synthesis on my main project continues, though I’m one of many hands covering it so it didn’t completely trash my calendar this week. The synthesis session reminded me that I’m best at, and enjoy most, the drawing out of insight, the pattern-finding, the sense-making. And so the very end of the week saw me pulling together (from our user research and wider evidence) some inclusion profiles we can use to keep those most likely to otherwise be excluded from our service at the front of everyone’s minds. Reflection: I’ve colleagues who are *astonishingly* good at running user research interviews, and working alongside them I’ve concluded that I’m just not as good with people as they are. This is linked to my desire to get better at connecting with others - I’m not saying I’m sh*t with people, but some of my colleagues are absolute naturals at building rapport and managing even the most challenging of interviews. It doesn’t come so easily to me. I’m much better at sensemaking and storytelling.

• In contrast, I started to hit my stride on identifying assumptions and risks, planning and structuring work to come, and mapping out best-guess back-office journeys and capabilities. We’re doing this to drive up momentum - our approach pushes us to start with a hypothesis or a prototype so we can test and learn and iterate quickly. Reflection: this is what I love about design - that we make things more tangible in order to (a) catalyse engagement with choices and possibilities; and (b) move beyond speculation and expert overanalysis by actually exposing those choices, possibilities and experts to reality. Just as no-one need argue whether the capital of Slovenia is Ljubljana when Google exists, many arguments in the service design space can and should just be resolved by putting a prototype in front of someone. The challenge now is to remember this whenever I feel we’re spending more time disagreeing with subject-matter experts folks on something than we would have spent testing it. This includes arguing about operating model and org design (elements of which can also be prototyped and tested, don’t forget).

• I ran a session on Spending Reviews, for colleagues. I spent a decade in the Treasury at the start of my career (including through changes in Government), so I know quite a lot about public spending processes, scrutiny, fiscal events and the like. Reflection: I know quite a lot about this. But I’m aware that a decade has passed since I worked there and things will have changed. I did my homework, checking back with colleagues who’ve only recently left, so I didn’t misinform my colleagues. But while doing my homework I struck by how very opaque Treasury processes are. I do hope the new lot have an appetite for significantly more transparency.

• I designed and ran an induction session on agile user-centred ways of working - essentially running new arrivals in the client team through our what our “start small, test and learn” approach means in practice. I used the best case study I could find to bring it to life - but it was a colleague’s, not my own, which I declared at the start of the session. At the end someone who’d worked on that programme told me that you wouldn’t know I hadn’t worked alongside them because I’d so effectively described their journey. Reflection: when the original storyteller isn’t available, I can do a bloody good job of it in their stead. It takes preparation, practice - and the chance to hear the story told by others a few times (so I can capture the small details that really make the difference). We should do this more intentionally - grow our cadre of storytellers, so that our collectives stories spread further and live longer than they otherwise would.

Personal

• There was an election. We have a new government. I’m struck by how different my optimism feels compared to the last time Labour won back power. I remember feeling ecstatic, in 1997. As a kid from a Scottish coal-mining community, whose parents were still bitter about the poll tax, the change in government felt truly momentous. I don’t feel that way this time. I’m still optimistic. I’m pleased. I’m relieved. I’m feeling an (albeit slightly subdued) excitement at the potential that comes with any changing of the guard. But I’m not elated. Reflections: a quarter of a century later, and slightly grizzled from the reality of making change happen in public services, I probably shouldn’t be surprised I feel this way. But I am. The optimism I have now is a realistic optimism - one founded on a belief that things can be better, but there’s a shedload of hard work we need to put in to make it happen, and that we’ll fail plenty on the way there. I guess this is who I am now. I miss elation though. It feels good.

• I had a COVID booster on Friday. There seems to be a bit of a mini spike and I don’t want to get ill. When I told my mum, she told me she decided to not have the booster because “if you ask the nurses at the hospital, they say that you can’t trust it, that you’ve no idea what side effects you’ll suffer five years down the line”. This is my clinically vulnerable, regularly on-deaths-door Mum, choosing not to protect herself from a known current risk to her health (one that would be fatal for her) - because the anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists have managed to make it into her Facebook feed. I’m beyond livid. Reflection: none. Because I just can’t crack open all those emotions right now. 

• My own kids: the eldest has won a prize or award for History at her school. Next week she receives it - and her 13th birthday is a few days later. She has just announced that she doesn’t want any presents this year because she already has everything she needs. Awwww. Part of me is imagining some sort of dramatic metamorphosis of my darling history geek midweek, werewolf-style - but maybe it’ll be closer to Harry Enfield’s Kevin-the-Teenager? My youngest in contrast is climbing trees, acquiring scratches and bruises on every limb, and living her best 10yo life. She ran a colour run yesterday - so today I have the pleasure of repeatedly washing the clothes she wore to see if they’re remotely salvageable. Though she’s already asked to go shopping for more clothes. Reflection: only on how much I love these two, and how I find myself regularly fascinated at how very different they are.  I’m sure most parents feel this way. Doesn’t make it any less fascinating to me.

Work

• Really challenging research interviews, with people who are angry, frustrated, grieving, sceptical, and often in poor physical, mental and cognitive health. They’re taking part, despite their anxiety , because they truly believe that people need to be actively involved in the design of policy and services for them. Reflection: It’s a privilege to do this work with them, to help them contribute however much or little they can; and I’m deeply relieved we’ve had had consistently good feedback from the research participants about their experience of us and our sessions. It took an awful lot of preparation and care to get here - far more than we’d take for more standard engagements - so I’m looking forward to sharing what we did, how and why with wider colleagues. I’m also pushing for us to be able to speak more openly about the work, so we can share more widely still.

• Working on some operating model stuff - and reminded this week that as much as people think they know what each other is talking about, you’ll often still need to show them what you mean in order to be confident that you are indeed on the same page. That’s even more true if what you’re describing isn’t that widespread. Reflection: dynamic operating models that support the design and delivery of services that continuously improve and evolve to meet changing user needs - they’re not mainstream. And it’s hard to persuade people to take a leap of faith on something relatively unfamiliar especially in the public sector. Telling people about it, trying to explain with words how it looks and feels remarkably different - it’s simply less effective. Sharing lived experiences of these ways of working, going on road-trips to places already working in these ways to see them in action, using analogies and visual metaphors, pointing to contemporaries already doing this, actually starting to adopt and iterate some of the habits and building some of the capabilities (starting small). It all makes it feel more real, more relatable, more attainable.

Home

• Pride London. I was supposed to go. I was looking forward to going - it would have been my first Pride. Sadly I was too unwell. But that’s okay. There will be other Pride events. I’ve realised, though, that lots of the events run really, really late (like, 10pm-5am). The group I planned to go with arrived at one venue two hours after I went to bed on Saturday (I could tell from the WhatsApp messages I read this morning). If I want to start doing stuff like that occasionally, well I need to figure out the logistics. How do people do it? The last train home is too early, at midnight, so are people instead getting the first train the next day? I don’t think I’ve ever stayed awake that long. Reflection: I want to feel more part of the LGBTQ+ community this year. And I need to figure out how to do that as a 43 year old.

• For those following along, I’ve returned to my swimming lessons recently. My breaststroke, of all the strokes, is the weakest - and alas my rubbish breaststroke technique caused some severe groin strain this week (no innuendo). My swim teacher is enthusiastic but still a little too rookie to know what’s causing it - so I asked him if he could look into what it might be, outside of our lessons, essentially setting him homework ahead of our next session. Reflection: Previously I’d have felt too uncomfortable to make an ask like this. Maybe it’s my British politeness? Maybe it’s something rooted deep in women of past generations (certainly where I grew up) that sense that we shouldn’t be demanding? Either way, awkwardness over something a small as this isn’t okay and isn’t a sentiment I’m willing to submit to - not least because I need to figure out what is causing me the pain so that I can move beyond it and finally get strong enough for open water swimming.

• On Thursday evening we had the Open Evening for the secondary school my youngest is hoping to attend in September 2025. She’s lucky - her sister already goes to the school, and it applies the sibling rule in considering applications, so she’s very likely to get in. Going round the school site, I felt a deep longing to return to school myself. Reflection: I think over the decades I’ve become increasingly aware of how much I don’t know - and I felt that intensely while visiting classrooms, seeing the curriculum materials, seeing the work of teenagers now. Some seriously strong FOMO. All the subjects I didn’t take, all the books I never read, all the practical skills I never developed. All the curiosity unindulged. I’m getting a taste of it with my eldest daughter - who already knows so much more than I do about so many things. So I’m looking forward to learning vicariously through my children during their high school years.

Mix of work and other this week.

Work

• Finally chopped off the long tail of that engagement that wasn’t ending. The client is sad to see us go - but I’m going to subscribe to the adage “always leave them wanting more”, rather than dwell on the impact we could have had if we’d kept going. It’ll be lovely to watch the client team progressing on their service transformation - we’ll just be cheering from the sidelines like everyone else now.

• I was struggling to effectively communicate how I saw something unfolding - because a lot of the words we and the client team were using have been ambiguous, so we’ve been talking at cross-purposes. I don’t ordinarily choose to work late evening/early morning, but I was struck by inspiration and found a much better (and visual) way of getting my point across and showing how their concepts were similar but different. And the clarity meant we were able to spot material differences in our thinking, and know where decisions hade to be made - really speeding us out of the fog we’d been in. Reflection: I say there’s no such thing as overcommunication, but the value of repeating poor communication isn’t high. Without my intervention, we could have kept spinning our wheels - and no amount of communication in that context would have moved things forward. We needed to show what we meant. Spending focused time working through a very different way of communicating the concept - one that would be much less ambiguous - was absolutely worth it.

• I was a participant in a workshop this week that had been run a few times already with different groups. Billed as co-design, it was clear from the start of the session that it was actually an engagement session intended to win people round to ideas the facilitators already had by packaging them up as our own. I was being “stakeholder managed” - and it felt quite yucky. Reflection: workshop participants aren’t unintelligent, they know when you’re leading them somewhere. They see you introducing entirely new concepts while you’re paraphasing their contributions, they hear you using different language to them and aren’t surprised when it magically matches the slides you made earlier, Blue Peter-style. This feels disingenuous and patronising. It is OKAY to share what you already have (but do it early, and change it in response to feedback) - just don’t dress it up as something else.

Other

• I’m back swimming once more, focused on getting strong enough to move from pool to lake or sea. I love the idea of open water swimming, but didn’t manage to build up my fitness enough to actually make the transition last time. Why? Because my technique wasn’t good (so it was exhausting) - and the swimming instructor stood at the side of the pool chatting rather than giving anyone feedback. It’s why I left in the end. And it’s why I’d been reluctant to return. But I did, and I was pleased - the new swimming instructor is very attentive and encouraging. I’m still going to have to get the hours of swimming in to build up my stamina, but I’m confident this time I will actually see the improvement I’m looking for. Reflection: it’s absurd to think that I’d subconsciously abandoned the goal of getting strong enough for open water swimming because of one bad swimming instructor. But I had. It’s a reminder of how difficult it is to persuade myself to do hard things. I have loads of excuses at the ready for abandoning a swimming lesson - and that one was enough to properly tank the endeavour. Do we do the same in our work lives? Take a failure in one context, and generalise it to others, letting cynicism take root? Or remember a colleague with whom you once had a challenging relationship, and assume that won’t change? All I needed to do was try again - one lesson - to test my assumption, and if it had gone badly I could have quit. But what if it goes well is the question we need to be asking ourselves.

• I struggled to sleep this week. My mum started the week with a bladder problem and, as anyone caring for clinically vulnerable parents, infections are not fun. Midweek - just as we were heading into the evening stage of our work summer gathering, I found out it wasn’t a bladder problem, it was bowel cancer. I stood off to the side, away from my colleagues, and had a little cry. Sleep-deprived and perimenopausal can make for a bit of an emotional mess (and that’s before the Pimms), so I’m grateful to my colleagues’ support through Wednesday’s messiness. Reflection: lots of workplaces say they have a caring values-led culture, but its times like these where it’s really put to the test. Every single person who interacted with me showed me how much they cared and communicated clearly that they had my back. Whatever I needed. Want to leave straight for Scotland, Audree? Need a mental health day on Thursday, Audree? Want to talk to a specialist oncologist friend for a second opinion - they’ll hook me up. Want to just let loose, take silly photos and distract myself - they’ll bring the distraction. This is what I needed, and something I didn’t get while contracting. And I’m so immensely grateful for it.

• Friday was my birthday. Eggs benedict for brunch; and a gastropub (the Alford Arms) for dinner. The kids were so excited for my birthday - the youngest has been making me hand-made gifts fora couple of weeks now in preparation. Reflection: on my birthday itself I felt the second-hand joy from my kids more strongly than my own. I did today too - cycling with Z down a hill on the way back from swimming, she squealed with happiness and I felt that sound lighten my heart. Is there a way for me to get some of that first-hand joy back again? It surely isn’t something I left behind in my childhood - but I’m struggling to recall feeling it since. I can do contented. Perhaps I’m too serious or cynical for joy now? I jokingly called Ben Terrett “a joyless optimist” once - but perhaps that label fits closer to home? —— On second thought, even if it’s true, I don’t believe it’s inevitable or permanent. I just need to be more consciously seeking out joyful experiences - and, learning from my children, perhaps simple joys are the right place to start.

Some of you know me professionally. Some of you know me personally. Some of you know me from these interwebs. And some of you know me IRL. Each of those Audrees is different. Professional Audree is confident and opinionated. Personal Audree is less confident, struggles with connection, and is still working through issues from her childhood and adolescence. Online Audree is passionate, balanced, and trying to put out only good into the world. IRL Audree is quieter, loves being around other people (until she doesn’t), and is quicker to take the risk on telling uncomfortable truths when she thinks it matters because she knows she can handle the IRL fallout if she misjudges it. All these Audrees are deeply reflective (perhaps excessively so) and trying their hardest to be authentic, to behave in a way that feels true to herself.

Ok, enough weird talking in third person. I’m sharing this with you because a few of you who only knew me online have recently met me in real life and were surprised with the Audree they encountered. I’ve mentioned this before - I write to think. I write these weeknotes for me, to process what happened and how I feel about it, what I can learn from it. I think through writing. I share more of my inner life in these weeknotes than I do with the people around me IRL because I’m talking to me, not to you. I’m happy to talk about this stuff with any of you IRL but I don’t need to because this is me processing it. The stuff that isn’t in here - that’s the stuff I need IRL conversations about.

• An engagement that should already have ended still hasn’t really, truly ended. Ending things is hard. (There are books about it, I know). Reflection: I’m finding this hard because it’s supporting a discovery that is quite naturally sliding into continuous discovery mode to support the design of the service through alpha, beta and beyond. So my arbitrary finish date on it that makes it tough - there’s always one more thing that they’ve never done before and would be good to coach them through for the first time.

• I’m committed to one large engagement, and contributing a small amount of nerdy stuff to two or three small ones on a more ad hoc basis. In previous situations where I’ve been allocated to multiple engagements, I found the context switching really tough. Right now, it’s easy. Reflection: I think that’s because this is an intense project taking up most of my time - it’s immersive. And I’ve been using the other engagements to lift myself up out of the weeds. It’s working really well - switching things up by this small degree means I have something else to focus on, taking my mind off the big engagement. As a result, when I do return to the big engagement work, my brain has reset, I’m having more eureka moments because my thinking is both more lateral and more strategic. And I’m able to sleep at night without everything running through my brain. So: can I engineer a future Audree-deployment model consisting of one big rock, a couple of small pebbles, plus the usual cupful of internal/corporate sand (for the Covey fans)?

• Working on a dynamic operating model at the moment and it just wasn’t landing with the client - I couldn’t figure out why. The content is good, proven stuff, and the client tends to get most other aspects of PD ways of working. So what was wrong? Turns out I wasn’t speaking their language visually: they’re used to consultancies presenting them with operating model diagrams, and so it looked like I hadn’t come up with the goods. Reflection: I’m a visual thinker but I when it comes to org design and operating model design I have an aversion to high-level diagrams. I reckon it’s because the diagrams typically chosen either (a) oversimplify so much that they at best hide the good stuff, and at worst unwittingly design it out; or (b) reinforce new public management and “old power” thinking. But I also know that familiarity creates trust in design - and if creating a visual to sit alongside solid written content is what is needed (here it was), then I need to stop being so dogmatic.

• I caught up with a colleague who was asking about some behaviour patterns they’d seen in the senior civil service over the last 20 years. I’ve spent a lot of time studying them quite closely, and trying different strategies for engaging and adjusting them. The trick is to remember they’re just humans, with all the foibles that everyone else has. And that, the more senior you get, the better at internal politics your peers are likely to be (they’ve had to be, to get there, usually). Reflection: turns out this was a powerful conversation for the colleague. I was able to shed light on quite a few things they hadn’t been able to predict or explain, because I’m a people-watcher. It’s this dark matter in organisations that I’m good at navigating - weird interpersonal dynamics, dysfunctional teams, toxic leadership behaviours. I ought to do a lot more coaching than I do, I reckon.

Short weeknotes this week really.

• We had an end of engagement workshop with a client team and a large group of their colleague-collaborators. I suggested I hand the client team the baton ahead of this final session - I felt it would be powerful for their colleagues to hear them tell the story of what had been done, to have them walk them through the roadmap and dive into the detail. I’m proud that the client team stepped up - confident and feeling equipped to deliver a great session. They did a grand job. And they’re able to describe not just the approach or the principles, but how it will working, and is already working, in practice. This , though, represents a further widening of the gap between the people who show up and those who don’t - a gap that still needs addressing. Reflection: busy people have lots of competing demands for their attention - so it’s not uncommon for folks to dip in and out of workshops, show-and-tells, town halls and the like. Their days might be back-to-back meetings, or they’ve fires needing to be put out, or perhaps they’re just very busy and trust that their team is on it and doesn’t need them. Here and there it might not matter, but the absences add up and as a leader you can quickly find yourself in a very different place to your team - and with sufficiently different mental models and expectations that you’re unable to give them the support they need. As someone running transformation projects, I know the fix for this is often more bespoke communication and engagement for these leaders - to meet them where they are (within reason). But my honest advice for leaders this overwhelmed? Either genuinely delegate leadership decision-making so that decisions can be made at the pace of delivery - or else don’t pursue that transformation project until you can give it the attention it needs.

• Most of my week was spent working on the big new engagement that started the week before my holiday. There was a huge amount of progress in my absence - I’ve been frantically trying to catch up with the rest of the team. This week for me involved: data schema, document requests, data protection, trauma-informed research training, trauma-informed operating model design, engagement strategy, participant recruitment strategy, screener survey, exploring options for prototypes with connected front and back-end, operating model design, comms planning - for service, and for service design. It’s…a lot. And I hate feeling like I’m a bottleneck on things. But we’re making good progress. And it’s a lot of fun. My team mates are amazing and my contributions are valued. It’s lovely. Reflection: When you’re part of an immensely talented team, the learning that comes from the “all hands on deck” nature of intense, ambitious, ambiguous, complex projects like this is truly invaluable, and the camaraderie is swoon-worthy. It’s all about the people. The same project could be a dream or a dumpster fire, depending on the team.

• We had “Ladies Lunch”. This is a regular hour scheduled for PD women to catch-up. It’s a mix of in-person and hybrid as we’re really all together in the same place at once. Sometimes we talk about meaningful things, sometimes someone presents something or facilitates a structured discussion about something important. But just as often we’re shooting the sh*t about favourite coffees, teenage celebrity crushes, and when we’re having the next karaoke night. Reflection: These lunches, with this group, they really hit me in the feels : they’re utterly innocuous in the diary, and might look like a bit of a waste of time, but that time spent is astonishingly valuable because of the connection it creates, renews and strengthens. We’re sharing ourselves as women, not just as professionals. And I love it.

• Post-holiday chaos. The day after our arrival home, our youngest had 24hr playdate with a friend and our eldest needed emergency dental appointment. We had to stock our completely empty fridge and cupboards and clean a mountain of washing. The girls had to revise for school tests (they’re streaming/setting the classes for 2024/25). I held onto holiday mode for as long as possible - and didn’t turn Slack notifications back on until the very last moment (Monday 9am - go me!).

No work, all play this week.

Those of you following along at home will remember that the holiday we planned for Easter was scuppered by an expired passport. Well, this half-term we had the rescheduled holiday to Copenhagen.

• I learned that short breaks to rainy cities are much easier to pack for than our traditional holidays. And, at ages 10 and 12, our kids can be trusted to (mostly) pack everything they need. We were able to travel light(ish) and pack last minute. Reflection: this was on my to-do list all week, prodding and nagging at the back of my brain as a daunting chore. The reality of it was 5 minutes of planning, 10 minutes of packing, and 10 minutes of checking their bags - plainly not justifying the cognitive burden it represented in my mind. I’m pretty sure this is a throwback to when the kids were younger and packing to go anywhere was a logistical nightmare - so I need to try and reset my assumptions for this stage of my life.

• I’ve never visited Copenhagen before. It is a beautiful city. And it feels incredibly safe, relaxed, welcoming and friendly to me, and to my children. But walking around the city I couldn’t help but notice how astonishingly white the population is - this level of homogeneity is really disconcerting and uncomfortable.

• I love the combination of bicycles + flat landscapes. If I were to move to Copenhagen, it would be for the cycling culture. There were bikes and cycle lanes everywhere - including lots of physically separate cycle lanes that allowed families with children to cycle safely alongside buses and trucks.

• My 12 year old is at an age where she doesn’t want to do (m)any of the things that I’d like to do when it comes to sightseeing. I found that hard to navigate without feeling a little resentful. In the end I think we found a solid compromise, with all of us making it to at least a couple of our individual “must-go” destinations. Reflection: as is often the case, friction emerged just before lunchtime and was resolved when food had buoyed our spirits somewhat. We forget - as adults, as teenagers - how much of an impact neglecting our basic needs has on our frame of mind, on our ability to make decisions, and on our emotions. I think this means: planning our morning after breakfast; reviewing and planning our afternoon after lunch. On reflection, that probably also holds true for my working day, if I want to make the smartest decisions about how I spend my time.

• Every day felt about 20% too much for me. My husband and my youngest were keen to squeeze novelty, excitement, learning and fun out of every minute we were there. My eldest and I need downtime, to recover from all the stimulation and to recenter ourselves. Reflection: On a short holiday - where you’re aware time is precious - it’s easy to over-programme your days and end up overwhelmed and exhausted. Especially if you have a 10yo who gets bored easily and demands to be entertained while others are just need some down-time. But cramming too much into a day is counterproductive if you want to enjoy yourself and create good memories, because that’s as much or more about quality than it is quantity. I’m starting to think that splitting into pairs - to indulge our individual interests, energy levels and preferences - is the way to go. Though part of me is sad at the idea - is it really a “family” memory if we’re not all together?

• I spent quite a lot of time looking at the Slack app icon on my phone, and persuading myself not to click on it. I succeeded. I’ve been experiencing FOMO because the project I’m on is fun - but it’s also intense so I know if I' start to open notifications, messages and emails I’ll get sucked in. Instead I’m suffering through gentle post-holiday inbox dread. It’s okay, I’ll cope.

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.

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.

From mid-May my work life and home life are due to get much busier. Knowing it won’t last, I’ve been sure to enjoy the slightly quieter, slower pace available to me this week.

• I’ve been thinking and working on some internal projects with some fantastic colleagues - one in the operating model space, one focused on case management, one on grants management, another on researchops, and then one on people strategy. I love the variety of work - and how much opportunity there is to collaborate on things that will make things easier now and as we grow. Reflection: the opportunities are there but not always seized because client work (a) always takes precedence and (b) is relatively unpredictable in its scale and flow. It reminds me how much of an ask of their staff it is when our clients expect transformation activity to happen “at the side of the desk”. It’s important, it’s strategic, it’s urgent BUT it’s the first thing to be paused when people feel overwhelmed. In my case, it means that some of these projects go more slowly than we’d like, and if we really struggle with momentum then we need to just put it down. I saw a couple of our leaders do that this month with internal projects, communicating clearly that they were being taken out of our work-in-progress for now. It’s vital role modelling - and something we advise clients to do all the time, so I love that we’re taking our own advice.

• I’ve spent plenty of time getting to know people - new starters, as well as colleagues I haven’t yet had the chance to work with. I‘ve had my head down a lot recently, so it’s nice to have room in the diary to connect. Especially as we’ve had so many new people join us recently, and I hate not knowing at least everyone’s names/faces, even if we haven’t had coffee yet. Reflection: actually I’m not sure how true this is. I’m awful, surprisingly awful, at remembering names and faces. But I’m uncomfortable with not having been introduced/not introducing myself - I want people to feel known and seen.

• I’m in the last proper week of an engagement (though there’s always a slightly extended “tail” in wrapping up fully) - so I’ve been finishing off the final deliverables. This project has occupied quite a lot of my brain space over recent months, not just in working hours, so it feels like a moment. And with a big intensive project starting next week, I need that brain space back. Reflection: if it feels like a moment then I should make it one - should do something with the team now, rather than at the end of May (when we’re having a retro, a few weeks after the scheduled end of the work). I don’t know if the way I run a retro at the end of an engagement is different enough from sprint retros to properly give that sense of acknowledgement and celebration and closure we crave. Is there something special and meaningful we could do or share or make together?

• I worked with a friend to record a podcast focused on “new power” ways of working in public service. It was a lovely conversation. I’m looking forward to editing it down into something they can share. I would have done that this weekend but it looks so lovely outside that I can’t bear to sit in the shed doing audio post-production. Reflection: I was totally overprepared but that doesn’t matter: I was just nervous and the preparation was my way of working through it. Once we got going I quickly found my groove - it didn’t feel stilted at all, so I guess I’ll find out if it sounded stilted when I go through the audio file later. I have been meaning to podcast and/or videocast for a while now and I expect I still will. But there has been a minor backlash on LinkedIN, with people I generally respect speaking out against other people doing videocasts, podcasts and blogging, with variations on a theme of “they like the sound of their own voice too much”. I know it’s a them problem, not a me problem, but it introduced just enough doubt for me to hold fire.

• I was gutted to miss CampDigital this year. I really wanted to catch-up with friends and former colleagues - and it’s always a great event. I wanted to see how Lou’s thinking on Bad Services is shaping up (that book must be nearly here); Julian always stretches my thinking; and I was hoping to see Coco speak, having seen her lightning talk last year. Oh well. Next time. My next conference is Service Design in Government in September - and I’ll be up in Edinburgh the whole week.

• TV: We’ve been watching Race Across The World with the kids in the evenings - the 12yo slinks out of her bedroom and curls up next to me on the sofa for the hour, reminding me of how it used to be before she went to high school and decided that parents were to be avoided wherever possible. I’m wondering if she’ll join me for Dr. Who or Eurovision. I miss the Eurovision Livetweeting we used to do when Twitter was a thing - I wonder if it’ll pop up on Bluesky instead? I’m not on Threads (and will never be), left X and Facebook, and that type of content is too much of a stretch for LinkedIn.

• The rest: sunny lunch out at a country pub on Friday; first BBQ of 2024; and completing some string art (a flamingo).

I think I mentioned how busy last week was - and how draining it was to spend every work day in the London. I’m ordinarily only in the office one day a week, sometimes two. I dislike crowded trains so I tend to board a nice quiet 6.30am train and start my day early, finishing 12 hours later (or more, if there’s a work social) - leaving me pretty wiped.

This week was just one day in London. I had some decent blocks of time for thinking and making - and they were in the “golden” parts of the day where I’m more likely to be alert, creative and thinking strategically. Reflection: this was luck, not planning, but it made such a difference. I need to try and actively engineer this situation more - but that requires me to stop trying to be so darned helpful and accommodating of others (bucking a habit of a lifetime) where it cuts into my “golden” time.

I designed and ran a workshop I’d call “agile UCD mindset”. It was pretty 101, but incredibly well received. Reflection: what’s obvious and basic for you and me really isn’t obvious and basic for people who haven’t been on the journey we’ve been on. Pinpointing significant mental models, using real examples to show change behaviours through different lenses, unpicking sources of discomfort and helping folks reframe. Simple but high value stuff - that I might be loathe to repeat, worried I was teaching folks to suck eggs. Even though I know that you can never really overcommunicate the basics (especially in organisations with quite a high turnover).

I attended a product leader meet-up organised by Scott Colfer. It was interesting - we discussed programmes and products, and reflected on how much product thinking is needed in the programme world to create the conditions for product management. I’d have liked us to have chatted for longer - it felt too short given how much I’m sure we can learn from each other.

I went along to a network “mixer” and there was a game to get us circulating - “people bingo”. We had to go round the room and find the names of people who had done various things listed on the sheet (conference speaking, writing articles, writing blog posts, mentored people, got a masters degree, worked with data science, participated in a hackathon). It was fun and I met a lot of people. And there was a free drag night at the end. I did, however, find myself irritated by the assumptions of the (mostly) men around me - because I kept being asked if I liked baking, if I’d ever been in a book club, if I had a pet. I wasn’t getting the questions about my professional self (which were the majority of the 25 questions on the bingo sheet) - unlike the guy who accompanied me round. Reflection: this bothers me but I’m not sure what I can or should do about the fact that individually these men believed I was more likely to bake than blog (or similar). It’s a reminder I guess of how hard it can be to be taken seriously as a woman in the tech space (or an overweight woman in the tech space)- and I guess a reminder for me of how lucky I am to be in a workplace where it isn’t much of an issue.

I took an “immersive sound bath”. It involved lying on a yoga mat with a blanket over me, while a woman hit singing bowls, played chimes, donged gongs, and generally made a wide range of incredibly relaxing noises that made me fall asleep at least three times in one hour in public. I came out feeling amazingly chill - went home (not much traffic) and entered the Fletcher madhouse where my two had friends round and they were making loads of noise (and mess) excitedly cake-baking in the kitchen. I definitely lost my chill. Reflection: I almost think it would have better not to do the sound bath. The transition from soooooo calm to soooooo frantic was too much for my poor brain, almost physically painful. I wonder whether if I’d just stayed at “relatively stressed out” I’d have found the kids less stressful. Is this a thing? I should look it up.

Four friends and I went to see the Moulin Rouge (stage show) in London. We haven’t seen each other in months and so we had a lot to catch up on. The day started at 12.00 as we were catching the train into town for a matinee. The show was really fantastic - I want to take my mum and sister there, if we can find a way for my mum to travel safely and comfortably to London in her condition. After the show we went to Covent Garden for more chatter and some high quality people-watching, before going for dinner and drinks, returning home around 11pm. Reflection: I was overstimulated by 7pm. Having to be that intensively sociable for such a long stretch of time was hard. I’m an introvert and I know myself - and my friends know me - so it wasn’t too weird when I went quiet and withdrew a little from the conversation after maybe 8pm. As I’ve grown older I’ve grown more confident, I share more (online and IRL), and I’ve grown more sociable - but I’m always going to draw most of my energy from being alone and in my inner world. I love spending time with my colleagues and my family and my friends - it’s truly life enriching - just not too much time. And I’m lucky to be surrounded people who interpret my behaviour as self-regulation rather than rude.

A lot on at work this week:

• a client session replaying our research insights and opportunities, followed quickly by a session mapping out the many ways they could sabotage their efforts to seize those opportunities. Reflection: the sabotage workshop I developed in 2017 while I was in Barnardo’s - it didn’t get much traction back then because I don’t think I was in the right rooms. But, for the rooms my colleagues and I are in now, it’s just the ticket. It makes me wonder what other things I developed earlier in my career, for other contexts, might be more impactful now. Maybe it’s time to start panning for gold in my google drive… Find out more here: https://www.audreefletcher.co.uk/blog/2023/8/7/self-sabotage-name-it-to-tame-it);

• a UK and Europe team awayday that left me feeling hugely energised. Partly, I think, because we held a deep-dive into learning and development and, well, learning is why I come to work each day. A team session on new time-tracking software is unlikely to leave me so buzzed. Reflection: I can see that L&D requires some careful balancing in a small-but-scaling org like ours. Balancing individual learning ambitions with the ways in which the business needs us to grow as a workforce; meeting the needs of some for direction, clarity and structure, without frustrating the many who want to retain the high autonomy, fluidity and informality they have now in how they learn and grow. I’m going to enjoy watching how the L&D proposition evolves over the coming year or two - our People Director is amazing so I’m exceedingly optimistic.

• a client workshop generating strategic options and potential experiments aligned with them. As ever the success of such sessions lies in (a) advance preparation, and (b) your ability to pivot quickly when needed. No pivot needed this time though, as they were engaged from the start. I set out the objectives, the framework, the questions - and then handed them post-its and sharpies. Reflection: I love that we’ve got them to the point where they’re comfortable enough with this as a way of working that they can just crack on - and progress their collective thinking so efficiently. That comfort, though, is still mostly limited to the core of the Team Onion - and to go far, you need to go together. I can’t help but wonder what could we have achieved if we’d managed to spread more widely some of those mental models and ways of working in the time we’ve had? (This creeping ambition is why I like to pair with folks who’re ruthless with scope…) https://teamonion.works

• a design community of practice session discussing design sprints and the experience we have across the teams of quantifying UCD impact. At the end I found myself about to apologise for having been “a bit much” in the session - let’s say instead I was impassioned - but I caught myself before apologising. Reflections: I have strong opinions on (Knapp-style) design sprints because I’ve seen lots of really poor practice. Like, ethically questionable stuff, performative and tokenistic inclusion, centering of the designer/process, exploitation of participants and occasionally harm. Want to cause me to grind my teeth and mutter under my breath? Show me folks trying to apply “crazy eights” to a deeply entrenched and complex social issue. Want more thinking on this? Try KA McKercher: https://www.beyondstickynotes.com) That said I’m more chill about this when the design sprints as part of a wider process and focused on simpler things, especially if adequate research is done ahead of the sprint, the participant list is carefully drawn up, participants expectations are well managed, and ideas are tested and iterated based on real user feedback.

• a team session. An engagement I was on 3 days a week last year has been so successful that the client has asked us to grow tentacles and focus on multiple programmes. I’m now only on it 1 day a month - they keep me around for my niche funding and governance nerdery. Having new people join the team was an opportunity to tell the story so far - and wow, how far we have come since we started. Reflection: the challenges we expected when we began were even harder than we’d anticipated and yet we have achieved a great deal of what we were hoping for in the the time we’ve had and in some ways have exceeded our own change ambitions. It didn’t feel like that was the case at the time. That’s the reality of two steps forward one step back - so you owe it to yourself and the team to stop now and then and see how far you’ve come, it’s so heartening. This stuff is obvious, right? Doesn’t mean we don’t all need reminding to do it. There were also elements of the engagement last year that hurt my head and my heart - but my memory of that has dimmed significantly and so my narrative retelling of the journey is more positive than it would have been back then. It feels like maturity - it’s probably just distance and perspective.

Personal

• PD network mixer. I’m not putting this point in the work category because actually it didn’t feel at all like work - instead it was like being at the pub with lots of friends and a bunch of new but fascinating and talented acquaintances. And a handful of people who know me much better than I know them because they read my weeknotes. Reflection: I’m finding myself in some unexpected and sometimes weird (but not uncomfortable) conversations because of this “personal information asymmetry”. I’m going to continue sharing - for me, and for those of you who’ve said they enjoy reading (thanks for the feedback btw, it means a lot). But if you meet me in real life for the first time and ask me if my daughter is feeling better now, do expect me to be at least a little thrown to begin with.

• Eye tests. I have a test this evening. I know my eyesight is getting worse. I mean, it’s still good. But it’s not what it once was. Reflection: my feelings are mixed. I’m not looking forward to my eyesight being poor enough to need glasses. But at the same time, I like how glasses look. I even toyed with the idea - earlier in my career - of getting some unlensed glasses, in an effort to be taken more seriously as a young-looking woman in the workplace (I was approaching 30 when the iPhone was launched so I’m not gonna call myself young).

• I fumbled an act of allyship recently. I only found out this week. Reflection: I felt (still feel) awkward and awful and deeply embarrassed that my actions intended to help ultimately made things worse. I’ll learn from it, have apologised, will continue to look for ways I can repair/make up for harm done. But I’m not going to stop stepping up and speaking out - I don’t want my allyship to be the type that cowers and hides at the first sign of cringe.

First week back after the Easter break.

Work

• Had the retro to close off what was a really fun client project on Monday. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about what the magic ingredient on that engagement was. I concluded there wasn’t just one but a number of factors. Certainly my team mates were amazing (incredibly capable, great communicators, creative, all working together and in sync despite very different schedules). The scope matched the intensity and duration of the work (not always a given). The client was great - quite relaxed, no significant shadow politics rumbling in the background, and they were open to working in different ways. Reflection: it’s not uncommon for clients to want an outcome that requires them to make changes they’re entirely unwilling to make - so it’s refreshing when the challenge is that they don’t know what or how to do differently but are up for giving it a shot. We often don’t know how willing they truly are until we‘re asking them to change something - so what might I do to find out as quickly as possible? How might we be more compelling when it comes to securing the will if it isn’t there? And what can I do with factors more directly under my control to make projects more fun irrespectively?

• With that project closed, I was left with just one other live engagement this week (while we figure out what’s next for me in the client and internal project pipelines). This is the first time in my career where I’ve not worked full time in a role or on a project - at work we use a “fractional deployment” model and so I’m usually working across a handful of projects at any one point. Occasionally I’ll be underallocated then I can find myself swaying from feeling slightly overwhelmed to being slightly bored. Reflection: truth be told I still find it all a little odd. I don’t mind the context switching (most leadership roles are mostly context switching). But my thoughts aren’t so easily compartmentalised into allocated billable hours and days per week - my brain will continue to work on a knotty problem until it is solved.

• With some time free, I helped a colleague prep for an exec board meeting we the team needed to land a big proposition. I really enjoyed thinking it through with him: who on the board knows about this already? Do they really know about it, or did they just receive a paper/email? What do we know or suspect about their disposition to it so far, and how can we check? Are they an ally or a potential threat? Could they advocate for this and win others round before or in the session? Are there peers more widely (in the department, in Whitehall) who might make a great evangelist for this ahead of the session? What hot buttons do we need to avoid? Where are the bear traps? What do we need pre-emptively reassure on? How do we get access to them ahead of time, to persuade them, to brief them? What do we need to negotiate with whom ahead of time? Reflection: it reminds me a lot of the work we had to do at the Treasury when we were prepping for negotiation changes to international laws - where we were expected to have completed most of the horsetrading before the politicians eventually sat down. Viewed through this lens, preparing for the exec board session is the work - and so it’s astonishing how often folks fail to include it in planning. The board papers - they’re not an arbitrary input, they’re not a deliverable, they’re evidence of conversations had.

• I was out for two weeks and the project team did a fantastic job while I was out. I know we hire well at PD - but I’m always impressed at how effortlessly people step up and cover for each other given the mix of deep specialist and expert generalists we have. It’s also nice to come back and see that there are still distinctly Audree-shaped contributions to be made, and to be reminded of the value I bring. Reflection: it’s as if my absence highlights the counterfactual for me in the workplace - so if I’m intentional about doing so I should be able to learn a lot from observing what has and hasn’t happened while I’m out.

• New boss asked me what I want. I’ve been told I spend a great deal of time and effort advocating for others, and really not that much time articulating or asking for what I need, and that perhaps I should address that gap. Reflection: I think that’s partly true. I don’t see my needs as particularly unmet - though when I do ask for things, I tend not to ask in a way that would be described as demanding. Things I’m not demanding (some not demandable): to host some podcast episodes for PD; to host events or moderate panels; more public speaking and writing opportunities; a Trustee or NED position; to work on engagements with the people in my list of people I want to learn from; to do a little travel with work (my kids are old enough now for me to escape for a week here and there); to get a pay rise. And for the office tea supply to be kept fully stocked.

Not work

• Andy Dudfield came and spoke about Full Fact. Such incredibly meaningful work. Andy’s session shifted my sentiments about AI a little (I’m not longer quite the AI sceptic I was), though also left me more worried about the world than I already was. And I was worried a lot.

• I did quite a lot of thinking about failure demand and system cost. I’m going to blog about it I think, rather than put it here.

• I went to see Sarah Snook in A Picture of Dorian Gray. It was astonishing. So many layers. What an incredible talent she is, not just playing but embodying all 26 characters so compellingly. A spectacularly innovative production too - I found myself chuckling at how clever it was quite a few times throughout. Definitely recommend you go see if it you have the chance.

Another holiday week!

• The plan was to spend some time with some friends on their boat. The kids and I have never been on a boat before (excepting a ferry or two). Alas it wasn’t meant to be - the winds were too strong for the boat to make it to a pontoon so we instead we spent three nights at the Travelodge in Paignton. We all had a fantastic time despite persistent rain - we went to Colton Fishacre and Agatha Christie’s house Greenway, and the kids spent most of their time last week playing chicken with the waves on the shore, skimming stones, crabbing, and teaching me to play card games I’d never learned as a child. Reflection: if you have good company and the right clothes for the weather, it’s easy to make the most of any opportunity. And it doesn’t even feel like a consolation prize if you can let go of your foiled plan, and embrace your alternative opportunity fully. It would have been easy to choose disappointment - instead we made golden family memories. I think there’s an obvious parallel with work - and how effectively ruminating on what might have been, focusing on loss, and inflexibility (of thinking, of planning) closes down possibilities. Open-minded optimism FTW.

• I realised my friend with the boat is stuck in golden handcuffs. She works in a cut-throat culture, feels her job is constantly under threat, and is expected to take regular work calls during her holidays. And she knows wouldn’t earn even half her current income at a competitor firm, so she’s sticking it out. She’s not alone - golden handcuffs are the unspoken retention strategy at her firm. Reflection: it’s an interesting choice from her firm. In corporate law perhaps it’s easier to use money to retain talent than it is to nurture a culture that people want to stay for. But in the public sector we don’t have that choice - we simply can’t afford the golden handcuffs. It got me thinking about my own career journey - as long as the salary is above the minimum I need to pay my bills, I look for an inclusive culture, job flexibility, great colleagues, learning opportunities, and the difference I could make. I believe talent flight from the civil service is a result of these factors being steadily eroded over the last decade - but I’m hopeful good leadership can turn it around.

• My eldest daughter saw a pop-up from Safari iOS saying I had 500 tabs open and suggesting that I close those I hadn’t used recently. Naturally she clicked yes - and deleted c.460 tabs. I noticed a week later - too late for me to recover the tabs through the “recently closed tabs” function. For months now I’ve been meaning to go through those tabs and save, share, or write blog posts inspired by them. I never made time. If I’m being honest with myself I don’t know if I ever would have. I assumed I’d be mourning the loss of the “treasure” within the tabs - but since I don’t have a record of what was in there, instead of feeling sad I feel relieved of the burden of tasks undone. Reflection: Where else is this true? Occasionally I take this approach with my inbox - archiving everything assuming anything important is already noted or will float to the top again. It’s a version of “ignorance is bliss” I guess. At the touch of a button I can significantly lighten my cognitive load and have a much simpler view of what’s on my plate. But perhaps it’s also dangerous - I’m abdicating a responsibility to make an active choice about what I will and won’t spend my time and attention on. What important things won’t I do because they’re no longer on my radar? What lower priority things will I do instead simply because they’re there in my field of view, or because they’re loud or persistent. Leaders should still aim for that lighter cognitive load and clarity - we can’t get anything done with too much work-in-progress - we just need to accept that deciding what not to do is a key part of leadership, and if we don’t make these active choices we should expect things to come back to bite us.

Holiday week.

• I had a call to make - since our trip was cancelled, should I return to work for the week (so I can use the annual leave later in the year on actual holiday), or should I take the time off anyway? I went with the latter because (a) I’m tired and recovering from food poisoning, (b) I haven’t arranged childcare in advance, and (c) we can still make use of the time.

• We took a trip to Cassiobury Farm with the kids and another local family. It was nice to get out in the (brief) sunshine - and even better to get the girls out of the house.

• We decided to redecorate the living room. A decade ago we had a “feature wall” with giant red flowers, and magnolia elsewhere. Today we have refreshed the white of the ceiling, skirting and picture rails - and we have pale green painted walls. We’ve sawn up our broken 15 year-old sofa bed and taken it to the dump - and we’ll take the green sofa from my garden office for the living room until we have saved up to replace the broken sofa with something new. Reflections: first, more than half of the time in a redecoration if you care about the quality of the finish is preparation. Scraping, filling, cleaning, soaking, sanding. It doesn’t feel like the work, but it is the work and can really impact the end result. Of course, if the quality of the finish isn’t a priority, then you can significantly reduce the time you spend - the trick is to know what level of finish you need. I think the same is true at work - for high impact, things that might not feel like the work are incredibly important; equally, if you can achieve a good enough result to meet your needs with something low fidelity, (e.g. you can prove a point with a paper prototype) don’t waste your time doing more than that.

• I’ve eaten out. A Z and Mummy date at the Harvester on Tuesday. Dinner with my husband at a nice steakhouse last night. And a family meal at the Giggling Squid this evening. Reflection: eating out served two purposes - functional because all our belongings from the living room are piled up in the kitchen, making it pretty much unusable for a stretch this week; and psychological because even though we haven’t gone away, it feels like we’ve still got to experience a little of “holiday mode”. I often find, when I’m on holiday, that I want to find ways of bringing that holiday feeling back with me - small things I can do - and it feels we’ve been doing that.

• I’ve been reviewing submissions for this year’s Service Design in Government conference. There are some really cracking submissions in here - I’m really excited for September.

Tasting notes: uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, with a definite streak of angry feminist, ending with a minor note of self-pity.

Work

• worked hard to map out costs to a client, to its service users, and to society of a poorly designed public service. Reflection: some of those costs aren’t going to be quantifiable - but they’re still real human costs, significant and worth addressing. To get folks to recognise this, I think we need to do some storytelling to bring to life the stories of harm we’ve been told in our interviews. This stuff can be painful to hear - so I’m going to have to think about how to do that in a way that keeps my audience open and curious, rather than sending them into a threat response state.

• wrapping up one engagement on a high - and trying to adjust the scope of another slightly so that the client gets what they need most from us now that they know more about their problem space. Reflection: trying to do this with traditional orgs can be challenging because the instinct is to assume the person is trying to wriggle out of delivering what they promised. Thank goodness we have a client who understands agile projects and the drive to push where the value is not just where they thought it would be at the start.

• I prepared the ground for a really awkward-but-necessary discussion that went well, I believe, because we equipped the group with the language they needed to really lean into the conversation. Reflection: for important conversations that folks aren’t used to having, you can’t assume people come to the table with anything more than good intentions  (indeed, sometimes you can’t even take that for granted). Give people the concepts and mental models, help them see what’s usually invisible to them, connect these things to what it is they’re trying to achieve.

• https://bsky.app/profile/pubstr.at/post/3kowieerg6r22 Stefan Czerniawski posted this about the Cabinet Office Policy Lab. A group of amazing women - Andrea Siodmok, Cat Drew, Beatrice Andrews, Lisa Ollerhead, Lucy Kimbell - put in the hard yards in PolicyLab’s infancy to establish a capability that delivers such value into government that it’s still running a decade later. In any other blog post the omission might have gone unnoticed - when we deliver as part of the civil service the success is the team’s, or the department’s (or the Minister’s) and so we don’t expect ongoing recognition of our individual contributions in public (or internal) departmental comms. But the story of the success of the PolicyLab since 2014 seems so inextricably connected to Andrew, Cat and Beatrice that it’s especially weird they’re not named. Reflection: it leaves me wondering - which unnamed women prepared the ground for work I’m currently doing? Who are the unsung civil service (and ex-civil service) heroines to whom we owe a great deal? And can we, should we even, find ways to stop writing the humans out of these stories - or is it an unavoidable quirk of public service?  

Home

• I watched the new Ghostbusters with Zoe. It was light-hearted fun. I love trips to the cinema. It is so much more of an experience than watching telly at home.

• I finished another piece of art - the opposite of my fish, intentionally quick and messy. It looks a little cartoonish, I might have overdone the eyes. Reflection: I really enjoyed the freedom of the process with this - but I’m not quite so pleased with the end result. I think because it doesn’t leave me feeling a particular way. My Hockney tree landscape is relaxing to look at. The fish is colourful and fun. I don’t know how the fox makes me feel. I don’t think the process I went through is shaping how I feel about the end result - I should experiment with this to see.

• Holiday disaster: on booking the holiday I asked my husband to check the passports and he saw that his had expired - so, with plenty of time, he renewed it. Then on Friday, I started filling in the Advanced Passenger Information requested by the airline. I went to get the passports - and found that my youngest daughter’s had expired. My husband had looked at an expiry date of 31st March 2024, and believed it was a year away. And with only three days (over Easter) until our flight, there was no way to get a renewal for her in time: our first overseas family holiday since 2019 wasn’t going to happen. Reflection: I’d rather experience the discomfort of his annoyance at me for double checking when he’d checked, than feel resentful for having trusted him and been let down. In fact, I’d rather have been the person who’d made the mistake, than feel this way. Resentment sucks. And so do the chances of getting refunds with so little time before the holiday.

• Travel insurance - my travel insurer allowed cancellation for full refund within 14 days of purchase, as long as the insurance wasn’t yet active. On day 13  - three days before my  insurance would be active - I tried to call and cancel. And, of course, it was Good Friday. No call centres open. No one responding to emails. It won’t be until Day 17, and two days of active insurance, before anyone at the insurer sees my cancellation request. Reflection: I was surprised at how astonishingly stressful this radio silence was. I couldn’t - still can’t - get hold of anyone and have no choice but to watch my policy slip past the deadlines for refund eligibility. I’m very hopeful the emails I’ve already sent will secure the refund - but I can’t know. So there’s this lingering and angry feeling of injustice I’m going to struggle to move beyond until I know either way.

• On Saturday I got food poisoning and spent the entire day moving between my bedroom and my bathroom. And on Sunday I spent the afternoon with extended family-in-law and had to listen to men tell me how they didn’t think patriarchy was a thing any more. Definitely not how I expected the start of my Easter break to go.

[Alt text: a messily painted fox’s head and chest on a white textured background]

Work

• As predicted, the confluence of simultaneous engagement-ends, the end of the financial year, and impending Easter holidays have made this a hardcore week. My diary has been pretty back-to-back, with at least one high-stakes meeting or workshop each day. And though the meetings and workshops are the work - each also created work which I didn’t have time to do (and which now is parked in my brain, nagging at me). I’ve ended the week physically, cognitively, and emotionally exhausted. Reflection: my work schedule demanded that I be observant, active listening, quick thinking, creative and emotionally well-regulated for too high a percentage of the week. Not all meetings are created equal, so I need to be much more deliberate in scheduling some downtime (or at least lower stakes work) around the intense stuff. I’m also in these meetings with other colleagues - I need to keep checking on them, making sure they’re okay, and helping them if they’re not. And writing that down I realise that I need as sense-check for myself: if the level of intensity or pressure is high enough to make me want to protect my colleagues from it, then perhaps I ought to be intervening on my own behalf too.

• One client meeting was not what we expected at all. A Hail Mary high stakes meeting that went in some weird directions but ended up in an astonishingly positive position. Half the planned session structure and content was critical in getting where we did, the other half turned out to be pretty irrelevant. And of course we couldn’t have predicted in advance which would have been the useful half.

• I’ve been reflecting on experiences with senior leadership teams and executive boards over recent years, and teasing out the difference in my mind between “toxic leadership” and “dysfunctional leadership”. There are plenty of toxic leadership teams around Whitehall. But there are also quite a few organisations in the public sector that are dysfunctional without the toxicity. For example, some leadership teams are well-intentioned and full of nice people who for one reason or another don’t deliver; some leadership teams are delivery-focused and value harmony so highly that they’ve designed out necessary interdependence by building siloes so tall that they can deliver within their unhelpfully narrow scope without ever treading on anyone else’s toes. Reflection: behaviours like collective leadership, collaboration and challenge don’t come easy to those with an affiliative harmony-seeking leadership style. In underperforming organisations, meetings that feel easy and seem to go well might actually be a sign of dysfunction.

Personal

• Cate and I didn’t record the podcast. Turns out she’d invited me to be interviewed, rather than to interview her. But we did get a chance to try out the tech set up and discover some quirks we wouldn’t have learned about otherwise.

• Art class - I missed because Emily was ill, again.

• My youngest keeps on hiding discarded chewing gum under the living room sofa. We discovered a pile this week. I’ve found myself thinking about trust a lot, as a result. On the face of things she and I have a shared vision of a nice, tidy, clean living environment. It’s certainly a preference she declares, and she always keeps her own bedroom in check. But despite this, she’ll choose to do things that mess up (and sometimes damage) rooms in our house: sometimes she’s rebelling, sometimes she’s being lazy, but whatever the reason she’s usually putting her own needs or interests ahead of the family’s in one way or another, and I struggle to trust that she won’t do it again. Reflection: This feels a little like some client situations I see - superficially something is a shared endeavour, there’s a common vision or objective, people declare their commitment…and then one or both head off and do something that damages the trust of the other, setting off escalating reactions and responses. How do you rebuild that trust? In my parent/child relationship, of course, it’s my job to be the adult: there is no winning or losing. But in the workplace? It can feel very different. What does it take to convince someone to choose to be the adult?

Straight down to business this weekend…

Professional

• I’m going to produce a podcast for Cate McLaurin and the WPSI network. We’ve been planning it this week and I think we’ll be recording it Monday. I’m excited and a little nervous. Reflection: I’m more than ready to do this - which tells me I should have done it earlier. I’ve been playing around with post-production software and tweaking equipment for waaaaay too long, but not actually sharing anything. That might sound odd because I’m so comfortable sharing my written thoughts. But I don’t like the sound of my literal voice, and so find it hard to listen back to myself in the way that I’ll review and edit my blog posts before sharing. Doing this podcast with Cate should help me get over that.

• I’ve been doing loads of workshop design this week. A combination of prepping for imminent sessions and getting a jump start on sessions later in the month. It feels nice to not be in just-in-time mode (or seat-of-pants mode), it’s less stress-inducing for sure. Though beyond having the materials and facilitator narrative a smidge more polished, I don’t think being prepared earlier affects the end result that much. Reflection: “prepared” is a product of a range of things - sure, having designed the narrative, exercises and materials for a specific workshop is in there. But so is having a repository of tried-and-tested activities and tools in my brain, and having the confidence as a facilitator to switch things up on the fly in response to unexpected situations. “Feeling” prepared (which I rarely do) is very different to being prepared (which I’m almost always).

• I disappointed myself this week. Things have been quite busy and I made sure to put in place some induction plans for a new team member. The team did a great job introducing her to the project and getting her set up, and there is no end of material for her to immerse herself in so she can get to know the problem space. But the meeting she had with me dropped out of my diary and I didn’t remember to put it back in. We’re friends, so she didn’t take it as a snub. And she’s fantastically good at absorbing huge amounts of information, so it hasn’t slowed her down. But it did mean that I hadn’t shared with her the specific things about the project that only I know - contextual and strategic things. The conversation with me would have help her understand the reasons for the scope, and the pace we’re working at, and reassured her on overall deliverability. Instead she was left feeling anxious after her first week. Reflection: There are a few things going on here - (1) my habit of underestimating the value I can bring to things. I put my contributions in the “nice-to-have” box, even when others consider it essential; (2) a need to prod around to understand why the rest of the team didn’t pass that contextual and strategic insight on - Did it not occur to them? Have we all just been moving too fast on the basics (if so, what else did we miss)? Did they assume I would and so they didn’t need to? Did they feel insufficiently briefed themselves, and so I’ve been undercommunicating all round?

Personal

• E has had a fever, headache and sore throat all week. Our local Director of Public Health has announced cases of Strep A in the area and I think that’s what she’s caught. As well as being ill she’s also upset because she wanted really good attendance this year (she loves school) and anxious about what the school will say - we think this week off will have pushed her below 95% attendance for the year. And the “Moments Matter: Attendance Counts” adverts on the radio are telling her she ought to just “suck it up”. Reflection: I’m sad that even at this age the incentives in her ecosystem have her wanting to return to school before she’s properly recovered. In the past she’s returned too soon and then needed to take further time off - it all feels so counterproductive and unnecessary. I’m going to keep reminding her of this. And, at the end of the year, when she gets a poor attendance mark, we’ll go out to celebrate her having prioritised her health. Z was “ill” on Monday too. That’s in inverted commas because I eventually started asking questions about her sore stomach and bottom - and learned that she’d never had a hot chilli pepper before nor the after-effects that come with one. A few hours of digestion and a couple of cold baths soon put her right.

• I’ve been struggling to make it to art class the last couple of weeks, though I’m still painting at home. Reflection: I’ve noticed that I bailed on art class whenever I worked in London the day before. The in-person work day and commute must take it out of me more than I realised - I am more introvert than extrovert, and I’m easily overstimulated by a London day. As I’m trying to make Mondays and Thursdays my regular office days, perhaps Wednesday would be the best day for a local art class. Maybe I should look into switching days? Or, since I don’t go to art class to socialise, see if I could do an online class?

• I’ve been reading and reflecting a lot on allyship and how it needs to be a continuous process of looking at how our biases are affecting our decisions and behaviours, listening and learning from those we’ve disadvantaged or hurt, remembering not to be defensive, and internalising the learning and awareness into our actions going forward. No-one is perfect. And anyone who believes they are unbiased is lying to themselves. We need checks in place to catch us when we f*ck up, and we need paths for moving forward. It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned we’ve been, impact is what matters (paraphrasing Sheree Atcheson). Reflection: research suggests we underestimate the positive impact of allyship. Perhaps that’s the excuse we hold up when we choose to stay comfortable and not rock the boat - that it wouldn’t make a difference, or that it might be seen as virtue-signalling or performative allyship. We need to recognise that we simply cannot build and maintain the inclusive cultures we seek without consistent and robust allyship. We need to keep showing up.

Another big week. The pace doesn’t look like it’s going to let up now we’re heading full throttle towards the end of the Financial Year (traditionally quite chaotic) - and this year we also have the school Easter holidays starting April 1st, so it’s going to be an even bigger peak of work as we try to get things done before the break. Reflection: yikes, that caused a cortisol spike, perhaps focus on one week at a time Audree?

Work

• I spoke at the SDinGov conference about “Designing in the dark: the invisible matter than makes or breaks our projects”. I gave this talk for the first time last year and it was well received - I really pleased because I’d spent days writing, iterating, memorising, and rehearsing the talk, wanting to learn it by heart so that I could focus on connecting with the audience. This time round the performance felt just as effortless. Reflection: given the initial effort invested I owe it to my past self to share this presentation with many more audiences - and I owe it to my future self to invest the same amount of energy in new talks to come.

• I wrote a blog post about how men in the workplace can support the impressive women around them by giving them the platform, and by being their hype men. You can read it here. https://www.audreefletcher.co.uk/blog/2024/3/8/walking-the-talk-on-lifting-up-the-women-around-you I wrote it because every International Women’s Day I hear men online saying they don’t know what more they can do - despite there being plenty they can and should do. We need to get specific and practical about what needs to be done to make it harder for LinkedIN Larry to continue paying only lip service to lifting up the women around him. Reflection: I don’t have much patience for excuses and like to dismantle them so people can’t keep hiding behind them. It’s a tactic I use all the time, including at work when coaching clients. It’s important, though, to always consider whether you need to call out the excuse-making directly to achieve your goal: sometimes you might need someone to consciously recognise what they’re doing (and so it’s worth the risk of their defensiveness derailing the conversation), other times you just need to give them the constructive, specific alternative. Lead with kindness, whichever approach you take.

• I had a conversation with a woman in a mid-level role who desperately wanted to step into a leadership position. I told her she could lead from where she is (because we all can) - her response was that she’s already burned out doing everything, and she couldn’t possibly imagine “doing it all”. We talked some more about her perception that leadership requires that - and the advice I wrote in my blog post was my advice to her https://www.audreefletcher.co.uk/blog/2024/3/8/want-to-lead-do-less. When I shared it online, it got quite a bit of traction from people who “needed to hear it”. The same thing happened with another blog post - this time on risk-taking - because it’s something that frustrates delivery-focused leaders every day. Reflection: bite-sized coaching tips can have an outsized impact if they’re shared with people who need it when they need it. Even if it’s a point extensively covered in leadership advice books, I should share these thoughts more often - because it’ll be exactly what someone needs to read at that moment. It may be obvious, but it’s not necessarily unwelcome. [Bonus reflection: reply-guys will always be there - ignore, confront, block, mute, delete, do whatever you need to - but don’t let them annoy you into silence]. [Bonus bonus reflection: I was quite write-y this week (I know it’s not a word). That’s because my work stress levels dropped just enough for my brain to switch out of fight-or-flight mode. Occupy this space more please future-Audree]

• I ran a taxonomy session and I love nerding out with other people about taxonomies. We had a Teams break-out room fail so the session didn’t go quite as planned. But, as is always the case, the session yielded invaluable insight, contributions and buy-in so we’re in a great position to take this forward. Reflection: always check the tech in advance, and always have a specific plan for tech failure. And, yup, I still hate MS Teams. There was a moment there when I thought I didn’t - but I was wrong.

• I took part in a couple of really great retros. One for a project that has been a bit of a bumpy ride so far, another on a project that has been such smooth sailing that we’re all still waiting for other shoe to drop. I came out happy and excited about what’s next for both. Reflection: these retros were great - for different reasons, but both great nonetheless. And I can see I’m learning more from the bumpy rides than I can from the smooth ones: I need to use this as a source of positivity and motivation to tap into more regularly on those tougher projects. I’m going to think about how I, practically, to do this. Perhaps through my weeknotes?

• I had one of my regular career coaching sessions. The things I wanted to dwell on: making our engagements more fun for everyone; getting better at controlling the scope of long, thin and slightly vague projects; and creating the conditions for me to lean into my superpower. I’ve come away with loads of ideas and positivity - and my boss is better positioned to help me with some of this stuff now that he knows what’s on my mind. Reflection: in past workplaces my career coaching conversations have usually been focused on career progression and what I need to be able to demonstrate to move up. I’m not particularly looking to climb the ladder in PD (the level above me involves being spread thinner, being a step further from the problems to be solved, and spending a lot more time on business development). When I do eventually move on from PD I hope to return to Government, under a Labour administration, to do something epic. I’m a public servant at heart, always have been, always will be. In the meantime, I’m loving the chance to have career coaching sessions that are focused on whatever professional and personal growth I’m seeking right now.

Personal

• I saw Catherine Bohart at Soho Theatre on the opening night of her tour on Monday. She was absolutely hilarious. Highly recommend. I also saw Sarah Millican on Friday night at the Hammersmith Apollo. Also hilarious - but my takeaway from that evening (sorry Sarah) is how stunning the building was. Of all the art movements I love Art Deco the most, and this was an amazing example of it - so much so that I’m going to start experimenting with it as a style in some of my home art/crafts projects.

• I organised karaoke after our work on Thursday. It was so much fun. Reflection: We don’t really have that many opportunities to socialise outside of work as a group - not ones that allow us to so fully shed our professional personas/self-consciousness, be a bit silly and have a laugh. It’s precious - a category of bonding experience that leaves our relationships so much stronger in a way that after-work drinks simply can’t match. My soul needs more of this. (Is this just friendship? I don’t have enough of it in my life)

• I got a new haircut. I really should have done this before the public speaking. Apparently it’s a “90s bob cut”. It feels weird to be old enough to see hairstyles come back into fashion.

• Health overshare - I have a hypermobility syndrome and it makes me especially vulnerable to delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). I went to the gym on Friday and the pain that arrived on Sunday night had me near convinced I was having a heart attack. Turns out I’d pulled one of my pectoral muscles near my sternum. I didn’t return to the gym until Friday again - when I told them about the full week of pain I’d had. The trainer there quickly showed me a “Theragun” they now have in the room - a couple of minutes using it and the pain was gone. Reflection: don’t suffer in silence. The people around you might have just what you need, if only you’d tell them. They’re not psychic. This is true for life lessons more widely, of course. Oh, and every little helps when it comes to strengthening joints - I’m only a few weeks in and my knees are no longer clicking.