October 3: lost treasure
Felix found our cupboard of books, stationary and other artefacts from pre pandemic. There’s been a lot of furniture moves/work on the office over the last 18 months (obv a good time to do the work given we weren’t there)and as a result we’d lost sight of where the cupboard exactly was . . .
This might seem like a small thing but I was so overjoyed at this discovery — and I realised that for me the cupboard and its contents had become a proxy for ‘the before times. . .’ and the office culture we’d created.
So what happened this week?
We had a Hackney senior leaders network session — the first with Mark, our new chief executive. It was good to hear him outline his focus and approach, and to talk about his expectations of the senior leadership team — collaborative leadership, a clear focus on resident outcomes (thinking about effecting generational change and impact), and a firm grip on our services — which I took to mean having the right attention to detail so that we can be confident we’re delivering well.
I’m going to be one of three new convenors for the Women in Public Sector Innovation network that I’ve been part of for the past couple of years. I’m really excited to take this on with other brilliant women and I’ve been reading ‘The art of gathering’ by Priya Parker to really think about what my role is, and how we want the network to be sustained.
I’ve started working on the financial model/future budget plans for our modern tools for housing programme. It’s always where I feel least confident* – unpicking previous funding models, and creating a future narrative that everyone can understand. I think best when I can visualise so I started by sketching it out for myself, and then getting feedback early on, before I get so invested in what I’ve done that it’s hard to hear feedback.
We ran a session with our team leads looking at how we can develop a set of leadership principles we’d all want to sign up to. There was great feedback on what we’ve done already and I spent some time turning that into the next iteration and something that’s more visual and shareable.
Every fortnight we set goals for our cyber silver recovery work — this fortnight many of the ones I’d set weren’t met, so this week I tried harder to think about the balance between ambituous and realistic, and I asked the group to critique what I’d come up with. As a result I’ve set fewer, they’re more focussed and I think we stand a better change of making progress against them.
What did I read this week?
This great blog post from GDS — I particularly liked the focus on inclusion and what that means . . .
Eddie Copeland and team wrote a great blog post on what LOTI’s achieved in the last few months:
And this on how organisations are like slime mould — absolutely worth looking at:
I also rewatched this brilliant film from the Netherlands about the why of cycling:
*a persistent and unrealistic self belief that numbers aren’t my thing. It’s not true, and I know that. But it persists anyway.
