Weeknote S3E04: “… oh, y’know, busy…”

In which lots of things happened over two weeks, and I arrive at a crossroads

When people ask ‘how was your week?’ I often answer “oh, y’know, busy…” Many of us do.

Lemur says being busy is not a competition

Without wishing to sound macho [narrator: you’re a slightly rounded-at-the-middle five-feet-four, who are you kidding?!…], the past fortnight has been pretty busy even by normal standards, but looking back, it’s been a pick n’ mix scenario rather than One Big Thing. That’s something I’ll come back to.

Things I’ve been busy with include:

• helping to design, and co-facilitating, a Hackathon-style workshop for senior public service leaders, eliciting an OMG moment from colleagues

A tweet from a senior colleague praising my team’s work. LOL at the use of OMG

• coordinating the better sharing of data, insight, and analysis across government, as part of the side-gig I’ve mentioned previously — more on this at the crossroads below. This sentence boils hours of painstaking work down to a few words, but it’s worth noting how this work has thrown into sharp relief experience from my previous data policy roles, and opened my eyes to the vast variations in data maturity across different parts of central government and the wider public service landscape.
• continuing to condense a year’s worth of research on leadership, done by or through my team, into concise briefings, slides, and provocations for conversations across my organisation. Whilst doing so, this tweet caught my eye as a neat summary of the contrast in expectations between policy and research

A tweet capturing the difficulty of bringing policy and research closer to each other

Flow

Condensing academic literature into engaging lay content is hard enough, but I used to do it for a living. Condensing research findings — particularly on a theme as nebulous as leadership — into actionable insights that provoke changes in behaviours, incentives, and systems is an altogether more challenging task. We’re getting there, largely through trial and error — sharing findings with close colleagues, then slightly more widely, iterating based on their feedback, before settling on formats and messages to suit a wider audience.

All of which requires patience, and skills that do not exist in one person — it’s a team effort.

It also requires the time and space to focus, something I’ve both had more of (cue parental guilt when The Boy stays in after-school club), and less of — because I’ve been context switching between the day-job, and my aforementioned side gig. Doing lots of different things gives the feeling of being really busy, but makes it harder to get those things across any sort of finish line.

Crossroads

I took on this side-gig over the month of September in order to lend a bit of support to a newly formed team at the heart of government. There’s a chance I could make the side-gig a permanent thing. This puts me, as I so often find myself, at a crossroads.

Fork in the road. LOL

Reflecting on whether to head off in a new direction, or pursue exciting adventures on my current path, I realised several things:

• I am lucky (a theme from previous Weeknotes, loyal reader) to be surrounded by wise, experience people who generously give up their time to listen to my vacillations/flip-flopping/over-sharing. From friends, colleagues, mentors, to family, people I know really take an interest, which is flattering and helpful
• I’ve been here a number of times before, whereby I pick up a side gig out of interest and/or offering my help to others, then end up making that my main calling. I don’t do it deliberately, but that’s often how things work out, which explains in part my transition from lab research to public engagement to advocacy to public service
• As a certified over-thinker, I often try to calculate how every last might work out before deciding. And yet I usually take the path my instinct was heading towards. Not sure what this says about me!
• There are advantages to allowing my story to develop in this way, including variety and breadth — the disadvantages being their opposite in many ways, a lack of depth and a sense of trepidation.

I’m not yet certain of whether which path I’ll take, and there’s little telling which choice will work out to have been more fruitful. What I do know, is that it’s nice to have the choice at all.