Weeknotes (S03E07)
‘We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins, carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains. 93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames, we are all just stars with people names’ — Nikita Gill.
Hiiiiiie, how’s it going? What are you most excited about at the moment?
So I’ve been working in MOJ Digital (as part of our User Centred Policy Design [UCPD] team) for a few weeks now and I really feel like I’m home. I can’t even put my finger on what it is — but I think its a combination of working with teams that truly have an open mindset and bring that to every situation; being able to access the right tools and technology that make real-time collaboration easy; and being part of a culture where feedback, challenge and early ideas are positively encouraged. It’s even the super simple things that I took for granted (before I stepped back into an analysis/policy world) like being able to have whiteboards everywhere to sketch things out, to gather round those visuals and ideas easily, and to build on them as more of the picture develops.
I’m going to carve out some time to write down some of my early thoughts of moving back into Digital, especially practical actions to improve connections and interactions between the different professions.
Digital isn’t a list of things to do. It’s about how you think, how you behave, what you value, and what drives decisions in your organisation. – Janet Hughes
Highlights from this week*
Monday morning/early afternoon was full of catch ups and meetings. I spent more time with different members of the team, and worked on a bunch of people development type stuff. We have a new starter joining next week, a couple of vacancies to fill *and* we are bringing in a summer intern – which is super exciting!
Late afternoon I headed over to DFE for the first cross government facilitators network, hosted and led by Janet Hughes. And it was bloody brilliant. The room was full of friendly faces as well as people I’ve not met before, and we spent our first meeting agreeing our principles, discussing the practical ways we want the community to operate, and things to discuss at future meet-ups. Janet has published a detailed write up of the event, and we are using Trello to communicate and collaborate. So do take a look through our ideas and see where you can contribute.
Tuesday was more catch ups and meetings, including time with a Deputy Director who’s been working with my team for a while. I was keen to listen to his experiences and get feedback from him and it was all glowing. So much so that he joked he’s been delaying filming a video with us talking about how we’ve worked with him and his team because he doesn’t want others to find out we exist, just in case we get too booked up to help him in future!
Later I attended one of our UCPD show and tells. The team have been doing brilliant work – based on user research from our youth justice projects – to kick-start a redesign of the content on gov.uk. This enables parents, families, carers and support workers to more easily find out information about the prison estate and what to expect. For example, this is the new content for YOI Wetherby, compared to existing YOI Aylesbury content. The rest of the day was spent in team meetings and strategy/planning time.
On Wednesday I was in the office until midday-ish. Alejandra and I met with a team that have recently discovered UCPD and are keen to work with us on the development of their new policy. Then it was time to head to KingsX to travel up to Leeds for Wellbeing Camp! For the first time in forever I managed to get a bunch of work done on the train (thanks phone tethering, no thanks train Wifi) and reviewed a ministerial brief, reviewed a session plan and slides for a workshop and blitzed through my inbox.
In the evening I met Nour for dinner in our hotel and was introduced to Gail, Lisa and Louella. Convivio Steve joined us a bit later. Lots of chats about public sector reform, food and drink, karaoke, leadership, epic commutes, culture change and anxiety/wellbeing ensued.
Thursday was Wellbeing Camp day! Nour had asked me if I would run a couple of sessions on weeknotes and digital wellbeing, and I was delighted to be a part of the day.
Here’s my thoughts from the two sessions I ran:
- I estimate that there were between 40–50 participants, and of those only 5 had heard of weeknotes. In fact, some attendees turned up thinking that my session was on how to write notes in meetings. So it was a great opportunity to raise awareness of the community with people that hadn’t come across weeknotes or been to a OneTeamGov event before. Quite a few people asked me how they can find communities and initiatives like this, and that today they realised there are like-minded people out there, and that they aren’t alone.
- As to be expected, there’s still a lot of fear about working in the open – knowing what you can and can’t say, understanding who to get permission from, worrying that your writing isn’t good enough, thinking you’ll look back and cringe at what you said, worrying about how vulnerable and honest to be. I was honest that writing my weeknotes is a conscious effort — that I think very carefully about what to put in them, that I apply my own common sense and don’t include content that is sensitive etc — and that my notes only ever include a fraction of my working life. Oh and that I have a BUNCH of unpublished weeknotes sitting in my drafts because a) I just needed to empty my brain in the moment or b) I worried it wasn’t good enough to publish.
- Lots of people looked reassured when I shared with them a quote from Sharon Dale that you don’t have to do weeknotes every single week. I shared that I felt like a fraud delivering this session when I hadn’t actually written weeknotes for two weeks, but also used a quote from Sam Villis that you can’t do it wrong. It’s your personal practice.
- People asked how much time writing weeknotes takes, and I said that we all approach it in different ways. Some of us write notes each day and publish on the day. Some write notes each day and pull it all together at the end of the week, or that some (like me) might take an hour or so to bulk write it over the weekend. That didn’t seem to go down too well with a couple of chaps who started rolling their eyes at me.
- Many folks were fascinated by the different structures people use and thought Sam’s blog post is a super helpful resource. There were questions about how to use Medium, where to find gifs, how to find other members of the community, how to tag content, etc.
There were many more questions and comments but I couldn’t have noted them down whilst running the session. Safe to say that they were very similar to the ones we had at GovCamp which Sam has already written about.
The slides I used are short and sweet, and you can find them here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11uOSg54CydQm3wBlgol7zMg-Uxh_1MGuKeuSxjlgrKQ/edit#slide=id.g5953c788f8_0_8. Many thanks to the folks who shared their ideas of what I should include in my talk.
Sam Villis has already published her weeknotes which have a great write up of Wellbeing camp.
There’s definitely more I could say about the event [but already conscious I’m late with these weeknotes, lols] so I’ll save it for another time and just say how proud I am of my wonderful friend Nour Sidawi. I don’t have the words for how brilliant she is.
Back to the week… on Friday I worked from home, had a bunch of Slack calls (another tool I hadn’t used before joining Digital and now I don’t know how I lived without it) as well as a chat with Antonia from the DDAT faststream. She got in touch to see if UCPD could present at their conference later this year. Antonia and I bounced a bunch of ideas past each other and will get together with some of the other policy lab/UCD teams in government at a later date.
*as always, more things happened. There’s just a bunch that I can’t talk about in weeknotes.
In non-work related news, I had to have an emergency opticians appointment on Friday. I’d had a visual disturbance on Tuesday night. It’s something I’ve had once before (November last year) so wasn’t as spooked this time but it’s something that can indicate retinal detachment so have to be incredibly careful. Had myself looked over and seem to be okay – but have bought myself new specs (which I will start to wear more frequently!) and I’m switching to daily disposable contacts. They tend to happen due to stress or tiredness, so its another timely reminder from the universe not to stress or worry about things that really don’t matter. Unfortunately the episode meant rain-checking my dinner plans with Ellie and spending most of the weekend hibernating. Fortunately J fed me popcorn and lined up trashy/feel-good movies for us to watch in a sofa fort.
Things I liked this week
Things I’ve read this week
And finally
Rest in power Spike, you taught me lots about bugs.
Until next time. ❤
