Weeknotes 51 – what happened this week?
One of those weeks with much variety, some great conversations and value delivered in lots of places.
6 (great) things that happened:
- I spent a couple of hours at the school where I’m chair of governors*, reviewing the headteachers performance against 3 key objectives. This is a really thorough process every six months, and we have support from our improvement partner to make sure that as a governing body we get it right. It’s really useful to see how objectives, impact and outcomes are described and measured in a different context to the one I work in normally, and just how much emphasis is (rightly) put on delivering the right outcomes for the children.
2. Kylie Havelock invited me to an awayday for the customer journey team at Citizen’s Advice to talk about the work we’re doing and how we’re approaching it at Hackney. As always I was v nervous** (I wonder if that ever goes away – and maybe it doesn’t and that’s ok too), but I gave myself time to prepare content that met the brief, asked for help from Matthew Cain and it went well. One thing that I did during the presentation was have a pause for a conversation – and that worked. These are my slides if you’re interested.
3. Chidi led a show and tell on the work the infrastructure team have been doing to redesign our low level network. I now know what that means, because the team did a great job of explaining it – and in explaining what they’re going to deliver for Hackney. It was clear the team themselves had learnt a lot about working together, and designing for the future.
4. On Friday I went to the One Team Gov discovery event on leadership development. This gave me an opportunity to hear from a wide range of people about talent management, leadership schemes and how and why you might want (or not want) to focus on potential. I really liked Audree Fletcher’s analysis of the core elements of various schemes that are available, and in particular the idea of developing your own personal board. A group of people that you trust and admire who you can check in with, get advice from and discuss ideas with. I realised as she was talking that I’ve done that (you know who you are and thank you) – and how valuable it is.
It also made me think about (and talk about) the importance of teams, and the dangers of hero leadership. I think that the teams and the culture that people find themselves working in is as important (if not more important) to how they thrive than someone’s leadership potential (and I’m still not sure how you measure that). I wonder what a team development scheme might look like . . .
6. Dan Barrett wrote two blog posts this week about talking about data. This is fab because he is a great writer, and I think if anyone outside my immediate colleagues can help me understand data better, and why it’s important to talk about it, it will be him. Also he is totally ok with eating dessert in the sunshine when it’s not part of a meal, just because we can.
6. Stephen, Karim, Eko and Jackie piloted their process for swapping the SIM cards out on all the tablets/iPads we have across the council. Their persistence and planning paid off – with over 70 sims swapped in the first few hours, and they’ve used that experience to review and iterate the approach so that next week it goes even more smoothly. This project is delivering value already – each sim swapped out will save us 2/3rds of the cost of the original, and we’re helping users manage their devices better as well.
What I read this week:
I thought this was an interesting blog post from the Canadian Digital Service (CDS) about bringing policy and digital together to solve problems.
And these weeknotes from Hidayat Deen — great to see him writing these regularly.
What I learnt this week:
I wasn’t all that well this week which meant that I needed to slow down a bit, do less, and recover.***
Whilst that was frustrating it did mean that I had to really think about what the priorities were this week and what I could let go of. This from Oliver Burkeman on Saturday was timely:
*I’m currently job sharing this role – having been chair for over 10 years, I’m stepping back gradually. So far this arrangement is working well – and means my co-chair gets to try out the role with the support of someone experienced.
**my New Years resolution was to say yes to invites like this and then worry about being nervous. It’s working so far 😉. This advice helped:
***I’m really not very good at this.
