Weeknotes S03 E08
Theme of the week — (actual) awe!
Where I was and who I met:
The big thing this week was OneTeamGovGlobal on Monday in London. What an amazing event! My intention was to meet all of the people, to take all of the selfies and tweet all day, however, a combination of heat, being based in one room most of the day as a volunteer and just the scale of the thing meant that I came away feeling that I had not made the most of the day. I don’t really believe in that kind of thinking though so I gave myself a bit of a talking to on the way home — Whoever comes is the right people, Whatever happens is the only thing that could have, Whenever it starts is the right time, When it’s over it’s over.
I met lots of people who I know and have met in person before (in the same physical space) and lots of people who I have spoken to on social media. I took the opportunity to get in lots of hugs and I finally met Dan Barrett.
Lots of people said that they were overwhelmed when they walked into the space. I felt that way when it was just the volunteers. The whole day was incredibly well organised and the committee members are right to be very proud and happy to have brought that event into being. Just wow.
To pick a few - James Arthur Cattell did a fantastic job of helping 500 people to come up with the sessions using the 25/10 crowdsourcing Liberating Structure. Jenny Vass and David prepared and enabled over 100 volunteers to look after all of the participants and Kit was a brilliant host. It was also impressive that two of the committee members are based in the North of England #notjustlondon.
I was back in the office for the day on Tuesday and then took an impromptu trip back to London for breakfast on Wednesday morning to see all of the people who were still in there.
It was a *bit* of an early start. Totally worth it though. I got to hang out with Ioana in St James’ Park for most of the morning before she headed back to Canada. This included drinking tea and listening to the soundtrack of Mama Mia from the Band of the Irish Guards and Band of the Scots Guards.
We also got to use Lego Serious Play techniques to reflect on OneTeamGovGlobal. Here is my effort.
On the way home I saw Pluto the Harris Hawk who ‘encourages the pigeons to move on from Kings Cross’. See if you can spot him.
I caught up with Paul on Thursday afternoon. He was one of the June Cohort of the Service Owner Programme and is very interested in learning from good examples of agile, user centred design and service design in the public sector.
On Friday I facilitated a virtual Liberating Structures session using Zoom with Nancy in the US, Susanne in Germany and Robert in the Netherlands. We mostly discussed how we might make the virtual sessions happen more regularly.
What I did differently & what I learned:
This week — not a great deal, most of the week my brain has been trying to manage my core temperature.
I have offered some reflections in the volunteer retrospective Padlet that was set up. My points were mainly practical things for example how busy the WhatsApp group was with the large number of volunteers and so difficult to pick up on important messages. This applies to any event but particularly one so large.
I enjoyed the virtual Liberating Structures Zoom meeting on Friday and look forward to more practice and learning.
Some things I watched, listened to, read, and/or shared:
This is a fab post from Ioana — It’s time to break up with some traditions.
This was a lovely thread from Matt Edgar who invited me to run the Service Owner Programme for GDS in January 2014 about how Tom empowered him.
I enjoyed this post about what walls are for from Lisa Reichelt who now works at Atlasssian the makers of tools such as Jira and Trello.
This post from Forbes was an interesting one about the future of work.
Here is a round up of all of the OneTeamGovGlobal posts by Sam.
What’s next?
This week I am mostly in Leeds apart from Tuesday when after a call with some people who are interested in kicking off a Liberating Structures User Group in Scotland I am travelling to London to take part in the @libstructsLDN meetup. We are in freelance summer hiatus now so if anyone needs anything I probably have some time available.
