# The Building Cohesion

> It's ramping up a bit more, but blockers on collecting research do stall things.

> Last updated: 2020-01-25

A quiet week, to be honest.

## Good things

It felt as though we really gelled as a team again this week, like we'd scoped the mission well enough to actually start innovating on users' pain points. That's mostly thanks to Ned being new to the team and us explaining things to ourselves as we explained it all to him.

Dan gave a great talk at [Citizen Beta 26](https://attending.io/events/citizenbeta026) and I really enjoyed catching up with [Trilly](https://twitter.com/TrillyC), [Simon](https://twitter.com/51M0NW), [Andy](https://twitter.com/mr_dudders) and [Dan](https://twitter.com/dasbarrett).

## Learned things

Observed a service assessment, which always seems like a lesson in providing good critique, a.k.a. not shitting all over a team's hard work.

## Not-work things

- Picked up [_Doggerland_](https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Ben-Smith/Doggerland/22392560) by Ben Smith, a Beckettian look at maintaining a rusting wind farm in the near future. It's funny in parts and describes their boring lives in excruciating detail, which is a neat trick. 
- Failed to go to the Swamp81 night, just wasn't feeling it.

## Difficulties

Interdepartmental politics has never been my forte, but we do have great policy & engagement colleagues to help with that. Nevertheless, we're currently blocked on proceeding before figuring out some politics. It'll be good for [cross-silo working](https://hbr.org/2019/05/cross-silo-leadership) in the long-run though.

## Achievements

An important meeting went very, very well. 

Mine and Matt's first product nerd lean coffee was enjoyable! We covered leadership vs management, kicking off missions, and future Product People meetups.

## Bookmarks

- [Finding answers when you don’t know the question (..on the World Wide Web)](https://medium.com/@jukesie/finding-answers-when-you-dont-know-the-question-on-the-world-wide-web-517a39fcf9ce), 2 mins
- [This Is the Guy Who’s Taking Away the Likes](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/business/instagram-likes.html), 15 mins
- [How we’re working to transform the way we work with data](https://wearecitizensadvice.org.uk/how-were-working-to-transform-the-way-we-work-with-data-52a2de4def99), 4 mins
- [Strategic thinking with blog posts and stickers](https://gilest.org/blogging-stickers.html), 3 mins
- [Greta Thunberg’s Message at Davos Forum: ‘Our House Is Still on Fire’](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/climate/greta-thunberg-davos.html), 3 mins
- [Digital is something you are so let your people be digital](https://gilest.org/digital-is-something-you-are.html), 3 mins
- [The New Generation of Self-Created Utopias](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/t-magazine/intentional-communities.html), 13 mins
- [Future of advice: our strategic framework 2019-22](https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/about-us/future-of-advice-our-strategic-framework-2019-22/), 6 mins
- [Teams of Teams, Railways not Sandwiches](https://medium.com/dark-matter-and-trojan-horses/teams-of-teams-railways-not-sandwiches-4e901ce92787), 17 mins
- [Council code sharing project is up and running](https://croydon.digital/2020/01/22/council-code-sharing-project-is-up-and-running/), 5 mins
- [Complexity revisited](https://medium.com/@EskoKilpi/complexity-revisited-31033d1c4038), 3 mins
- [The 2020 vision for open government](https://medium.com/@opendatacharter/the-2020-vision-for-open-government-1fea180a5a37), 6 mins
- [Data enabled public services need funding to scale, but better tools are also part of the answer – The ODI](https://theodi.org/article/data-enabled-public-services-need-funding-to-scale-but-better-tools-are-also-part-of-the-answer/), 4 mins