The Climb
Easy. Long time no speak.
My last weeknote was around 6 weeks ago, and there’s been lots going on but not much worth sharing. People and process changes, refocusing efforts to meet the needs of the day and help deliver on one of the Labour government’s main missions.
The first thing I want to reflect on is how mad it is that an idiot like me from Wolverhampton gets to work on this stuff. It’s a huge honour to be able to devote time and energy to this mission, and I’m grateful to everyone who helped me get here. The mission brings a sense of duty too, as do most roles in public service. As Ariel Guersenzvaig says:
“The public service element requires professionals to develop a strong sense of dedication to their profession and professional identity. Also, and possibly more importantly, it prescribes commitment to others’ welfare, and a strong sense of responsibility toward society.”
The work’s been hard and several weeks without reflection meant I needed a mirror. There’s a few things I want to work on professionally too, so I’m working with Stefan as my coach. He helped me see how much I’d done and that I hadn’t acknowledged the change of pace from the fast-moving first weeks. So I want to draw that line in the sand.
After delivering value quickly early on, we’re now working through the boggy stuff, tweaking ways of working and culture to be fit for the challenge at hand. Changing mindsets and turning the ship around doesn’t happen overnight, and there’s a list of things to work through. But we know what to do and the teams are being good at adapting, so I’m pretty confident we’ll get there.
Alongside that tricky leadership work, there have been some pieces of work I haven’t been able to delegate, so there’s a fair amount of plate-spinning.
I’m proudest of pulling together a service performance page, albeit a static page as an MVP, but one we can iterate on and add charts to as soon as we have capacity. Getting our key performance indicators out there and being accountable for what we’re working on was more important than making it flashy. I’ve added a proposal for service performance pages in the GOV.UK Design System backlog in case anyone’s interested in helping develop a pattern with me? Let me know on the proposal in the backlog.
There was also a presentation to our steering board which I delivered because psd was off on a well deserved break. I took a narrative we’d used before and built on it, talking about the importance of community and highlighting the marketplace nature of what we’re doing: there’s no point in creating supply without servicing demand, and there is demand, so we need to solve the supply-side problem quickly! Thankfully it went across really well and we got great feedback, so I was pretty chuffed about that. My next job is to share this with the team because it articulates the vision and our strategy pretty well.
I’m working on some ‘about’ pages that explain why we’re different to what’s come before too. The trick here is to talk about linked open data and the standards without saying those words, because they’re the real touches of brilliance. It’s easy enough to put some data on the web, but it’s no use if no one uses it. Our platform is built of the web, joining the dots and consolidating data from multiple disparate sources. Anyway, consider those scribbles and notes…
So yeah, as I said, we’re into the boggy stuff and there’s far to go. Being aware and adaptable, trusting the process, and celebrating the small wins will see us through. A lot like going for a long trail run or multi-day gravel ride.
We spot the bumps in the road in front of us. We note the distance we’ve covered. We dig deep for any hills ahead. And we celebrate when we get there.
It’s not complicated; it’s just hard.
It’s the climb.
Let’s go!
NL Design Systems Week
Hidde kindly invited me to speak at NL Design Systems Week, so I’ll be dropping some knowledge on what I’ve learned about running common platforms in government.
Not-work things
- I love my new bike. Cycled it from Croydon to Hastings over two days, which was a joy.
- Finished walking the South Downs Way, which we started in 2017. We did it in 4 sections, starting and ending at a train station each time. I’d like to do it all in one go though!
- I spent my birthday in Paris and, even though I didn’t know it was happening that day, I got to tick the Olympics off my bucket list.
- I’ve been taking Fridays off (or working a half-day) to fit in outdoor activities. This feels like the perfect formula for summer, although ideally I could just take all summer off.
- We’ve booked to go to Japan in November, so please send me any and all tips you have.
Bookmarks
Haven’t been doing much reading around, the day job has been a lot!