Weeknotes: week 1
By: Neil Lawrence
Tags: Digital, Induction, Local Government

Weeknotes: week 1

Actually, still in the same town (and the career can’t really be seen as ‘new’) but close enough

After 11 long weeks I finally started in my new role at Dorset Council this week, although the transition actually started well before that with Twitter exchanges, invites to team meetings, meetups with my manager, chats with my new team and interviewing for a new team member. This even included a care package of DigitalDorset stickers from the excellent Lisa Trickey to properly adorn the new laptop.

Team biscuits, as baked by my lovely colleague Gail (that’s me bottom-right)

Leaving my old employer was a mixed bag of emotions; excitement at starting something new, anxiety about the unknown, sadness at saying goodbye (completely remotely). It also resurfaced a surprising amount of anger about the situation that set me on the path to changing jobs which was a challenge to manage at times. But enough of that….

The smartest decision I made was about how to say goodbye through writing individual emails to the people that I’d worked with who’d made a difference to me, either through making me laugh, inspiring me to be better or by listening when I needed a friend. I was able to say things that you don’t get to say in a traditional pub-based after work leaving event, or in a generic speech to a crowd, but actually what made these people special to me.

Those emails automatically fired out at 5pm on my last day giving me a lovely steady stream of responses in my personal inbox over the weekend, but (and this was the clever bit) also in my new inbox at Dorset for my first day’s reading.

Embracing the blancmange

After a long stretch at one place of work you build up a network of peers, you know where to get answers, what makes people tick. A sort of protective armour of knowledge and reassurance. I’d forgotten what it was like to start somewhere new and lose all that. A bit like being at a new school.

So to compensate I found myself adopting validating behaviours like sending documents I’d worked on in my last role as part of exchanges (a sort of “look at me, I do know what I’m doing — honest”). Hopefully this will drop off as my imposter syndrome wears off a bit.

And there was so, so much to take in. I was pretty shellshocked after day one. My very smart wife helped me understand I was just at the ‘blancmange’ stage of a new project (where everything is blobby and mushy and all over the place). I just needed accept where I was and embrace it.

Without the normalising induction routines of being shown where the kitchen was, where my locker was and where I sit (hint: downstairs, upstairs and in the back bedroom) I got strange comfort in tiny achievements like booking an induction course, setting up Zoom and logging into Slack.

Learning through conversations

I’d been given a really useful (and long) list of people I needed to speak to as part of my induction and really quickly this started bearing fruit in making connections, exchanging experiences and taking away the mystery from job titles. I realised how important establishing relationships early on is to me in feeling part of somewhere and helping explain my thinking.

I’m going to keep adding to my list as I go and keep having these conversations.

Festival of the Future

It’s hard to sum up the Digital Dorset #FutureFest which coincided with my first week at Dorset. An amazingly ambitious event with 64 sessions taking in chair yoga, robotics, mental health, digital inclusion..and so much more. Don’t take my word for it, check out the programme.

All the hard work had been done before I got anywhere near it, but I did take some delight in press-ganging two favourites of mine to take part; the mind-blowing Mark Thompson covering How radical thinking can preserve our public services ( we should look at wiring his energy to the national grid), and the captivating Sam Villis on How to tell stories so the world listens. We had some really good participation in both events and it was good to hear colleagues saying how much they got out of them.

Thanks to the immense hard work of the whole team (and particularly Sam), everything has been captured on YouTube for others to enjoy at any time. Which is perfect, as facilitating meant I didn’t get to participate as much as I would have liked.

A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Digital World

Annie Heath and Simon Wilson’s Research and Design Meetup on Friday

Right now it feels like the digital sector is coming together like never before, and I’m really keen to keep up the momentum on this as well as focus on my personal development in my new role.

First up was a post-work LocalGov Digital drinks chat organised by Kit Collingwood in which she threw some meaty questions for us all to chew on collectively while we downed our cocktails. It did feel like being amongst the Gods a bit, and I’m still not sure I have earned my place with such luminaries. But no-one was there to impress, just to chat. And drink, obvs.

Friday was the inaugural Research and Design meetup kick-started by Annie Heath and Simon Wilson in which the patriarchy was subverted and Miro was unleashed to actually get us thinking about what we, as a group, wanted to focus on to make a difference. It was nice to see familiar faces, and even begin to co-conspire with a colleague about opening up our user research at Dorset (TBC)

And at long last, after too many Friday’s off in a row, I managed to attend a LocalGovDigital Steering Group meeting. Without an agenda we let our creative freak flags fly about organising discussions/podcasts/videos (TBD) that we could share with others. Lovely to see Lucy again (whom I learned this week isn’t in fact under 18) and get thinking of a good session on data and skills.

Maybe the bit that chimed the most was a post-meeting chat with a couple of people about the challenges of pushing a digital agenda in an organisation that doesn’t want to play (see below), and realising it’s easy to look at others and assume all is perfect where they are. Talking openly about this stuff can help feel less alone when you’re in the trenches, and that’s another great thing about this community I’m part of.

Being part of a Dream Team

Anyone that knows me or has been trapped in a corridor with me over the last 18 months probably got very bored of me going on about how unhappy I’d become at work. I got bored listening to myself, frankly.

In all honesty it’s taken until this week to realise how exhausted I’d become having the same battles over and over again. Why not use Gaap? Why not try user research? Let’s do some collaboration! User needs not business needs. Digital doesn’t just mean technology.

This week has been like finding my digital spiritual home. A place that not only gets it, but is delivering it. I know there will be things that disappoint or wind me up, but I’m getting such a good feeling about Dorset that I’m ending the week on a real high and looking forward to next week.

I had to explain to my new team that for a long time my ultimate ambition was to have not one, but two content designers working for me . I now have six, with another on maternity leave and a temporary vacancy to fill. They are really, really good at what they do, hungry to learn more and up for new ways of working. It’s becoming clear I’ll learn far more from them than they will from me. Perhaps that should be the goal of any manager.

Other than The West Wing; they need to learn about The West Wing….