Series 3 Episode 18 — things are going well
By: Cate Mclaurin
Tags: Digital Transformation, Local Government, Leadership Development, Weeknotes

The one where things that were bothering/worrying me weren’t as bad as they could have been, some great things happened and where I think I’ve fought off the work/life balance beast (for now).

So what happened this week?

Monday: Started the day with a catch up with Ninah from GLA, to talk all things delivery, which was great as I haven’t seen her for ages. Then a good conversation with Marion, Lucy and Jasmeen about product strategy — and as a result we’ve now got a field trip to Citizen’s advice booked in for early December to learn more from Kylie Havelock and the team there. Then off to UCL for this week’s lecture — from Simon Sharpe at the Dept of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). Then back to Hackney for a 1–2–1 with Rob — a useful conversation about what I’m working on around apprenticeships and preparing for a panel discussion at Google Cloud Next ‘19.

Tuesday: After an early outdoor swim in the silky early morning light* I was greeted by Sam, one of our apprentices, and offered quite literally the best homemade hobnob ever**. Then Emma and I met with Jenny from finance and wrestled the delivery budget into submission — that felt good. Went to my seminar at UCL and worked with my group on our presentation about Copenhagen’s bicycle strategy. Oh and also a final trip the dentist — which wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be.

Wednesday: A lot of shorter meetings /conversations — including but not limited to a packed show and tell from Benefits and Housing Needs and Future Gov/MadeTech where they demoed where they’ve got to with a single view of data using GDS design patterns (verdict from the room: clean design, easy to use, more please), moving our new mobile phone policy forward (we’ve still got a couple of things to figure out before we can go ahead with bring your own device but we’ve got a plan for how we’ll progress these), a chat with Varsha and David about how we might engage with open contracting to make our contract data more accessible and open (Varsha’s team already publish our data each month so we’re looking at ways to improve what we do now), and a catch up with Sachin on how he’s doing and his projects.

Thursday: The main event on Thursday was talking to the teams about our 5 missions, and how we’ll work together to create our objectives and key results. It was a packed house — and lovely to see the amazing team we’ve built listening and responding to the ‘what next?’

Thursday was also a chance to talk to Roo Reynolds about what next on our devops work — we want to extend the participation in learning by doing to all the teams so we’re designing a build phase that enables us to put together a multi disciplinary team to do just that.

henry lewis having fun with post its

Henry hosted a coffee and cake session with anyone who wanted to come along to talk about our HackIT manifesto and where we might need to iterate it. I helped with blu tack and sampling the cakes.

Friday: Apart from FOMO at missing #localgovcamp (but cheering on Philippa Newis, Marta, Yvonne and Matt who were there), it was a day of being able to work on moving several things forward that I’d talked about earlier the week, and spend some quiet time in the office with people but not in meetings.

What I read this week:

This from Catherine Howe about the words we use and the language we share (and don’t share), and why it matters that we listen to each other:

at this point saying something is digital is a bit like saying water is wet. Digital and networked technologies reach so far into our lives that when people talk about digital they are very rarely talking about bits and bytes — they are talking about a substantial and material change in their organisation which is enabled by technology

I do think there is good governance though — that starts with trusting the expert people you work with . . . and Richard McLean writes really well about this subject.

This was an interesting article about leadership styles and how we approach coaching/learning and encouraging people.

All week I had serious Ada’s list conference Femi especially because I missed this talk from :

UCL Reading this week:

This week’s reading was in preparation for a lecture on value production in the public domain and included an article by Daly on why macroeconomy is within our planets ecosystem, not outside it:

and this from Atul Gawande in the New Yorker on attitudes to healthcare In the US: