30th May — 2nd June week notes

I went into the start of this week already feeling quite tired after a weekend of hosting and didn’t feel quite myself, some unexplained aches and pains which I’m hoping a chiropractor appointment tomorrow will help put me right. As a result, I felt pretty flat at the start of the week and two days of back-to-back meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday didn’t help.

The week started to pick up towards the end and after a weekend of sunshine, spending time with friends and relaxing in the garden. I’m feeling much brighter.

Lazying around in the hammock

It’s hard to believe this time last year, I was on my sabbatical without a job — enjoying the delights of Maine, Portland. Part of me craves that sort of adventure again but I’m grateful for where I am a year on and how everything has worked out.

Four highlights from this short week

1. Tony Piper, an executive coach I’d worked with over a year ago got in touch for a catch-up. Tony is infinitely wise and is the type of person who makes you feel instantly calm. I always have a notepad readily to hand when I speak to him because he’s full of anecdotes and thoughts worth capturing. Our conversation covered neurodiversity and relational working. One of the things I scribbled down was the following quote “you’re either in your thoughts or in your life”, a fairly profound quote about being too much in your head to enjoy what’s right in front of us. We also talked about how to talk about values in the workplace in a way that makes it easy for everyone to partake, he shared in his experience most can answer two simple questions “what lights you up” and “what winds you up!”. I really loved the simplicity and effectiveness of these two small questions which can reveal so much.
2. We had a practical kick-off for a new project, talking about schedules and expectations around delivery management across suppliers. It was good to start to dig into the detail of the project, next week I’ll be working with the team to run a ways of working session and I hope to share a blog post in the coming weeks of some activities I’ve come across to get the most out of these sessions.
3. Chris / I presented some of our learnings from Agile Manchester, on reflection 4 pm on a Friday wasn’t the best time — it was a bit lower energy on our part than we’d have both liked but the first set of learnings from Emily Webber’s talk struck up a really interesting conversation and through us off timing wise but it was really great to see people engage with the topic and thoughtful debate. During the weekend I came across this from audreefletcher which was timely and resonated with me, by producing the slide-deck, if nothing else, it had helped seminet my own understanding.

4. Last week we voted on a new name for our “resourcing” channel after having an interesting conversation about a desire to humanise our approach to assigning people to projects. It’s great working somewhere where individuals care about the details.

Next week, I’m looking forward to a DM social and in-person community of practice on Thursday in Bristol 🥳 I also *think* this week officially marks my 6-month mark.