Week notes 20–24th Feb

After a lovely week away on the Isle of Wight, returning to work was difficult. Straight back into a day of back-to-back meetings and the rest of the week continued at the same pace, I feel like my feet hadn’t really touched the ground.

After an away day on Wednesday (more details below), I crashed on Thursday and a persistent headache combined with nausea led me to take half a day off where I slept until 6 pm and then slept again from 8 pm-8 am. I debated canceling my trip to Canterbury this weekend to meet up with old colleagues, now close friends but we’ve made it here and I’m really happy to be here.

1. At the start of the week, I connected with Steve Coppin-Smith — a mutual friend had suggested we should chat and he was right, our meeting over-run as we ran away with ourselves talking about big agile, post agile, influences, and collaboration in a distributed company and how a lot of the tools we’re currently using don’t signal to leaders the key information they need to know to do their jobs well. One of the user cases he shared with me was coming back from holiday and wading through loads of Slack messages, emails, and JIRA notifications to actually find out what’s gone on, very pertinent. He’s kindly invited me to a Slack group to explore the product Waggle more and provide some feedback. I think it sounds really interesting.
2. On Wednesday, we had an away day at Soho Farmhouse (a lovely location) with an external company to collaboratively work on Torchbox’s vision for the next 3 years. We started the day talking about growth and the different forms of growth i.e. beyond just increasing headcount. We explored what would be different in three years in four main spaces, financial, impact, joy, and employee ownership. I was the newest voice in a room of twenty people so I was really honored to be involved and I look forward to seeing where we go from here

1. On Friday, I connected with Philippa Head of Delivery at Royal Borough of Greenwich. We have been connected on Twitter for a while and wanted to explore the topic of accountability together, we talked about agile governance, and the confusing overlap between responsibility and accountability — I like how Philippa just simplified it by asking “who has skin in the game” — she’s further on with some of this thinking that me so it was great to hear some of the things she’s doing to articulate governance structures and some techniques she’s tried with teams which put the accountability on the team to pull in leaders to support with big decisions and then for those to get documented into ‘how to’ guide so other teams can see that this team had this problem and this is how they solved it.
2. Unfortunately, we didn’t find someone suitable in the first round of interviews for the Senior Delivery Manager role, so if you feel you missed the boat. This might be the sign you were looking for!
3. Next week is another short week as about 80 of the team are off to Chamonix for a team-building trip ⛷

I ended the week as it started, feeling a bit flat, to be honest, and acutely aware that I’m trying to move forward with lots of different things, and as a result, feel like I’m making progress with none of them! So I need to pair back and be more realistic about where I can spend my time going forward.