Month(ish) notes #2 — fluidity of communities, being a mentee, and ambiguity
27th June — 29th July
This is my second month-ish notes. I’m still aiming to keep them up and regularly make time to reflect. Publishing these is my way of committing to working transparently, with intent, and vulnerability. I have found this blog post by Cassie Robinson really helpful in defining the benefits of week notes, or any notes.
It’s not about building a personal brand, or an organisational one for that matter. It’s about giving life to what you are doing so that it can live way beyond who you are.
After publishing my previous post, I heard from folks how writing publicly has helped them better organise their thoughts and be brave in sharing openly. Thanks to Martha Edwards for the advice on how to keep it going — keep it simple, easy and as low pressure as possible.
What’s been happening
The area I’ve started working within is focused on what could loosely be called a target operating model. A way to identify what digital transformation is, its positioning, how it translates operationally to support others, the key components of sustainable and effective transformation, and the incremental changes needed to get to our future vision.
Within that sphere of work, we’re hiring for a Head of Design. So, want to come be my boss? Ping the team a message if you have questions: digital.recruitment@gov.scot
Our new Head of Design will join this work, and as described in the job advert, “identify and articulate the key components of a successful transformation, design how change programmes access these components in the most cost effective and efficient way and drive a more sustainable technology”.
Fluidity of communities & how they operate
Our UCD community has been through some changes this year. Both the community of practice and the way we operate has changed based on colleagues leaving, and others like me joining in recently. I put some time aside to map out who’s working across our disciplines: content design, accessibility and usability, service design, interaction design, performance analysis, graphic design. Through doing this, I discovered folks I haven’t met, projects that I wasn’t aware where they sit, and overlap in upcoming vacancies within service design discipline.
Bringing us closer together will enable us to share ideas, find common patterns, support each other but moreover make services and products better by building consistent approaches and standards.
We circulated a couple of questions to our community to get insights on the challenges people are facing, what currently works well, and expectations they have from a UCD community. The next steps would be to make sense of the feedback, and test out some activities and approaches to working together.
I’m coming back to this blog post by Clara Greo, Kara Kane and Keeley Robertson — “communities need leadership to support them and drive them forward”. A learning I’m thinking about here is how communities need orchestrator(s) — person or team enabling ways to connect, share and learn whilst remaining invisible and supporting the community to grow.
I really enjoyed meeting Cathy Dutton from Defra to learn how they organise and structure service design practice in large organisations. It’s something I’m trying to bring within my own team — looking at increasing our service design capability, and aligning work to components or services.
Finding a mentor
I joined a civil service mentoring programme just when I was changing roles. This turned out to be great timing, as I’m navigating my new role, expectations of being more senior, and the kind of leader I want to be now, and in the future. We were matched for a speed mentoring session — a great way to figure out if it’s the right fit for both people. And turns out I found a mentor!
They’re a deputy director and my wild guess was that their calendar is packed. One thing that really helped both of us was me writing couple of paragraphs to explain three things:
- My background — career path, work highlights, identity
- Areas where I think mentoring could help me
- An extract of my user manual — specifically communication style, how I like to receive feedback, and how I learn best.
By writing this, I found the time and space to think about what I needed from a mentoring relationship. By reading it, my mentor was provoked to think if we’re a good fit. Mentoring is a two-way relationship so I wanted both of us to be transparent and see if our objectives match. We’re now set to meet regularly for the next 6 months.
Two things I’m learning and thinking about
- Interpreting text in a different way to other people. I’ve been working closely with a brilliant colleague on desk research. As part of this, we have reviewed a lot of existing documents — reports, reviews, research findings. I kept finding myself messaging Maeve regularly to check my understanding of specific parts of reports — and turns out, we both translated it in very different ways. We interpret content based on our previous experiences, knowledge and also values, which makes interpretation a process of how we interact with the text individually. This made me more conscious of seeking out additional ways and means to complement any reports in writing, like talks, videos, meetings.
- Designing with ambiguity. I’m learning about how my own responses to ambiguity might align to the expectations from others when it comes to a design question. I found myself often searching for the exact definition of ‘ambiguity’ — “the quality of being open to more than one interpretation; inexactness”. I’m learning to find the balance between not having any answers myself before starting a project, and no one having any answers before a piece of work is commissioned. I find the lines here a bit trickier to follow when it comes to scoping out work versus delivering a defined project. I’ve come back to this blog by Ben Holliday a few times.
What’s next
- Working to confirm the scope and defined plan for the project I’ve started on and align interlinked dependencies.
- Taking our very first Design for Planet draft ‘guide’ to test internally and get contributions from other disciplines like policy, learning, climate change and net zero.
- Taking some time off
3 things I’m grateful for
- Amy Hupe’s post on design systems for humans
- NASA’s Webb telescope releasing the first images
- Celebrating my best friend turning 30 and her expecting a baby
