Weeknotes #3
Week commencing 22nd July 2019.
I switched up the format of these again, borrowing from Matthew Cain as I really liked the questions that his heading prompted. So here goes;
Focus for the week
This week I met up with Hugo Mathias the CIO at Northampton General Hospital and Andy Callow the CDIO at Kettering General Hospital to hear what they’re working on and how we might be able to help. We talked about the importance of service design and how the maturity of an organisation affects what strategy you adopt. We also showed a few of the services we’ve built already that could be reused to help improve health services.
We had our fourth DevDay this week. DevDay was started after our all-hands team meetings ‘weren’t technical enough’ for some of the team. Each quarter we do an all-dayer at one of our offices to demo some of our work, share ideas, hack protoypes or learn something new together. It takes quite a bit of work to put the day together with different people in the team presenting and sharing things that are important to them.
I wrapped up the day with a skittle map and goal setting exercise for the team, the idea was given to me by an absolute rock in our team, Kiri. We worked through generating skills and behaviours needed to work in our team, each person picked 8 that matter to them and rated themselves on confidence in that thing. I wrote some more about the experience here. After the skittle maps, we each wrote three goals for the next week, month and quarter and swapped them with someone else in the team. The intention is to have small personal goals but also have someone else hold us to account, it might work, it might not but it’s another experiment that could help a few people with direction.
I am pleased
- Two people in the team presented for the first time at our all-dayer, they were brilliant. Considered their audience, rehearsed with others and really got their message across to the room. No mean feat when you’re not used to presenting and it’s not your default to want to do that. They rose to a challenge and delivered brilliantly, really proud.
- Jim in our team showed outstanding ability to support everyone in tiny ways, offering supporting feedback, clarifying conversations to help them progress without escalating and ensuring that people around the table who are less confident, were heard. Thankful for behaviours like this being so prominent in the team.
- We managed to get everyone in the team to complete a skittle map and set some goals for the next week, month and quarter. More on why we did that in another post
I am worried
- I’ve taken on too much and I’m feeling a bit lost in the list of things I could do
- Benedict ate too many? (4) oranges at DevDay
I learned
- Not everyone’s as comfortable in the team in terms of trust as I thought, sharing the skittle maps and task lists caused a few people to be uncomfortable. I need to help build some more safety there
Currently reading
- Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
- A Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker