This week has been a busy week and out of the office quite a bit. Out and about included my first visit to #localgovcamp, our quarterly management meeting, this time at Stoke Newington Town Hall, and a Hackney leaders network event.
So, 6 great things that happened this week:
- Local gov camp. Lots of energy, great talks, met loads of people who I’d been following on Twitter, heard mentioned by my colleagues, or had already met at One Team Gov. Nic, Emma and Richard hosted great sessions on the work we’re doing in Hackney on user research library, project pipeline and planning. There were loads of interesting sessions, to mention a few: Lizzi Standing ran a great session about #weeknotes which I think has inspired several people to start writing and generated a good discussion about working in the open. Esko from Satori labs ran a session on network mapping which sparked all sorts of interesting thoughts about how we might use this at Hackney, and Ian and Belen from FutureGov ran an engaging session about the digital academy work they’re doing with Essex.
2. I ran a workshop in the office around our learning and development strategy* with team leaders at the start of the week, asking ourselves three questions: What’s my role as a leader in embedding a learning culture? How do we develop a future leadership pipeline and then nurture it? What are my needs as a leader? I used the liberating structures 1–2–4-all method to make sure that we generated good discussion and ideas. At the end we all committed to 3 micro-actions we would take next.
3. Paul and I wrote a brief together for a small project for a group of our new apprentices to take forward: how might we creatively play back our internal customers’ experiences of our service so that we can use the insights to improve how we deliver those services. We’re trying to be clear about the ‘what’ we want to achieve so that we can leave the ‘how’ to the team who’ll deliver it. It was great to work with Paul on something practical that the apprentices can make their own.
4. I spoke at our senior leaders network meeting about our digital apprenticeship programme, alongside Alex who looks after Hackney’s overall apprenticeship programme. I was quite nervous – it’s a big room of senior people, some of whom I know but most I don’t yet. But – I was well prepared, and we have a really good story to tell so it went well.**
https://media.giphy.com/media/uLnPIWsqIz2aA/giphy.gif
5. Our quarterly management meeting this week was great – a really good discussion about what we want to achieve in the next 3 months, and a chance to share what we’ve been working on with each other.
6. Final swim #8 of 8. I’ve really enjoyed it each week so – I’m setting myself a new goal: can I swim every week up until Xmas? That’s (only) 13 swims. . . .but it’s getting colder.
What I’m reading this week
I’m still reading Leadership on the Line, which is very good, and also a new novel by Tim Winton (also v good).
* Jessica Brown will recognise this format, because I’ve basically taken and then built on the ace work she did at Acas 👍
**that is apart from my seeming inability to do simple maths whilst under pressure.
Madebycatemclaur.in 
