This week
I’m feeling a lovely feeling of putting myself wholly into my work this week. Even though I’ve been getting up later, generally and finishing sooner the bit in the middle has been all about work — even when at one point today I went for a walk with the dogs and did a call, and had a second breakfast break when Szu and Eloise came down stairs. I feel so nice that I was able to watch the news last night, for a bit. Next week will take some adjusting too when half term ends.
On Monday the Miro Board that I had prepared for the Senior Management Group meeting on the People Survey went down well. I also learnt another useful tip (by not doing this) when you have prepared dots when people have finished putting sticks on before starting the dot voting make sure you have brought them all to the front. I had a great catch up with Anna about it today and were going to move on to looking at actions plans — so I’ll draft up a workshop for teams to do that.
Organising for the Wellbeing Day on the 10th March seems to be ticking along, we made it into the Programme Monthly update and Janet opened up the pitching in her weekly note — which was great. She also kicked of the FFCP Wellbeing Tracker, which was brilliant. I’m glad it’s out in the wild and more people want to join in which is great — I just need to confirm who and if they are up for it.
I had some lovely bocks of doing time — this week it was spent crafting a session for the first get together of everyone in Debbie’s team. I found http://theteamcanvas.com which looks great so were going to make a start on it — even if we come back in another session. I really like the structure (and think it will help), were also going to be doing a picture check in that Mirren is going to run — and yes you guessed it — I put the whole thing in Miro. I singed up to other tools like https://www.sessionlab.com/ but I didn't need this level of functionality though that looks great for running bigger events — I’m getting really itch about starting to think about this for next year… I woke up this morning thinking about having a cow not a real one and then it was an inflatable cow, but now as I type it’s just turned into a white cow for people to write on.
I saw the sketch note this morning and it made me think about the pitches that we might get for the wellbeing day, and also the strange tension that was surfaced in a discussion circle I facilitated, about how help that is offered often relies on the individual's action. This as I know is very tricky because when your not in a lovely place or a coping space, when your just about coping or cracking you can’t, if you don't have good habits and if you cant communicate then it’s very hard. With that in mind I signed up for HeadSpace it’s free for members of Defra staff.
As ever lots of lovely conversations this week, some confusing ones as well. I can talk too much (when I get going) delaying the end of chats. I also got to go the Organisation Dynamics show and tell, which was nice to see how they are progressing. I need to raise the thought I’ve had about moving to product teams with them next week.
Oh yes and on Monday Nour published Nour, Clare and I’s first blogpost thinking about the work we have done and how we did it — it’s been a lovely process, very cathartic and generative.
Memory Jar
My Dad turning up at the door delivering a box for tomorrow and most wonderfully a bag of compost. So nice to see family.
