Week notes 21st May

I started writing this on a glorious morning on the Isle of Wight – just taken the dogs out – a perfect bank holiday weekend which makes the apocalyptic weather from the rest of the country another piece of evidence that says that the IOW is actually in another timezone….if not a different reality.

One of the things I have taken from last week was a lingering sensation of not having handled something well – but having taken it apart and put it together a number of times I can’t figure out a way I could have done it differently. Or at least without a similar balance of consequences. Very frustrating for the perfectionist but that was last weeks mistake (or one of them!).

Moving forward.
This week I need to concentrate on capturing the evidence and data I have from April and May and turning this into some proper observations. I am forming a bunch of conclusions and need to turn this into something that I can get comments and reactions to.

I also need to see if the plans for mindful diary come to fruition and I get the sensation of being back in control of my time – fingers crossed on that one.

I also need to make sure that I am properly drawing together the different strands of things that I am doing to be coherent for me and for my team – I think its getting there but it seems some scrutiny.

I’ve also been thinking a bit more about some of the bigger themes I want to engage with, partly fuelled by the fact that last week was unusually sociable. This demonstrates that anyone in their 40’s needs a good reason for a night out on school night but luckily I had 3 good reasons as I met up with some very different but equally fabulous female friends – always restorative. One of these was dinner with the always inspiring Cassie Robinson and we got talking about a whole bunch of things snd, amongst other things, we talked about something I have been mulling over about the nature of organisational change.

I’ve been asking myself why people think there is any meaning in thinking of it as being different to system change because of the balance of internal and external change pressures and the fact that the organisation itself is best thought of as a network and not as a hierarchy (or more accurately a network/hierarchy hybrid). The challenge comes as you think about pacing change within the system of the organisation in such a way as to maximise the reach of the change without distracting from the core purpose of the organisation and making change an end in itself. Hugely relevant to my current focus and the fact that my biggest challenge (TBD!) is a need to level out the pace of change across diverse groups of people who currently have very different perspectives without causing change to slow to a crawl – its all about impact.

I wrote a piece immediately after the Brexit vote on the need to build bridges between old and new ways and much of it still feels true; I wrote this in the aftermath of the Brexit vote but it still feels true and we should all ask ourselves if we are pulling up the drawbridge or helping people walk across.

Anyway – quite enough rambling – will put some of this together into a proper post and right now get on with my micro ambition of being less late to meetings for the rest of the week.