2020 review
A late foray into last year’s highs and lows
As I start to write this I’m wondering if it’s a good idea to revisit what has been a really strange and difficult year. I mean, I don’t have to tell you that, you were there too. So I’m going to just start writing and see where I get to.
Pre-Jan
One of the big things of the year has been tracking my reading with my Trello reading list — I actually started this at the end of December 2019. I’m not sure I’ll carry it on into the new year but t’s been an interesting exercise and I think there will (hopefully) be two further blog posts about it:
- one pulling together some of the best bits I’ve read over the year, and,
- one looking at what I learned by doing it (but that needs a fair amount of evaluation which I haven’t had time to do yet).
I’m feeling quite pleased that I’ve managed to keep it up for a full year. I wouldn’t characterise myself as being able to create and keep up habits, but that’s patently not true in this instance, and worth remembering.
January
It’s so strange to think now, but back in January the EHCP for my little boy hadn’t been finalised, though his DLA had been approved. In January, I viewed what will become (in September 2021) his new school for the first time.
January was also GovCamp, which feels utterly impossible now. The small rooms! The crowds for cheese! People travelling from around the country!
In a similar way it’s strange to think that before GovCamp the idea for The Tiger Who Came to Tea workshop didn’t exist and then afterwards, it did.
Since then it took on a life of it’s own. I wrote it up as a blog post — which to date has had 2.6k views — and then, later this year I wrote a follow up blog post about other stories you could use:
I presented it at UXBristol, and ran a workshop as part of Dorset Council’s Festival of the Future. I’ve sent out 50 tiger stickers to participants across the country.
For something I took a punt on (and I remember how uncertain and embarrassed I was about pitching the idea, pic below) it’s become something of a foundational part of how I see and describe myself now, even becoming a key part of how I think I might be able to market myself as a freelancer.
Anyway, running workshops and talking about stories with lovely people became one of the highlights of my year.
I started the year as Head of Digital at the National Leadership Centre in the Cabinet Office. That experience really has a narrative arc all of its own but I’ll try and work it in here.
If I remember correctly January was mostly spent suppressing my brain’s desire to make me feel incapable with it’s recurring “oh crap I’m on my own” intrusive thoughts. I also had to get back to grips with the weirdness of the Cabinet Office and all of those returning feelings from joining the Civil Service back in 2015, being intimidated by others education, feeling out of place and just generally feeling as though others were speaking a language that I didn’t understand (remember kids: impostor syndrome is a class issue).
Practically I was getting ready for the National Leadership Forum and battling some old school expectations of digital being just about delivering on other people’s wishes.
In January the team at Convivio delivered me a business contingency plan in case of a COVID-19 pandemic, and everyone thought it was a bit over the top but it wasn’t, was it?
February
After the National Leadership Forum I had some time to settle in properly and get to grips with things; writing a strategy and getting clearer on a roadmap (frustratingly just as our supplier team were ramping down). This also meant getting ready for procurements and budgeting.
I was also anxious having invited Katy, Hattie and Rahma to speak with me at SDinGov that by this point we still had no presentation pulled together and (possibly because of other uncertainties I was feeling) I beat myself up over it rather than asking the team for their help.
Frustratingly at this time I remember needing to put together a number of documents justifying the decisions taken to date with the digital service and costs incurred (decisions I didn’t take) and battling some low level “gaslighting” about my skills and experience.
That sounds like a pretty major complaint, but I don’t mean it to be, it happens and don’t think it’s intentional but it is organisational. But, seriously — don’t hire digital people if you don’t understand and are going to constantly question their experience and ways of working.
The thing I’ve always said about the Cabinet Office (and I learned this early in my CS career) is that it is populated by intelligent, motivated and proactive people who can push things through. They are clever enough to work things out in some way, and yeah, this means stuff gets done. Almost anyone can achieve a result, which on one hand its democratising, but on the other is means that work can sometimes be done by people who aren’t best placed to do it. It also means that things are sometimes moving (unstoppably) in one direction, when someone with a different set of skills or experience might look at it differently and improve it.
A department of proactive, intelligent (and yes.. privileged) generalists potentially makes it more difficult to see and value distinct skills?
Anyway, all the questions about how things are done with digital, the necessary team and skills (as outlined within the service standard) and the associated costs left me feeling confused, questioning myself and unconfident about my skills (while simultaneously being frustrated and slightly angry because I knew what I was feeling was wrong). So while I had relative empowerment as a G6 and Head of role, to make decisions and manage budgets, I also felt weirdly undermined, that’s what I mean by gaslighting in this context (and hopefully don’t diminish it’s important meaning outside of this by using it in this way).
Anyway, I remember asking two questions around this time:
- Should we extend the contract with Convivio as it looks like COVID might kick off which will make things harder to procure? (A: no, we won’t be affected by COVID)
- What happens if we stop? (A: huh?)
March
At the beginning of March I travelled to Edinburgh for SDinGov which also seems crazy now. There were elbow bumps, standing close to other people, hundreds of people in rooms together. I remember someone (Sharon Dale?) telling me that they’d struggled to get antibacterial hand gel and paid a small fortune for what they did have, and when I went home on the evening of the first night I remember being alarmed at the apocalyptic tone of the BBC news.
The conference itself was good, the talk went well I think, I clearly remember Clara and Liam sitting in the font row grinning at me whenever I looked over for validation — which I appreciated hugely. But, as always, I find afterwards I feel really anxious and uncertain, so after a couple of drinks with Dan and Andy I slunk off back to my hotel early to deal with the “vulnerability hangover”.
When I came home my husband got a bug and we ended up taking him to hospital. I really didn’t want to be there; there were people in side rooms with COVID and no room to socially distance in the waiting room. Thankfully he was better after just a couple of stints on the drip.
That Thursday I went into London for the last time in 2020, to attend a training session on presenting with impact at the National Theatre. It was great — but weird — nobody quite sure if they should be there, and obsessively washing our hands. That evening my husband’s company announced they would be closing the office for the forseeable future and then on the Monday, lockdown started.
Suddenly the schools were closed and we had to furlough our little boy’s nanny. I worked half days from 8 until 12 so that my husband could work in the afternoon. In reality it often didn’t work quite like that and I had work out how to manage childcare and listen and participate in meetings too.
At One Team Gov breakfast one week it suddenly dawned on me that having the opportunity to keep working on something was a bit of a privilege. Other teams had had their work deprioritised and their budgets cut with nothing else to do. So, while dealing with the emotional fallout that comes with a major change in circumstances those people also lost their purpose — which is so important to public servants.
In the NLC we saw a rapid pivot and reprioritisation. It was actually really good to see this play out and in the right kind of way. We knew the work to be done, the team had to be restructured and this was done with consideration for peoples skills and their preferences, which was great. The team had purpose and things moved quickly. I was busy and knackered but also felt kinda lucky.
I spent a good chunk of time getting the contract with Convivio extended after all so that we could continue developing the digital service and providing more support to the COVID-19 response work of the team.
April
Frazzled. I literally have nothing written down for April, if I remember the month outside of work was very baking-focussed. I made a lot of cakes and things to pass the time as the weekends felt unbearably long. I also started getting small gifts in the post, like a postcard from Jenny’s bunnies (and some brownies from Jenny), a gift from Nour, some more brownies from a friend and some flowers from my mum. All unusual but welcome post.
My husband was asked to reduce his salary but we were just both really happy to still be able to work during such a weird time.
I gained both Morgan and Prateek in digital and it was so good to be working together, we came up with some good ideas and approaches with the help of Convivio. I also worked into the evenings doing calls with Morgan while making dinner, this was actually a highlight because it helped me to close the day and consider my thoughts.
It was a good time because it felt like all of the parts of the team pulled together, but it was also a hard time because it was possible to see better ways of doing things that ultimately got blocked quite late in delivery.
It was a really great reminder of the need to be able to manoeuvre and move around obstacles when you are working in digital. It became clear to me just how much learning and how much work the team had been sitting on that had reached between 60–80% done but ultimately didn’t make it into delivery due to reasons beyond their control; buy-in and expectations about what was appropriate to deliver. That digital team empowerment went a certain amount of the way, but not all the way, which was disheartening, and it’s very hard to describe where the money has been spent when things haven’t got over the line. And also when you’re the new person saying “lets do this” and “this is where I think we can add value” and getting “yes we tried that (and here’s all the work we did on it) but it couldn’t happen because…” in response.
Billy had been due to return at the end of April but decided against it given the circumstances with childcare, and I was asked to stay until July.
May
At the beginning of May we heard that my husband’s operation would go ahead the following week so I had to quickly decide what to do but had no choice but to ask for special leave from work. It was tough, so tough I moved in with my in-laws, and honestly, that’s probably enough said about May (but if you want to read more you can here).
June
In June our little boy’s nanny was able to come back to work and some sense of normality resumed, or at least it did for me as husband continued to recover from his operation. I’m not sure if that made me less frazzled because there was still quite a lot of work to do.
A lot changed in the team and it meant that when I came back from special leave I needed to make a number of decisions and review budgets, I recommended that we shut down the digital service and it was agreed. It was a tough decision and it took a lot of work to make sure that everyone understood what was happening, but taking the service down was in itself really unremarkable. I think it was the right decision.
And then Billy came back, we worked together for a little while to hand things back over, and my time at the National Leadership Centre was over.
June was also overshadowed by the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, and like many others I spent a lot of time reflecting and thinking about what I could or should do. I resolved to try and learn, quietly and to myself. One of the One Team Gov community came out and asked why we hadn’t put out an announcement to say that we stand with the BLM movement and I remember thinking about how that hadn’t occurred to me as I had been doing so much internal soul searching.
But the OTG team decided to get something out there. Baring in mind most of the core team are white this was incredibly hard and I don’t think we got it right, I’m not sure we could have got it right and perhaps that’s the point. But we took the time, and we tried, and we said something when many others didn’t. I’m proud we didn’t shy away from the feedback.
We also updated One Team Gov microactions to reflect things people could do to be more inclusive, and held space at the beginning of every weekly breakfast for people to reflect on what they’d learned the previous week and what they were going to do with the information, I turned up for as long as I possibly could to make sure that this happened every week.
July
I returned to the team in the Local Digital Collaboration Unit just as the applications to our COVID-19 fund were closing, which meant that I was almost immediately thrown into application scoring. It was a lot of work to score, moderate, interview and award, but a really great opportunity to learn just how much local government were working on and dealing with at that time and to get back to grips with everything going on in the team.
I had previously thrown my hat into the ring for some Deputy Director roles across government, that ultimately ended up getting something like 1600 applicants, and in July I needed to complete verbal and numerical reasoning tests to sit alongside my application. Obviously with 1600 people I didn’t get a look in, but my statement of suitability was graded as moderate demonstration which, honestly, I am still happy with.
In July we also pulled together a team and began the organising for what would become two One Team Gov Suicide Prevention events with Debbie, Gail, Andy, Jon, Jenny and Paul.
August
In the beginning of August I had an interview for a G6 role at HMRC that I applied for before I went back to the LDCU, I had a migraine in the middle of the interview which meant I’m not sure I made any sense at all, so I didn’t get it. Migraines became something of a theme for the latter part of the year.
I decided to finally take some holiday, we travelled to Cornwall to stay with my parents, avoiding all of the busiest spots and sticking to the Eden Project and Wheal Martyn which were relatively quiet.
While I was in Cornwall we held the first of the Suicide Prevention events, being joined by almost 100 Mental Health First Aiders from across government for a breakfast chat. It was good, the people who were there were interested and engaged but we had technical difficulties which caused quite a few headaches. Still, we learned a lot about the role of MHFAs within government which I hope is useful.
September
My little boy returned to school for the first time in almost 6 months and with that came just a little more normality again, so we decided that we would sell our house — just to add a little more drama to an otherwise uneventful(!) year.
I did what I still think has been some good work on how we characterise the projects and the support we give to each of them based on a number of factors, and I got pretty obsessed with throughput and capacity because we still don’t have a really good idea of what is achievable and a number of the team were getting (or had already gotten) burned out.
I also entered a rabbithole of procurement for one of our COVID-19 projects that would eventually award in November.
We got all of the planning for the Suicide Prevention event in place and the number of attendees reached 900 in the week before the event. Of that more than 300 people joined us for most of the event. It was a busy and challenging event to run, and there are definitely things I would do differently if I did it again, but it was a rare opportunity to have so many people with “lived experience” in one place and to build understanding and empathy.
Actually, this really was quite a lot of work and including it here like this doesn’t really do justice to all of the work that went in, but the team were excellent and we achieved a lot, so I’m proud of that. I also learned a lot about how I lead and how I want to lead a team, I’m proud of what I managed with that too bringing together a diverse group who I (mostly) hadn’t worked with before and achieving something really great.
September was quiet for me because I was working out procurement which took some time and meant that my “proper” work didn’t really kick off. It was frustrating and I felt a little out on a limb.
October
By October I was getting pretty frustrated and tired with not having any “meaningful” work to do and the feeling of moving backwards from a G6 (at NLC) to a G7 role was acute. I felt out on my own and constrained and that contributed quite significantly to what I think was the start of a burn out. I started missing people quite a lot more significantly than I had realised, started craving the office and realised I need purpose in order to get my energy. When I don’t have that for some reason, I expend energy in all the wrong directions (mostly inwards) which leads to burn out.
Thankfully May-N asked me to pick up on the LDCU training offering work so I had a project I could get stuck into and that meant I could speak with people from outside of my immediate work bubble which re-energised me, but the migraines were still coming at a rate of around 1 per week which should have been a sign to stop and rest. I didn’t.
Egle, Nour and I managed all of the scoring for the Community Engagement Playbook project and it was good to finally get to all of the applications and speak to suppliers.
I started really thinking about my personal website and started devising some real product offerings, just the start but something nonetheless.
November and December
These are more recent history, covered off in my weeknotes, but essentially, the migraines became too much I ended up in hospital and then was forced to take some time off. My Grandad had a tumour removed, along with half of his lung, and the government called another lockdown just a couple of days before the celebration of my 38th rotation around the sun. So November was all a bit stressful really.
Lockdown was a bit of a bummer, especially on the weekends when it was rainy and with limited options to entertain an autistic 6 year old. It was interesting to see how it gradually dawned on people that Christmas would be very different this year. There were a lot of signs that things were more difficult for people this time around, not least from my confused and frustrated family members desperately trying to work out if they could bend policy in order to see one another (they couldn’t).
The Community engagement playbook project kicked off and started running which was really good to see and took up a lot of time, the team took another pivot which meant that December was mostly trying to get that sorted (and planning for January).
I started taking some FutureLearn courses and completed two of them (in the Anthropology of Social Media and Decision Making) and I signed up to take a coaching course in January — which I am really looking forward to.
And so what?
Well now I’ve written this I’m not entirely sure, but maybe some key points:
- Despite what happened this year I did still achieve, in fact, I was involved in some important work
- I need to find ways to stretch myself otherwise I don’t feel I have enough purpose and will burn out.
- I need to take more than one holiday for a week in a year.
- I need to track my migraines and learn to listen to my body more.
- I read something from Twitter I think that said “Product managers do not own the decision, but they own the decision quality” and it really made sense to me that I’ve been fighting for decision quality this year — it’s important to me so I will stick with it.
- I think in this year I will need to find an opportunity to stretch and will definitely be looking for a G6 role or something in a related space so that I can grow.
- I’m looking forward to my coaching course and seeing how it will influence my day-to-day working and/or give me insight into myself.
And that’s probably enough isn’t it? It’s taken me a reeeeally long time to write this and it’s loooooong. I’m sorry about that, if you read this far, thank you. We will keep moving forward in 2021. Keep going, stay strong and keep fighting racism.
Love you bye!
