#11. Wadadli kitchen, moving people
also The Magus, Just One Of Those Days, The Great, saag aloo shepherd’s pie
Hello!
I had such lovely feedback from writing about my mum last time, and then so many surprise happy birthday messages on Monday, that I’ve spent the whole week feeling great about starting this newsletter. It’s been a big part of feeling OK for me during this last (hopefully) stretch of lockdown. So, you know, thank you everyone.
This episode is a day late because the work week took it out of me. I work four days a week because my job used to leave me feeling so drained on Friday that there was no time to recover before Monday. This week I was shattered by Thursday evening. Need to find some way to protect myself a little more or bad things start happening.
Wadadli kitchen
On Thursday I tripped over a box that Esther left outside my room. I opened it and found a bunch of weird flyers, posters, postcards, movie tickets, drinks coasters, bookmarks booklets - all printed in big, bold neon colours.
These two struck some kind of buried lockdown nerve and made me cry a bit:
Lyrics that spoke to my soul. I DO want to reach out and touch and I AM tired of being alone. I was overwhelmed that another human had taken the time to reflect these feelings back at me in this physical/literal self-care package that appeared out of nowhere in my work day…
…because the box was part of a cook-at-home Friday-night meal from Wadadli by Andi Oliver and Miquita Oliver. The final part of my birthday.
A feast. Orange and ginger wings, golden tamarind chicken, Andi’s chocolate curried goat, mac and cheese, fried plantain, fries, coco bread, sweet potato roti, green slaw, escovitch pickle, crispy onions and coconut, hot sauce, scotch bonnet salt.
But not just a feast. A feast with feeling. The QR code on the back of the drinks coaster linked to a seven hour Spotify playlist that moved slowly through reggae, dub, ska, lovers rock, one drop, two tone, ragga, dancehall. Jamaican music through a British lens. Hit after hit after hit.
So we put on the playlist, turned it up loud, cooked the food, sang along to Sizzla, ate the food, got a bit drunk, danced around the front room, got a bit more drunk, drummed badly on my new cajon, and happily lost ourselves in Friday night feeling.
Pure fire. Food, music, people you love. Unforgettable lockdown experience. Thank you Andi and Miquita for thinking beyond the food. And thank you Esther for making this second lockdown birthday so special xx
Moving people
At work I spent the week doing team moves. We’re splitting an existing team into two new teams so we can get moving towards our goal :)
But, like any time we change what people are working on, there’s always the potential to upset and annoy people in the process. Not great for them - and not great for getting moving towards our goal either :(
I learned about moving people around on Government as a Platform from 2015 to 2018. I grew a team of ten researchers working across five teams. People joined, left, got promoted, became bored, wanted to learn new things, fell out with people - and so I ended up having to get good at moving people between teams almost constantly.
I evolved a bunch of principles to help me. They look something like this:
Clear the move with all the managers before you tell the person who’s moving. It’s OK to talk with managers in advance. But talking with the person too soon often causes confusion and pain - especially if one of the managers doesn’t agree and you have to backtrack later. Do the chess work to make it simple.
Don’t ask for a preference if you’ve already decided. There are times when it’s possible to ask for people’s preferences and meet them. And there are times when decisions are made regardless of preferences. It’s better to be straight up about which situation is happening even if it makes you feel awkward. Asking for people’s preferences when you know you won’t act on them is…disingenuous.
Tell people they’re moving in a one-to-one conversation. I don’t think it’s OK to tell people by email or Slack message. I don’t think it’s OK to tell people in front of other people. 1:1s take more time (for me) but are respectful (for them) and allow space for people to express feelings and ask questions.
After the 1:1s, tell everyone concerned in one big, clear communication. People often miss this final step! I normally tell the line managers (I spoke to X and they’re moving to team Y) and the teams (hi team Y, person X is joining you). It’s OK - preferable actually - to do this big comms by email. Shared understanding.
So it took a lot of time and energy. All those 1:1s were why I was shattered! But ending the week with the big, clear email felt great.
People sometimes question the time I take over this. They don’t think it’s my job. (They don’t want it to be their job perhaps!). I get that. There are ways to structure it so this stuff gets done by other people. I work to create those structures over time.
But, in the meantime, in the here-and-now, in big organisations it’s always the people-focused things - creating good job descriptions, getting back after interviews, setting up inductions, telling people they’re moving face to face, running decent end-year reviews - that fall between the cracks. It mystifies me because what is more important than the needs of the people that are in the building who are doing the actual work?!
Reading
Clearing out my Evernote I found a cryptic note - like a message in a bottle - from a couple of years back that simply read:
The Magus (Madeline Miller)
I love Madeline Miller’s books (Circe especially) and I love a blind recommendation so now I’m reading The Magus by John Fowles. It is haunting and a bit unsettling. It opens with all the dubious sexual politics of a book written by a man in the 1970s but quickly turns into something else entirely that is set on a remote Greek island. I’m hooked.
Listening
So many happy memories of singing along to Sizzla. Clubs, parties, festivals, carnival, queuing for food in Lloyd Park. Now me and Esther on lockdown makes the list too.
Watching
We finished watching The Great last week. It ended up being way, way better than Bridgerton. Beautiful to look at, very funny throughout, some of the liveliest characters I’ve seen for ages, and set in the Russian court in the mid-18th century which is…unexplored territory for a British drama.
Eating
Esther made Anna Jones’s saag aloo shepherd’s pie last night and it was delicious and comforting. Also I hadn’t realised how much I love the smell of melting ghee emanating from the kitchen until last night…
OK. Feels a bit weird writing this on Sunday morning but I’m struggling to adjust to find the right time to write now that the new job has (inevitably) expanded to fill so much of my mind-space earlier in the week. Still figuring it out. As if that ever ends :)
Stay safe.
Will
PS - here’s the chocolate cake that my mum made for my 43rd birthday. Half chocolate fudge icing (traditional vibes for me) and half whipped cream (low sugar for my type-1 diabetic life partner) and shaped like a yin/yang symbol after a poster we had up when I was a kid (and matches the not-so-secret David St Hubbins inside me who uses “bits and pieces of whatever eastern philosophy would drift through my transom”.) ❤️☯️♀️
