#12. Framing work, city trees
also Schumpeter, Battlestar Galactica, my own blog (!), instant noodle soup
Hello!
Spring is such a reliable way to lift my mood. Blue skies and plum (?) blossoms are the view out of my window as I’m writing this. I’m helping my brother build his new shed later today and I’m actually looking forward to it. Not sure if this is middle age or cumulative lockdown speaking?
Also looking forward to Easter next weekend. Not so much for the bank holidays (altho those nice) but mostly for being able to do an egg hunt with my niece and nephew in their garden, and to drive out to see the sea with my mum, because the lockdown rules are changing again on Monday 29 March. Stay at home nearly over. It’s been a long long time coming.
Framing work
This week I’ve been framing the work that our two teams will be doing from April. This is tricky because it means balancing two things:
Our teams need to own the work themselves. People work better when they have autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomous teams make better decisions about what to do and how to do it than me because they are closer to the work.
Our teams need to contribute to our wider strategy. Creating one login for government is complex and requires lots of coordination. My two teams. Our workstream and Emily’s workstream. Digital Identity and GOV.UK. GDS and departments. And so on.
My first instinct is always to tell people to do what I would do. I’ve spent the last six weeks absorbing a terrifying amount of detail about identity, technology, security, fraud, Treasury commitments, departmental expectations, past sins, and what Tom wants us to do. I can’t set the direction of our workstream without making sense of this. But the act of making sense of it tricks my mind into thinking that this huge complicated puzzle is mine to solve. And my mind loves a puzzle.
Over the years - slowly and reluctantly, with my inner toddler kicking and screaming all the way - I’ve learned this is the wrong instinct. This is not my puzzle to solve.
So I asked for help. Rob talked about mixing prescription (telling teams what to do) and openness (pointing in a direction and letting go) depending on context. Cantlin said, Will, it’s not a brief! They’re not an agency. These are adult-adult relationships. Give them some constraints but let them work it out. Ben and Richard, our product managers, said help us understand the context a bit more than you did last time.
In the end I wrote a two-page document for each team containing:
Background - vision, mission, goal, objectives (reminders, already set)
Problem - the discovery decision that each teams has to make
Constraints - actual constraints plus simplifying assumptions
Out of scope - a short list of things not to do (yet)
Context - the whole second page was a longform written version of my thinking. At Local Welcome I learned that when I made decisions the team didn’t agree with it was helpful to explain my thinking. Maybe they would agree, but if not they knew where to focus their critique :)
I invited the teams to tear the documents apart and make them their own. I said they could challenge anything - where I was convinced we’d change it, and where I wasn’t I’d be clear why not. The only thing I asked was that we agreed their set of ‘discovery is done’ when objectives (thanks Pete!) by the end of next week.
I’ve got no idea whether this is the best way to frame work. We’ll find out by doing and learning as we go. We’ve got Elisse to help us do that now (yay!). And next time we’ll do something a little better…
City trees
Ever since Jay tweeted this list of the top ten trees in the City of London back in November me and my brother have been planning to visit them all.
Last Sunday we finally set out on our bikes.
You can tell we’re not tree-people because none of them had any leaves yet! It turned into an exercise in identifying trees from their bare naked winter shapes. Which, to be honest, was an interesting challenge that I never would have done otherwise…
Here are the trees we visited and the photos we took:
Most historical - Mulberry (Francois pointed out we got the wrong tree tho)
Most welcome - Elms (pretty sure we got the wrong trees here too)
There was also a bonus extra tree (this top ten list goes up to eleven?). I wasn’t expecting to find a redwood next to the Gherkin so here’s proof:
We were using our own hastily-assembled Google Map but there’s a more official version of the Google Map which might bring you better luck. One really weird feeling was realising that biking around the city trying to navigate to a pin on a map, and then getting off the bike and walking around trying to find a specific object - this whole experience felt exactly like one of the side-missions in the Grand Theft Auto games. I’ve not experienced real life feeling like a computer game so much. Simulation vibes.
Anyway, the trees were only half the story. The other star of the show was the City of London. It’s dead at the weekend, deader in the pandemic, and it’s a joy to freewheel around empty streets finding Christopher Wren sandwiched between Foster, Rogers and whoever else does glass-and-steel these days.
Listening
The History of Ideas episode about Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter was just outstanding. Especially the bit about democracy not being an ideal for determining the will of the people, but instead a mechanism for competing elites to manufacture sellable versions of their ideas and use any ‘psycho-technical’ means at their disposal to win the competition (written in 1942!). And how even that narrow definition is still radically different to the alternative no-competition version.
Watching
We’re watching (rewatching for me) the Battlestar Galactica remakes from 2005. If you can get over the use of ‘frack’ as a swearword there’s a lot to love. A post-9/11 sci-fi about the near-total elimination of humanity by machines that we’ve built and have evolved to look just like us so we can’t tell who is human and who is machine. Epic levels of paranoia. Plus some layers of mysticism, android-dreams-of-love, and both the best fighter pilot in the fleet and the president of the last-humans being women.
Reading
Still reading The Magus. It’ll take a while. In the meantime the only other thing I read this week was my own mini-series from 2017 on three ways to run better discoveries. When John gave me a performance objective to write down what I was learning so that others could benefit I never expected one of those others to be future-me!
Cooking
Two packets of demae ramen sesame noodles with only one of the seasoning sachets, a cup of frozen peas, as much fried garlic/chilli/ginger as available, soy-soaked tinned water chestnuts/bamboo shoots, topped with fried frozen korean dumplings and a soft-yolk boiled egg and a drizzling of sesame oil. The perfect cupboard meal.
Right. On with the weekend. Enjoy yours!
Stay safe.
Will