Week 13, 2024
Tasting notes: uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, with a definite streak of angry feminist, ending with a minor note of self-pity.
Work
worked hard to map out costs to a client, to its service users, and to society of a poorly designed public service. Reflection: some of those costs aren’t going to be quantifiable - but they’re still real human costs, significant and worth addressing. To get folks to recognise this, I think we need to do some storytelling to bring to life the stories of harm we’ve been told in our interviews. This stuff can be painful to hear - so I’m going to have to think about how to do that in a way that keeps my audience open and curious, rather than sending them into a threat response state.
wrapping up one engagement on a high - and trying to adjust the scope of another slightly so that the client gets what they need most from us now that they know more about their problem space. Reflection: trying to do this with traditional orgs can be challenging because the instinct is to assume the person is trying to wriggle out of delivering what they promised. Thank goodness we have a client who understands agile projects and the drive to push where the value is not just where they thought it would be at the start.
I prepared the ground for a really awkward-but-necessary discussion that went well, I believe, because we equipped the group with the language they needed to really lean into the conversation. Reflection: for important conversations that folks aren’t used to having, you can’t assume people come to the table with anything more than good intentions (indeed, sometimes you can’t even take that for granted). Give people the concepts and mental models, help them see what’s usually invisible to them, connect these things to what it is they’re trying to achieve.
https://bsky.app/profile/pubstr.at/post/3kowieerg6r22 Stefan Czerniawski posted this about the Cabinet Office Policy Lab. A group of amazing women - Andrea Siodmok, Cat Drew, Beatrice Andrews, Lisa Ollerhead, Lucy Kimbell - put in the hard yards in PolicyLab’s infancy to establish a capability that delivers such value into government that it’s still running a decade later. In any other blog post the omission might have gone unnoticed - when we deliver as part of the civil service the success is the team’s, or the department’s (or the Minister’s) and so we don’t expect ongoing recognition of our individual contributions in public (or internal) departmental comms. But the story of the success of the PolicyLab since 2014 seems so inextricably connected to Andrew, Cat and Beatrice that it’s especially weird they’re not named. Reflection: it leaves me wondering - which unnamed women prepared the ground for work I’m currently doing? Who are the unsung civil service (and ex-civil service) heroines to whom we owe a great deal? And can we, should we even, find ways to stop writing the humans out of these stories - or is it an unavoidable quirk of public service?
Home
I watched the new Ghostbusters with Zoe. It was light-hearted fun. I love trips to the cinema. It is so much more of an experience than watching telly at home.
I finished another piece of art - the opposite of my fish, intentionally quick and messy. It looks a little cartoonish, I might have overdone the eyes. Reflection: I really enjoyed the freedom of the process with this - but I’m not quite so pleased with the end result. I think because it doesn’t leave me feeling a particular way. My Hockney tree landscape is relaxing to look at. The fish is colourful and fun. I don’t know how the fox makes me feel. I don’t think the process I went through is shaping how I feel about the end result - I should experiment with this to see.
Holiday disaster: on booking the holiday I asked my husband to check the passports and he saw that his had expired - so, with plenty of time, he renewed it. Then on Friday, I started filling in the Advanced Passenger Information requested by the airline. I went to get the passports - and found that my youngest daughter’s had expired. My husband had looked at an expiry date of 31st March 2024, and believed it was a year away. And with only three days (over Easter) until our flight, there was no way to get a renewal for her in time: our first overseas family holiday since 2019 wasn’t going to happen. Reflection: I’d rather experience the discomfort of his annoyance at me for double checking when he’d checked, than feel resentful for having trusted him and been let down. In fact, I’d rather have been the person who’d made the mistake, than feel this way. Resentment sucks. And so do the chances of getting refunds with so little time before the holiday.
Travel insurance - my travel insurer allowed cancellation for full refund within 14 days of purchase, as long as the insurance wasn’t yet active. On day 13 - three days before my insurance would be active - I tried to call and cancel. And, of course, it was Good Friday. No call centres open. No one responding to emails. It won’t be until Day 17, and two days of active insurance, before anyone at the insurer sees my cancellation request. Reflection: I was surprised at how astonishingly stressful this radio silence was. I couldn’t - still can’t - get hold of anyone and have no choice but to watch my policy slip past the deadlines for refund eligibility. I’m very hopeful the emails I’ve already sent will secure the refund - but I can’t know. So there’s this lingering and angry feeling of injustice I’m going to struggle to move beyond until I know either way.
On Saturday I got food poisoning and spent the entire day moving between my bedroom and my bathroom. And on Sunday I spent the afternoon with extended family-in-law and had to listen to men tell me how they didn’t think patriarchy was a thing any more. Definitely not how I expected the start of my Easter break to go.
[Alt text: a messily painted fox’s head and chest on a white textured background]