A weeknote, starting Monday 19 June 2023
Three all day face to face events this week – one project kick off and two leadership events with different groups.
Kate Tarling joined us in the project kick off and shared some great insight from her work across a whole range of organisations who are on journeys towards being more service focused. Her book The Service Organisation is a great intro to the multifaceted challenges of doing that work in large organisations. There are some key fundamentals like clearly understanding your services end to end, and the people who use them, but you rapidly run into governance and funding and other dimensions of how large organisations function. One thing that is apparent is that language matters – service to one person means a high level grouping of multiple smaller services, to another it means a very granular level and specific part of a customer journey. Getting clarity on what we mean when we use certain phrases will be important.
Kate followed up with this post: To make better services, make better service organisations
The leadership events were useful for checking alignment, building relationships and prompting some deeper thinking about how we lead towards our recently published agency vision to 2030.
Prompted by some of the table discussions I now have a bit of my brain thinking about how people effectively learn about how their organisation works. We do certain things during onboarding to give new starters an idea of the landscape and introduce people to start building relationships needed for their role. People also learn over time and go deeper in certain topics as they work on projects. But in the context of end to end services and understanding how one team’s work influences another I wonder how we help develop and reinforce a broader understanding. Feel like the benefit could be more joined up thinking which translates into better problem framing and potentially more effective prioritisation of work. Immediate thoughts went towards some kind of service safari where you get to understand the front and back stage of services. I’ll leave that one with my subconscious for a while.
This reflective piece by Mat Johnson on things that we’ve lost and gained through remote and now hybrid work through and post-pandemic resonated. We continue to find some tech solutions mean we can continue doing great work and in some cases give us new functionality and abilities to engage people in that work in ways that would have been difficult before. But I’m also finding value in those moments of face to face contact between meetings in the office, and in side chats at events, where I get to talk impromptu about the things on my mind and deal with them without needing to schedule time in diaries to make it happen. This will continue to evolve for all of us, and as we’re now on the cusp of a big increase in the size of our team another part of my brain capacity is being used to think about how the routines and ways of working we’ve built in the last two years are going to be disrupted just by having more people in the team. I’m sure we’ll have bumps but it will be a team endeavour to make things work well.
A rise in self-service technologies may cause a decline in our sense of community by Blake Lee-Whiting feels in some way connected to that last article – but looking ahead rather than reflecting. Recognising the social value of our interactions with people in different service contexts is an interesting perspective. I’m not sure how and where that would surface in cost/benefit calculations of using automation in services. There’s a system dimension at play where although automation may improve a service from certain more measurable viewpoints, the less tangible and maybe longer term impact on the broader system is hidden from view.
That systems perspective is the focus Oliver Standing reflections on a recent webinar – Making progress in complex policy environments. I haven’t yet watched the video (yet another very interesting thing that I fear will be a while before I create space to engage with properly).
Finally, managed to create this year’s birthday card for our now 14 year old in record time. Inspired by the logo of one of his current favourite skate brands – Santa Cruz I got this complete just in the nick of time. The late completion a clear indicator/warning light that some of my priorities may be out of line at the moment.
Full weeknote archive – All the notes in one list.
Exploring Service Design – Collections of books to inspire thinking and action in how services are designed and run (affiliate link)
