A weeknote, starting Monday 27 February 2023

Carpentry tools from my dad’s workshop

• Started the week by directing a colleague to Kate Tarling’s new book ‘The Service Organisation’ and Lou Downe’s ‘Good Services’. A consistent referral I make to people wanting to know more about the characteristics of good services and the challenges of delivering them in large organisations. I also had the pleasure of a chat with Kate and a couple of senior stakeholders. Really interesting discussion about some of those service challenges.
• I’ve added both of those books to the shelves of my Exploring Service Design shop on Bookshop.org — happy to take recommendations for more books to help people learn more about people, services and organisations :-)
• I saw the latest Good Services blog post about ‘What makes a bad service’ and liked the carpentry reference, particularly as at the weekend I visited my dad’s workshop for possibly the last time as we gear up to sell my childhood home.
• Further discussion with stakeholders in a service about evolving our approach to performance measurement so we can influence work coming into the service backlog
• Attended my first cross government Heads of Design meeting for a while and was great to see some familiar friendly faces as well as meet some new folks. Looking forward to an upcoming face to face meeting where we’ll establish some collective areas of focus for us as a group.
• Ambition v capacity – This is a developing reflection as it came up in a couple of conversations this week. In so many of the conversations I have with people in my team and beyond I recognise that we hold the bar quite high for what we want to achieve but very often lack the capacity to make the progress as fast as we’d like. I’m sure I’ll come back to this one in future as it pulls on some of my personal values around curiosity, collaboration and patience, as well as the role I’ve got in orchestration of effort between teams and creating the space for design to have an impact.
• And talking of where designers have impact, this post from Amy Rogers is useful for helping think about the different levels we can have influence. sparking reflective thoughts on where I have an impact – spend a lot of time working removed from day to day design
• I also love the beautiful simplicity and regularity of Kathryn Grace’s weeknotes

2023: 13 Feb