Double header, I was off (most of) last week so didn’t get around to writing anything. Last week my daughter had chickenpox/shingles, so now our son has chickenpox (which was predictable), so no nursery for him this week has meant a proper test of everyone’s work flexibility!

We also put our house on the market this week, so lots of effort has gone into clearing it out in advance of photos and viewings. How has work been…?

• Big focus this week has been interviewing people for a content design role, one thing I’ve really taken away is how much people (both internal and external) want to join the content design community at Co-op. Its a real testament to the work of the current (and past) team to establish that kind of reputation. Can’t say much more as we’re still working our way through the interviews.
• The time for interviews and related admin has meant i’ve felt under-prepared for 1:1s I’ve had this week, which isn’t ideal. In general I take a pretty laid back approach, but reading Leisa’s structure made me pause and wonder what I might be missing right now. I know that 1:1s are quite very individual (aside from for the obvious reason). Some people have been surprised to hear I take any notes in the sessions, where others are much more likely to bring the structure themselves. Maybe once I’m out of recruitment focus I’ll re-evaluate.
• I presented quickly at our all design meeting on the past few months of our service design community of practice…which to be honest has been quiet since Riz (who was doing an ace job) left Co-op. I very quickly passed on to colleagues who shared plans for a new approach. This includes a new team, who bring energy to reboot it as a slightly wider service design and customer experience community…with a new name tbc. Communities of practice are a great way to hear and share new ideas/thinking but people can frequently get sucked into the ‘day job’ and not prioritise these things, so highlighting the great work being done in all the communities of practice was really worthwhile.
• These presentations were followed by Jack, Suhail and Tom running one of their ‘Debate clubs’ which have become a bit of a thing within the design team. We discussed whether artificial intelligence would have a positive or negative impact on our jobs as designers. I was surprised how many of our team shared they had already tried using e.g. ChatGPT in some way as part of their workflow. Afterwards I reflected on whether I had in fact used similar, and could only really come up with automatic transcription of research interviews, but Im sure I’ve used it in ways I’ve not even realised as well.
• If debate club sounds interesting, they’re taking it to UX Scotland later this year, I reckon it would be well worth attending!
• Another thing I’m grappling with is conversations about ‘Who does what’ in our teams. Before Christmas the design team were working on discoveries with less (but still some) interaction with operations teams. Now we’re back to ‘workstreams’ with various different operations roles involved, all of whom have been doing different things for the past 6 months, the question of roles and responsibilities has been raised. This means I’ve had to reflect in more detail about what value I’m actually bringing to the table, vs e.g. the ‘Product leads’, or the ‘delivery manager’ or the ‘lead designer’. As with most things, I oscillated between an old powerpoint deck someone sent me, a blank Miro board, and eventually resorted to writing something. Increasingly realising that’s often how I do my best thinking.
• I also took baby steps in the direction of trying to rekindle the work around digital sustainability that was kicked off by Siobhan whilst she was at Co-op. One way was finding some new resources that could be helpful:
  • IBM Design approach to sustainability
  • Sustainable digital design cheat sheet
    

This weeks long read (or listen if you prefer) is ‘Solitude and leadership’ which was originally a lecture delivered to the plebe class (whatever that is?) at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009 by William Deresiewicz.

Some of the themes really hit home, and reinforced to me the value of time to be alone with my own thoughts inside, and outside of work.