Like many people I took some time off this bank holiday week (and it was half term for us too). So this is a mix of holiday and work related ponderings:

• I took my oldest (5) with some friends for a bit of a cycling holiday. Train plus traffic free cycle paths, camping, a light bit of mountain bike trails in the Afan valley as well as plenty of running around a campsite and playing on adventure playgrounds. It was relatively basic, but we had a great time and I was super impressed with the kids cycling. I tried to cap any riding at about 10km a day for them, but I think they probbaly notched up about 35km total over 3 days, plus a load of running around and a few grazed knees.

• I started reading ‘The Service Organisation‘ by Kate Tarling – and thought about how we could start applying it within colleague facing design. As is often the case, the hardest thing I came up against was what the appropriate level of granularity of service would be to make a meaningful start.
• I sat in on a good conversation about starting to service map for one of the workstreams I support, which was very relevant to the book – and meant I could try and nudge in the right direction even when some were nervous about expanding scope beyond ‘product features’. Finding the balance between ‘scope creep’ and ‘narrowing scope artificially to make everyone feel more comfortbale about delivery’ is tricky.
• I planned a couple of weeks of activities for a work experience placement starting next week. To be honest, I feel much more pressure trying to sort this than my day to day work! In particular trying to remove as many barriers as possible to participating in the teams work, without actually formally being a part of the organisation…is hard!
• Got some time to draft a plan for a digital sustainability workshop as part of our internal conference in 10 days time. I managed to get two slots back to back, but its amazing how quickly 2×40 mins gets taken up when you’re planning interactive activities. My aim is always to plan light, give everything time to breathe, plan for unexpected conversations, means you shouldn’t run over!

Long read this week is sustainability related. Atlassian has published ‘Don’t #@!% the Planet’ as their summary of their approach to “building a sustainability program from the ground up, setting ambitious goals, and working to achieve net-zero emissions”