Its been a bit of a side-quest week. Had an invite land in my diary late last Firday, a call Monday and then a follow up on Friday to prepare for. Whilst its not ideal to have to reprioritise the week based on what someone else is asking for, it made me reflect on a few things:

• I enjoy working with others to untangle complex challenges, visualise them simply using service design approaches and then communicate back the possibilities. Never understimate the power of presenting via storyboards.

• You can achieve a lot in 5 days, even with a lot of other stuff going on. I had to reschedule and not attend some things to make it work, but was strict with myself that I wouldn’t work evenings to pull something together for a leadership ask. I’m glad I stuck to that.
• I have a high degree of trust in the teams that they can operate pretty much entirely independently of me. I’m really pleased to be working with people who are able to balance pro-active leadership of their own respective teams with asking for support and advice when needed. Most often I’m just a sounding board with some suggestions, and I’m happy playing that role.
• It was positive to hear technology leadership saying things like ‘we know there’s complex technical and commercial things to figure out, but we want you to start by looking at solving the customer frustration and mapping out a better customer experience’ (I may be paraphrasing slightly). Its not always that way around!
• I had another side-quest in that I’d agreed to host a work experience placement in our team for 2 weeks. I think I was more stressed about planning this week than the last few months of any other work! I really feel the pressure to make it a good experience, especially trying to navigate the challenges of hybrid working (the fact I’m nowhere near the office most of the time doens’t help). It was yet another example of how much I can rely on the team to be pro-active and friendly, which is ace. Apparently this week was ‘All I expected and everything I didn’t expect’…in a good way!
• A third (and final) side quest has been prepping an ‘Introduction to digital sustainability’ for our internal conference next week. As part of this I finally caved and responded to one of the many emails from Miro asking for a ‘quick intro call’ with our rep. I’ll be asking about whether they use renewable energy for their operations & data centres, whether having ‘file sizes’ would be feasible for Miro boards and whether they can share how much data Co-op has stored with them. All in the hope of getting a grip on how use of Miro contributes to our energy usage and overall digital carbon footprint.

Long read time. Last week I shared that I had got a lot of value from DXW’s user research playbook – another similar tab I had open at the same time was The ultimate guide to UX research – dscout people nerds. You might find either of them helpful!