2023/09/22

A bit of a strange week, to be expected when you share your own job on social media. Confirming leaving Co-op still feels weird, but you can now apply for my job. If its something you’re interested in, I’m very happy to chat about it.

This week I thought about:

• Purpose. Imran lead a great day of thinking about our purpose as a design leadership team, lots of reflection on creating the best possible conditions for Design at Co-op, how we inspire, challenge and support the design team as best as possible. It was also a great way to get to know the individuals across the teams better (even though I felt a bit of a fraud as I’m leaving!)
• Honest conversations. Its fascinating to see how people’s guard drops with you once they know your leaving. Maybe its a more genuine interest in where you’re going and therefore what makes you tick, or its just less desire to ‘make plans’ because you won’t be around to see them through. I’ve generally felt that people have been more open and honest with me over the past few weeks. No organisation is perfect and it benefits nobody to pretend it is, or try to protect existing structures that don’t work effectively. People should talk about this more, and not just when people are leaving.
• Setting deadlines. I’m STILL working on a doctorate around service design, that I began nearly seven years ago. I managed to meet with my surpervisors (old colleagues and friends too) to chat through how I could make more progress on it, and came away with some deadlines. Which aren’t always a bad thing!
• More recruitment. I’m still in the process of hiring for the team, even whilst I’m leaving. A new role for an interaction designer went live this week.
• Onboarding, or more realistically pre-boarding. For me ‘getting people access to all the systems they will need to use before they start’ is a real show of ‘we’re a competent organisation to come and work for’. I try and make every effort to get everything set up ready for people when they join.
• Related, the laptop and associated things arrived for my new role today, over 2 weeks in advance, so seems we have similar values there!

Long read this week is ‘Is this service design‘ by Cathy Dutton. Its targeted at design in government but lots still resonated with me about doing design in large organisations. One quote in particular:

None of this work feels like service design, its mostly been about building an understanding of the service, the people, the teams, and the ways of working.

Which in my experience…is actually about 50% of doing service design.