Weeknotes: Friday 17 January 2025
First weeknotes of 2025 — and already off schedule! After a much-needed break, I’m feeling refreshed and ready for the new year. Here’s what I’ve been working on and thinking about this past week:
- I was deeply shocked and saddened to hear about the loss of Vicky Teinaki last Sunday. While I didn’t know her well, she’s been a regular mention in my weeknotes, newsletter and social media — a true example of working in the open and supporting others. I had the chance to meet her at SDinGov a few months ago, where we talked about work in bilingual design. That conversation will stay with me. You can see her incredible work at VickyTeinaky.com. She’ll be greatly missed.
- It’s been an intense couple of weeks full of meetings, but I’m happy with progress. I’ve focused on reconnecting with people, and picking up the conversations we started before the break. We’ve discussed how we want to approach our work based on last year’s hiccups, defined project plans for the first quarter, and started socialising this across the organisation. Our squad has started strong, and we’re all excited about what’s ahead. In this first quarter, we’re working on making some content improvements to the CDPS website, and exploring service patterns for the Welsh public sector.
- Last year wasn’t easy — not the “getting out of your comfort zone” kind of challenge, but more of a test of patience. It felt like a long, draining year with sharp surprises thrown in out of the blue. But by the end of it, I had the chance to regroup with my team and have some important, fundamental conversations with them. Lately, I’ve been mulling over that old proverb, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” It’s made me think about how some things just need to take their course. You can’t always accelerate, shortcut, or force them. There’s a process, a journey, and sometimes you just have to let it play out. Fortunately, it does feel like something has shifted in our outlook.
- I’m one of those people who see the new year as a fresh start, using the holidays for a bit of self-reflection. This year feels even more significant — I’m turning 40 (ugh!), and even thought about writing one of those “40 lessons at 40” pieces. In the meantime, these are some intentions for the year, and part of the discussions I’ve had with my team:
Talking about the work is part of the work: not just writing about it, but embracing conversations as essential to progress
Focus on outcomes, not outputs: bringing meaningful change over simply producing things
Reframe design as decision-making facilitation: use design to guide decisions, create clarity and shared-understanding, and better outcomes
Stop waiting for permission: if something needs doing, I want to step up and make it happen
Show up with optimism, constructiveness, and playfulness: this is a personal one as I’m usually the grumpy old man
- I had a great chat with the skills team, though I think it turned into more of a soapbox moment for me — hopefully, I didn’t overwhelm them with too many curve-ball opinions! They’re working on a capability assessment for the Welsh public sector (‘Skills needed to design good services’) and asked how I saw it fitting with the Digital Service Standard and the Service Manual.
- As I see it, the service standard is a yardstick to measure whether a service is fit for purpose. A service assessment is a framework to evaluate where you are in your journey toward meeting that standard and identify areas where you’re falling short. The service manual provides task-driven guidance on how to design good services (and thus meet the service standard).
- For example, ‘How to run usability testing with Welsh language users.’ A capability assessment would help determine whether your team has the skills to follow the service manual and progress toward meeting the service standard, highlighting any gaps. Am I missing anything? I’d love to hear other thoughts.
- Understanding user needs is key, but too often organisational goals are disguised as user needs by framing them as user stories. This makes it harder to test if we’re meeting real needs or falling short. We need to start with an honest understanding of users’ perspectives — without that, how can we create something that truly works for them?
- If you work in Wales, check out the new Slack community, Cymru Ddigidol. I’ve been banging on about the need for something like this since I joined CDPS two years ago, so it’s great to see someone take the lead and make it happen. Now I just need to send my introductory message — it’s been sitting unsent for weeks!
- I came across something I wrote at the start of the pandemic, and surprisingly I still like it. I’ve updated it slightly (including the title) to keep it up to date: On leadership, communication and power.
- I’m really enjoying Will Storr’s The status game. It’s a great reminder of how central games are to our nature. Johan Huizinga even called us homo ludens- the ones who play. We’re all playing different games, each with its own rules, and it’s crucial to recognise which game is being played at any given moment. Play is how we explore, experiment, and make sense of reality. In work, a little playfulness can break the monotony of back-to-back meetings, helping us pause, find joy, and bring more intention to what we do.
- For Christmas, I treated myself to a Masterclass subscription — mainly for the ones I’ve been wanting to watch, like Frank Gehry on design and architecture and Noam Chomsky on independent thinking and the media’s invisible powers. We’ll see how it goes, but they should keep me busy!
- I’ve been in a climbing and bouldering rut for a while, so I’m trying rowing to shake things up. Hopefully it sticks — and it’s something I can do when I visit Spain, where I grew up by the beach and my parents still live.
- Watched Hamilton at the Wales Millennium Centre: 3 hours that fly by!