Weeknotes 08

I use our Reflection Questions as a basis for my weeknotes. They are available on a postcard. We’d like to send you our questions on a postcard.

What happened this week that gave me a glimpse of the future?

I went to the Nesta City Data Conference. I don’t go to a lot of conferences (unless I’m speaking) but I’m glad I went to this one. It was grounded in reality (lots of talk about fixing the data “plumbing” and how we can make the case to leaders) but there was an opportunity to glimpse the future.

Harrow Council is using Watson to help people make more informed choices about their social care options. A US county trialled an AI to provide a risk score as concerns are raised about individual children.

This gave me a frame to start to imagine how public services could be radically re-invented (and improved) by this technology. And the risks of course. I know plenty of people are way ahead of me on this but now I think I start to get it.

What did I learn?

I learned that data and analytics people in local government recognise that getting better with data is a cultural issue.

We have tools and services that could help them.

We currently don’t do a very good job about helping them understand and use our tools and services.

Also, the cycle highway along the Embankment in London is a massive boon to cyclists.

Also we had a bit of a reflection on our internal cadence. We use Basecamp to manage projects and ensure tasks are done. Basecamp has many strengths but it’s not great at helping us prioritise as a company. For that we use Trello in a sort of Scrumban way with a rather cludgy link to and from Basecamp. It’s better than nothing but I think we all agree it’s not brilliant.

Sharon Dale suggested we look at OKRs which led me to read Christina Wodtke’s book Radical Focus. And that made me think that we’re a bit to concerned with understanding everything that’s happening rather than making sure the really important stuff is prioritised.

How to balance the need to make sure our internal processes work well so customers get what they need, we get more customers and everything works smoothly with the need to actually do work rather than navel gazing..?

What did I do this week that I do every week?

I really got my head down and did some work. For paying clients. It felt good.

What will I do next week?

We’re off to do some Culture Mapping next week. Culture Mapping is a really useful service but it’s made all the more positive from my point of view because it’s really fun to do. We sit down with small groups of public service staff and we ask them about their working days, good and bad. I can’t think of a more enjoyable way to spend a day.

We’re going to be doing a load of development work on our cultural assessment tools, including culture mapping, and we’re looking for organisations that want to work with us on that development. So if you’d like to know more about your organisational culture, contribute to a bit of research and save a bit of cash… give us a shout.