Why leaving a job isn’t leaving the community
I recently left my job in the Australian Government to go and do something that I’ve wanted to do for a while — work in London. This was a really difficult decision to make and not because I was moving to another country. I was going to be leaving a job that I enjoyed. A job that (I felt!) was making a difference to both the culture of service delivery in government as well as the customer experience of our services. How could any new job compare to that?
In the end, the allure of having one month of summer a year was too strong and I moved to London a few weeks ago. One of the last things I did in my role was attend a Service Design in Government conference in Edinburgh. It was a great event. A lineup of speakers who I admired and followed avidly on twitter and blogs, and it was a fantastic opportunity to see the amazing work that is being done across governments around the world. However, as the conference progressed, the ‘what have I done?’ feeling became more and more overwhelming, and it wasn’t until Janet Hughes gave a keynote on the morning of the second day that I had a very late but very obvious realisation.
I didn’t need to be working in government to actively participate in making it better.
Through Janet’s presentation and the rest of the conference sessions, those feelings of doubt slowly turned into confidence that I could still have an impact, it would just be shaped a different way.
So what am I committing to?
- Join any community that will have me…
In the UK, they have a variety of communities that are focussed on better service delivery — OneTeamGov, various service design and agile meetups. I’m going to be looking into these groups and seeing where I can both get value and add value.
2. Share
I’ve been accused of being a bit of an ‘over sharer’ in the past but I’m intending to share everything — process, culture, failures, successes, challenges, ideas, recipes, opportunities etc.
I’m going to approach this in the same way that my local trash ’n’ treasure works - experiences or learnings that may seem trivial in the context of my work could be a gold mine for somebody else in the context of what they do. This has definitely been true for me when listening and learning from others.
This sharing may take the form of presentations, guest blog posts on here, tweets… but all of it will have the intent of making sure I am generous with my knowledge.
3. Lend my privilege
Last year I watched an amazing video about the concept of ‘lending privilege’ and it prompted me to reflect on how other people have lent their privilege to me so I could learn or experience different things which I otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance. I’m going to be paying this forward.
I’m super excited to be doing something different but also know that as a citizen impacted by government, I still need to be ensuring that public services are the best they can be. So if you’re like me, and have also recently left working in government or about to, have a think about how you could make an impact or share some of the ways that you are already doing it!
