Football — notes

Sam McLaren
Digital Dorset
Published in
4 min readJul 9, 2021

As part of my #weeknotechallenge I have decided to challenge myself to doing a different style of weeknotes every week.

I have finally reached the ripe old age of weeknote #24

The other weeknotes in the challenge are linked below:

‘Traditional’ Weeknotes , Gif-Notes , Sketch-Notes, Shanty-Notes, Week-quotes, Animal Crossing — Notes , Poster — Notes, Haiku — notes, Achievement — notes, Hanami — notes, Meme — notes, Retro — notes, Comic — notes, Story — notes, Slang — notes, Tweet — notes, Blog — notes, Hansai — notes,Show & Tell — notes, Taskmaster — notes, Lyrical — notes, Rap — notes, Wellbeing — notes

This week i am basing my weeknotes around Football. Its coming home — notes doesn’t have the same ring to it!

Getting Warmed up:

One thing i did this week was some mapping for a piece of work on the council’s governance processes. This is normally a pretty simple thing to do and involved collaborating and speaking to people to gather their experiences and knowledge.

This session was with my Executive Director which made it slightly daunting as the don’t often perform design activities at this level. Thankfully my concerns quickly disappeared, and it was great, lots of insight and conversation but the enthusiasm for what we do in the team really pumped me up on what was an otherwise a very down day.

Anyone have any Orange Slices?

Thursday became the one thing people hate about virtual working. All day meetings! At the end of the day it felt like there was too much of extra time added on. Everything blurred into one and i felt like i hadn’t achieved anything significant since 1966. Other than being ‘present’ in various meetings. I think moving forward I’m going to try and block out more time so i prevent back to back from happening.

I also am nearly halfway with the challenge i set out for my weeknotes,1 full year of different types/themes of weeknotes. Let’s hope i can keep this up and also balance out some of the more high concept ones like Sketching and rapping with the lower ones!

WWGD

What would Gareth do:

I know it has become the new thing to talk about Gareth’s leadership but it’s a good way to get people to engage. He hires people who are full of new ideas and fresh thinking. Instead of surrounding with ‘yes people’.

This week we had a full service session talking about behaviours and ‘challenging conversations’ using methods like BIFF. I have learnt about this before and on a leadership course and have since put it into practice.

One thing that was spoken about was giving feedback. Constructive feedback is something i struggle with because if everyone is saying something is inspirational and amazing you don’t want to be the one person talking about how things can be improved!

And this time it wasn’t even about the slides!

Passing the ball

One aspect this week have been about supporting other players and passing to them. Look I’m not Stirling i know how to pass the ball…

With the festival looming ever closer there are lot of conversations that need to happen and actions to tick off, we have been passing these around and sharing the load because this will get things done quicker and then it’s not all on one person’s shoulders. You don’t have the be the striker to set up a goal.

We have also had a few new starters in the team and the service. So i have had some meetings supporting them joining virtually. It made me reflect when i started at the council over 5 years ago (god I’m old now) and how different my experience would have been if i started virtually. You miss all the atmosphere and culture changes about joining a large organisation when its all behind a screen. This is an area that i think has been neglected when thinking about how YOU want to work in future and not how it affects others like new starters.

Here is an interesting thread on this: https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/is-it-selfish-to-work-from-home-5482218/

Full time:

Think that’s it for me this week. I’m going to go back to the locker room to collect my very overpaid cheque.

Sam out!

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Sam McLaren
Digital Dorset

Working to promote Dorset as a place to live, work, and visit. DL100 member. Inspiringthefuture volunteer. TED Speaker #SamsBrightIdeas