🌹🌱🌵; July — Aug 2020

“You can either abandon everything OR realize that you are only one meal away from being back on track” — Robb Wolf

I’m feeling: ⭐️ Inspired
It’s been over a solid month since I last wrote and I suppose I treated these a bit like I used to treat food; as soon as I made one slip up, I’d almost completely give up. So here’s me trying to get back on track. In this post, instead of reflecting on the last week, I’ll recap the last month.

🌹Roses:

🤗 Some things that went well last month: A feeling of progress

I have been reflecting a lot on what I mean when I say I want to work in “culture consulting” and considering how I’d like to position myself. I’m still not sold on the term and am in search of a better alternative.

Ultimately though, if I distil it down, what I am interested in is working with organisations to foster a sense of belonging, meaning, and wellbeing amongst employees at work and I have a hypothesis that Design Thinking and Agile methodologies can be applied to design the employee/people experience.

After speaking with people in this area of work, the skills I discovered the need for this kind of work are strong facilitation, communication, stakeholder engagement, and organisational psychology/change skills. What I then came to realise, when comparing these to the skills I’m expected to have in my current role, was that there is an opportunity gap specifically in growing the organisational psychology/change skills.

This led me to look into options for further study. I ended up applying for a Masters of Organisational Psychology at City University of London. After speaking to the programme director there, it felt like a great fit and something that would compliment my current knowledge and experience. I spent a solid weekend writing my personal statement (it’s here if you’re interested) and ended up having an interview on Monday. So keep your fingers and toes crossed for me! 🤞

💌 Some things I’m grateful for: Opportunities to contribute

In about December last year, I said to Sean, that I would like to equally be able to support him with his goals in the way he supports me in mine. Long story short, this led to me facilitating a session with him and applying some of my UX interviewing skills, to help him uncover his own career goals, and how I might support him in achieving them. We ended up having about 3 sessions for this which included some customer experience mapping of his journey so far, repurposing The Walnut Model to understand the purpose, vision, responsibilities and activities of his current well, and a “hats” activity where we reviewed Sean’s achievements, learnings, growth areas and desired perceptions for a couple of the roles Sean undertakes. It’s been a really enjoyable experience to help the person who helped me to uncover my goals, to uncover theirs.

Another thing I was grateful for recently was having the opportunity to participate and share my views at the last Moments with Unleashed about how UX & Design Thinking practices can be leveraged by people teams to drive engagement and design for the employee experience. One of the things I’m enjoying most about this journey I’m on is feeling more and more a part of a community of people who are aligned with my beliefs and values, and who challenge my thinking.

😮 Something that happened I wasn’t expecting: An opportunity to try using the culture map

Our team had been feeling quite a bit of pressure in the past few months and after it was raised again in a retrospective I suggested we hold a session on it. A framework I’ve used in the past for a similar topic, in a previous role, is The Culture Map. I thought this tool could be useful in the situation so I leveraged the framework to design a workshop to help us understand and manage the pressure. In a Gaping Void webinar, I’d heard the speaker talking about how mindsets actually inform behaviours, and how beliefs inform mindsets. Pairing these together, I flipped The Culture Map on its head and asked everyone to share:

Triggers (in place of ‘Enablers/Blockers’): What situations/actions/words/behaviours had triggered them to feel pressure on the project?

Thoughts/feelings (added): What thoughts and feelings did the triggers generate for them?

Behaviours: What behaviours did the trigger, thought or feeling lead to?

Impact (in place of ‘Outcomes’): How did these things impact them, the work they were doing, and/or the project?

We then tried to identify themes, look at whether we could remove, reduce or respond to the trigger and then make some actions for each. The main benefit of this workshop, members of the team told me later, was that it helped them to become aware of how everyone else was feeling. If I were to run this again, I would remove the ‘remove, reduce, or respond’ part of the workshop as it was the least understood and didn’t add much value.

🌱 Buds:

🌄 Something that I’m excited about/looking forward to: The future

It feels like the wheels are in motion. It was almost a year ago that Sean and I had a discussion about my future career goals that started me on a journey to trying to clearly articulate them. It took me some time to explain what kind of work I was looking to do, then research roles in that space and understand the industry more. Now that I’ve actively been trying to become a part of the communities that exist, things seem to be picking up and I actually feel like I’m not just talking about my goals anymore, but actually doing something in order to achieve them.

💡 An idea not yet fully formed:

I really enjoyed an Ideo U Creative Confidence podcast where Laszlo Block talks about the concept of nudge theory and how it can be used to cultivate better workplace culture.

I’d like to understand in more depth how to apply this theory without the need for a tool (despite it looking interesting).

📚 Something I’ve learned: Facilitation skills are key

In my last post, I wrote about how I’ve been reaching out to leaders in the People and Culture space to understand more about the industry and what skills are most important. Of all them, having strong facilitation skills was mentioned the most and as being important amongst all of the people I’ve spoken to. This is a positive as I thoroughly enjoy facilitating and feel quite confident in my ability to do so, it’s just a matter of practice.

🌵Thorns:

😟 Something I’m worried about: not much

I actually don’t have much here — I’m feeling generally positive about life. It looks like I’ll be flying home to Brisbane for 3 months from Oct-Jan which will give me some time to rest, reflect and spend some time with family.

🤔 Something I’m struggling/struggled with: UX portfolio vs EX/PX portfolio

This is a small thing, and once I actually get started on it I don’t think it’ll actually be all that much of an issue… but I took down my UX Portfolio website. It was a hard thing to do after having spent so much time and energy into it a few years ago. I’m not yet quite sure how to structure my “new” website. All I know is that I want to change my positioning to be aligned with where I want to go, incorporate case studies of any relevant knowledge and experience I have and have a strong story and representation of who I am as a person.

🤦‍♀ Something that didn’t go how I planned:

Weeknotes — now month notes? :P

🎹 What I was listening to while writing this:

I’ve been listening to Eskimotion on repeat lately, but especially love this song