What do you want to know?

I had a great chat with Hannah yesterday after she guested at a committee meeting. She told me a bit that the Session Leaders would be interested to hear, and honestly it hadn’t particularly occurred to me to share it yet!

It led me to mulling on what I should actively share. A lot of what I do is technically transparent — it’s in documents on Teams, it’s in Salesforce and so on — but what about the bits of information I choose to actively share and promote?

The easy ones are the “need to knows” eg “this decision has happened and it’s going to affect you”.

The harder ones are the bits of information or updates that might motivate, engage or even calm people to hear about. Or even that have no massive purpose, but might spark of a synergy or interesting thought that becomes something bigger. Figuring out what these bits of information are is hard.

So I thought I’d use this weeknote to list a load of things I did this week. I’d like to know what you would like to hear more about (if anything). You can’t ask to know about everything, otherwise your time would go and so would mine! But I am really interested — what is most interesting? Why is it interesting? Is it just interesting having an insight in general or are there particular things?

• Met with a Lambeth councillor to discuss engaging Lambeth schools
• Met with someone from Trust Impact to look at a structural change they would recommend to SF that would be possibly expensive and complex, but would enable us to compare volunteer ratios and link it to outcomes for YPs.
• Tidied up a load of EDI updates for Fiona our trustee and started looking into best practise on action planning.
• Double checked some budgeting assumptions — can the book be cheaper? If volunteer numbers are low do we have enough staff to make groups smaller? And more…
• Met with Learning for Parents, general reconnection but had an interesting conversation about how they built a digital platform. Also learned they have developed a digital reading log. Talked (very) loosely about what it would look like to work together on content or share tech.
• SLT meeting going over budget details and forecasting.
• Ran a committee meeting with our impact specialists — we spoke about lots of things including having enough resource to embed things that have been developed externally (eg Trust Impact) and our testing priorities and how volunteer ratio data is getting more important.
• Met with new link at Haringey council to find out what data they need and how we can go about confirming our delivery for next year. Heard what their priorities are and discussed what parts of that we can meet.

I’d like to end in saying two things. First, I’m excited about the potential for the information sharing group in this area. Where it can give us an organisational steer on how to share and what to share. And secondly, this is why I write weeknotes. It’s good for my processing but it’s another platform that I can share things that have been going on — which I think is an important part of being a leader. So if you ever want a bit more insight…my weeknotes feed can be a clue! And hey, maybe I will start taking requests on what I write about!