CAST Weeknotes (8–12 February) — New moon reflections
After the adrenaline rush from last week, the mood’s been more reflective and a bit subdued in our team this week. Molly thinks it’s something to do with the Chinese New Year (bye bye rat, hello ‘year of the ox’!). Ellie thinks it might have something to do with the new moon. Or it could also just be Covid, lockdown and Zoom life? It could just be something to do with the fact it’s still only 2021!
What have we been reflecting on?
After the buzz of our wrap-up Development session last week, we ran a learning and evaluation retro with all our digital partners who took part in the programme.
The session was run by our learning partner InFocus. InFocus’s work with Catalyst aims to capture all the learnings from the different programmes we’re running at the moment. E.g. what works, doesn’t work? What can be improved for next time?
One thing that stood out from the session is how well partners and charities have collaborated together in such a short space of time. Considering the challenging circumstances and different ways of working, it was impressive to hear how everyone adapted so well and genuinely got on.
It was also great to see Mentimeter in action again, a tool I used to turn to often for in-person workshops (remember those?). I still think it’s the best tool for polls and quizzes. Maybe it’s time to redeploy it to quash all that ‘Zoom and gloom ’— who’s up for a Menti quiz?
What else are we thinking about?
To consent, or to agree, that is the question.
For the past few months we’ve been hard at work practising consent-based decision making in our team (guided by the lovely Pete & Abi from Outlandish). It involves making decisions that build in different perspectives and critical concerns from team members. Here’s the very important nuance: consent does not mean consensus — rather than ask ‘do you agree?, we ask each other ‘do you object?’.
The aim of this approach is to find a proposal that is ‘good enough’ to allow us to swiftly carry on moving forward. It’s really about action rather than discussion. We’ve made some good progress using this approach in our small team. After a less productive experience in a bigger external meeting this week, I’m still unsure how well this approach works in a bigger group — say where mutual trust and relationships aren’t yet fully formed. It requires a lot of patience and practice.
I should add that we’ve done a lot of stuff too this week. Our Asana sprint board is back to looking more like a conveyer belt rather than that elusive funnel! But more on all that frontline action next week…
