Inside Catalyst, May 13: designing governance and content discovery
Working out ways of working
This week we’ve been energised by our work on team forming and agreeing new ways of working together. We are:
- Designing how the governance of Catalyst will work.
- Planning how to convene the people that lead Catalyst activities so that we can design how we’ll work together in this new phase.
- Work outing the role Catalyst needs Non-Executive Directors to play, and what our own role as Executive Directors should be within the network.
Designing governance
Our new Governance circle is taking its first steps, which is very exciting. It will be co-leading the design of Catalyst, including creating initial working agreements and principles, as well as mapping the network, roles, domains and value flows. It aims to model the culture and practices that will support all in Catalyst to work in a healthy, effective and values aligned way. Current members are Ellie, Jo and Megan as the three Exec Directors, Kate Swade as our Non-Exec Director, and freelance facilitation and governance partners, Jasmine Castledine and Abi Handley. We want to widen and diversify this group as soon as we have some basics in place.
Starting a small content discovery project
We are testing out some of our working descriptions for Catalyst’s new vision and mission. This involves listening to how people respond and what they feel when they hear the words and phrases we are using.
Our research questions are:
- What meaning do people give to the terms that new Catalyst is using?
- Where does meaning align and where does it differ?
- Which terms have the most meaning and which the least?
- Which terms should we explain and which should we replace?
Words and phrases we are testing include:
- Shaping liberatory technology for just and regenerative futures
- Liberatory tech
- Liberation
- Just and regenerative futures
- Social justice
- Centring community needs in design, digital and data decision making through building collective power
- Centring community needs
- Collective power
- Collective liberation
- Digital liberation
- Tech justice
- Field catalysing
- Systemic change
If there’s time we will also test out: human, interconnectedness, adaptive, reciprocity, equity, collectivism, love, curiosity, and communities of action, practice, place, interest, circumstance.
New impact report on the way
Reviewing our interim impact report has also brought us joy. It’s awesome to see so much incredible work and learning, captured ably by our learning partners, inFocus, and presented beautifully by our comms partners, Passion4Social.
Ongoing challenges with setting up our infrastructure
There’s too many things to get done and not enough time in the day. There’s a crunch point at the moment with needing to issue multiple contracts, which takes a lot of time. And the work to decouple our data and tools from CAST continues and is complex. We’re still in the phase of having to set lots of new things up, which swallows up time.
It’s not east trying to work at a sustainable pace and make space for important as well as urgent work.
The nerves of recruiting a new Executive Director
Ellie Hale writes… We want to make sure our Executive Director job description reaches as far as it can, so that we attract really awesome people. Counterproductively, I felt some personal resistance to sharing it. It’s a huge privilege to be able to hire a person with whom you’re going to work intimately on deep, sometimes challenging work, and that can also be quite scary. The role entails a fair bit of uncertainty, and I wasn’t sure how people would respond to that — I felt responsible for not being able to offer more stability and certainty. But we’ve actually had really lovely feedback on it, and of course some people will relish that opportunity precisely because it’s not all pinned down yet!
I had a fab online check-in with some of my fellow attendees of The Hum’s January Collaborative Leadership Retreat. It was helpful to hear how people had experienced the intervening months, and to remember that ups and downs are inevitable. We ran a short ‘clinic’ session and they offered valuable reflections and suggestions to get me un-stuck. When I shared the recruitment post later that afternoon, I tagged all the partners we’re currently working with , and was reminded of the seriously brilliant network of humans we have around us. That’s the kind of motivation I need to keep tapping into when the nerves creep in.
Megan’s chemotherapy update
Megan writes… This week I started chemotherapy again after a 6 week break. It’s a year since I was diagnosed and the time of year (Easter, the change of weather) has triggered a lot of memories of a terrible time. I am thankful that I have such supportive colleagues in the team and the network, meaning that I can still do a job that I find challenging and fulfilling, alongside undergoing treatment and looking after my family.
Mapping stakeholders
Parallel to everything else, we’ve also been mapping Catalyst stakeholders with our Comms team (Passion4Social plus Working With Joe), across axes of power vs interest/engagement. Our aspiration is to bring communities of action, practice, place, interest and circumstance closer to the heart of our work and into the high power, high interest quadrant.
