Weeknote: 25 to 29 March 2019

1. What inspired me this week?

Meeting up with my learning set peers on the NHS Leadership Academy Bevan Programme. Our set facilitator, Caroline, is incredibly skilled at creating the conditions for safe and productive conversations
Extended senior leadership team meeting with Wendy, our inspirational exec director
The NHS.UK team taking a sprint out of their normal work to prototype, test and build a website for X – keeping it user-centred, and putting the NHS.UK Frontend through its paces

2. What connections did I make?

Linking Darren at the NHS BSA with Emma, one of our product heads, to talk NHS Numbers
The first of what I hope will be many chats with Martyn, another new profession lead. We’ll need to work closely over the coming months

3. What caused the cold that wiped me out for a day and a half midweek?

A virus
Leaving my hoodie in the car when out for the day at Newstead Abbey, Lord Byron’s ancestral home
The curse of Lord Byron’s skull cup

(You decide!)

4. What goals were met?

Quite a few year end things wrapping up this week, including work from a supplier team who have been working closely with NHS.UK for the past couple of months. Deliverables delivered and batons passed to our in-house team
The service manual team who have met many of our ambitions set out in the NHS digital, data and technology standards framework, including: accessibility guidance, a content style guide, look and feel and interaction patterns and components, the NHS.UK front-end toolkit and prototyping kit. It’s already helping teams make things better and faster.

5. What do I need to take care of?

There were some conversations I found frustrating at work this week. As designers, we care about consequences. We solve problems in the world as it is. (NHS design principle #2 is “Design for the outcome”.) But I found myself talking at cross-purposes with people who had taken a rules-based approach, for whom considering consequences seemed irrelevant or even illegitimate to their task. Challenge for next week: find a different way to have those conversations.