Weeknote: 4 to 8 March 2024

Back from a week-and-a-bit of leave and barely a moment since to pause and reflect. Times like this make #weeknotes extra valuable.

What was hard?

Cognitive dissonance: the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it

On one hand, digitally-informed transformation of our national health service has everything to play for: a big announcement in the budget, and continued sky high expectations for a cross-cutting piece of work I have worked hard to get off the ground and keep aloft.

On the other hand, the lived experience of my colleagues is a daily struggle to inch forward the changes our service needs. Getting the simplest things done consumes far more management attention than is reasonable.

It has been this way for a long time now, and holding two contradictory assessments of our prospects stifles the level of ambition that leaders and teams feel safe to show.

What did I learn?

I was invited at short notice and with little context to a meeting at which the status being discussed seemed very distant from the reality that my team had reported.

I reflected that I need to spend more time explaining how the organisation’s general situation is impacting my team specifically. We’re no different than other teams in carrying a high number of vacancies, but the aggregate reporting obscures the nuance of what we are asking our people to sustain, and the particular capability gaps that urgently need to be filled. To turn this round, we need understanding and support from other functional areas. It’s the job of my leadership team and me to be clear and specific about that. Now that we’ve escalated the level of the issue, we need to be communicating about it every working day.

What did I enjoy?

I read through a draft document that my team have contributed to alongside colleagues who look after the 111 service in England. The strategy-making and drafting has been highly collaborative, and the result is a good document that I hope will be a foundation for future roadmaps and initiatives.

In the coming years, voice telephony and digital services will converge at the patient experience level, and there is so much potential for shared learning and experimentation between the domains.

What expectations did I set?

My objectives for the new financial year are starting to come to life, one conversation at a time. It’s been a few weeks now since I shared them with my leadership team, who challenged and helped to refine the wording. I try to use an OKR framework, more in spirit than true to the letter of the method. Having the key results printed on the wall behind me makes it easy to bring them into conversations with colleagues.

On Friday, I was talking with a senior leader from the data and analytics function, so I showed him the wall. He asked some good questions about the likely sources and flows of data to measure the OKRs, which will help me to refine them further.

Just before a catch-up with my line manager Helen, I checked in on the feedback my colleagues have given me through a “continue/stop/start” survey. There’s a signal from both my peers and team members that I need to invest more time in making our strategy clearer, and to look upwards and outwards more. I used this insight to refine a couple of my objectives.

Helen gave me some more feedback to ponder. Next time we talk, I’ll have more thoughts on the complementary roles of leap of faith assumptions and risk management, and how we bring both to bear credibly in a complex, literally life and death service.