A 3-day working week following a long weekend exploring 19th and 20th Century art and architecture in Surrey and Sussex. Highlights for me included Watts Gallery and Charleston.
What was hard?
The churn of organisation change is already starting to make it harder to make progress on some of our work, especially where we need to collaborate with teams in other NHS England directorates. I am determined to keep up the momentum on the work we have in progress – things that we know will make a difference to patients and services in the short term. But understandably some teams are a bit lost at sea, and reluctant to commit until they know what their new structures look like. I’m trying to strike the balance between pushing for continued progress while maintaining empathy for the people involved and the clarity they have lost.
In my own part of the organisation, I struggled to get colleagues who are working on parallel but complementary initiatives to collaborate at pace on a shared narrative which I think would really help to fill a void. By Thursday, I had separate contributions from each team, but not the single integrated document I had hoped for. That’s on me for not being clear enough about my expectations. Hopefully I’ll do better at that next week.
What did I enjoy?
On Thursday evening, I got along to a Leeds Digital Health event, ‘AI in Healthcare: Innovation, Impact, and the Future‘. I enjoyed hearing from experts who are already making use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in West Yorkshire-based health and research institutions. In the breaks, I enjoyed chatting with some attendees who were at the start of their careers in digital health about their hopes for the future. That made me hopeful that whatever the institutional changes around us, there will be people doing good, cutting edge work in the city for many years to come.
On Friday morning, I cycled to work for the first time in ages. My diary was clear. The office was quiet and spacious. Behind my desk is a big whiteboard wall, one side of which is filled with references about my team’s objectives and the standards we’re here to support according to the NHS Constitution. But the other side of that whiteboard wall, facing into a breakout area, that was blank. To get to the narrative I knew I needed, I went large, mapping out a structure with a marker pen and looking for themes that had eluded me when I sat squinting at a Word document on screen. It’s not done yet, but the change of mode definitely helped me get unstuck in my own mind.
What do I need to take care of?
Somewhere in all this – between the tepid bath of short termist repeating the things we’ve always done, and the ceiling we can’t see for the cloud of vapourware in which unproven AI and imaginary enterprise architectures magically solve all our problems – there’s a space of pragmatic ambition. In that near future, we re-combine the assets we already have, and the ones that are emerging as we speak, to co-design a radically different patient and staff experience. That’s where I am desperate to be working right now, and where I know my team has much to contribute. I feel another blog post coming on.
Matt Edgar writes here 
Did you make it to the Charleston in Lewes too? We went there at the start of the month, it was great. Need to get back on my bike to head to the one in East Firle!
We only visited the house at East Firle, had a lovely afternoon wandering the streets of Lewes. Never been to that part of the world before. Would definitely go back for more