Weeknotes 5 of 2023

In BC we just finished up a two-week spring break for school-aged children, and last week I found out very last minute that my 3-year-old also had a week off. So I made a spur of the moment decision book a few days off to take my kids on a trip to see their cousins and Nana. We visited a ski hill and hurdled down an icy slope in an innertube at what felt like warp speed and I managed to get both kids trying skiing (one very reluctantly, the other eagerly) —all in all, it was a fun break but the absolute opposite of restful.

What’s gone well:

• I hosted a BC Gov Design Community call with a guest speaker, Emma Parnell. It went really well and we had so much conversation and positive feedback.
• I’ve compiled and have started sharing some research I did on our organization design maturity (spoilter alert: there are lots of gaps that need addressing.) The feedback from designers is overwhelmingly positive (“I feel so seen” is something I’ve been hearing a lot.) So I’m grateful and excited to have insights and data I can start to leverage for change.
• I’m working on a systems map for the developer/technical ecosystem in the BC gov. It’s going well. When I have the chance to properly focus on it, it’s the kind of work that makes time go by quickly.

What’s been hard:

• Context switching. Between meetings, design community priorities and my already busy personal life, I find it difficult to find the focus time I need for the systems mapping and other work.
• Last weeknote, I mentioned that I felt some urgency around the lack of research and design training, so much so that I started thinking I would carve time in my already hectic schedule to repurpose some previous training materials I worked on to create a course. So I pitched the idea to some colleagues to who run the training hub in our org and the response was … well I don’t know what it was. Not as enthusiastic as I had expected, I guess. Training is something we need, something I’ve been asked for, so I assumed it would be an excited “yes, when can you start?!” I can totally understand the need to be strategic and not reactive to every idea but also I wonder about the people who are missing out on what they need while execs take months to figure out the strategy. So I’m playing with the idea of offering this under the umbrella of the design community, or even running something externally (a potential side hustle one day!?)
• I still haven’t found time to get the blogs posts I want to write out of my head, but I did start on one — just waiting for feedback on it.
• I’ve been doing— or trying to do — my taxes 😭 and even when it’s simple it’s just never simple is it? it also just infuriates me that I even have to do them when the government could just do them for me like the HMRC in the UK does.

What’s inspired me:

• Setting priorities: my experience facilitating leaders to do this from Heather-Lynn Remacle
• More great blog posts in Unbounded affairs from Marlieke Kieboom
• Design is political by Jane Reid.
• An old but good post I re-discovered thanks to the Public Digital newsletter: Setting up a discovery by Will Myddleton.
• a former colleague launched TaxGPT which I think is brilliant and awesome. It’s sparked a bit of understandable debate on twitter but I appreciate what Paul says about it: “TaxGPT isn’t perfect, but it’s better than avoiding the subject entirely, and there’s no perverse incentive here. It’s something you can use from your home, and you can use for free, and it doesn’t try to profit from people’s confusion.” (which is more than I think anyone can say for the current tax system in Canada.)

Reading, watching, listening

• I finished Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng and it was a really beautiful and powerful read. The big theme of the book is anti-asian racism, and I keep thinking of the first line in the acknowledgements: “This world isn’t quite our world, but it isn’t not our world either.”
• I finished The Last Of Us (the final episode is so thought provoking) and I’m now catching up on Ted Lasso — I’m loving this new season.
• Something Was Wrong recently told the story of an influencer who became the victim of an unbelievable amount of harassment, online and then in person. It was really shocking and interesting to hear about how much power internet strangers have to ruin someone’s life.