Good People
I’ve been thinking about how to reboot 1:1 meetings this week. After doing a bit of honest reflection I realised that some of my manager/managee (it’s a word, okay?) relationships have recently been veering gently towards cruise control mode. It’s not always apparent from the inside that things have become too comfortable. Ask the frog in the saucepan. 🐸
Good 1:1 meetings are a manager’s currency and without doubt, if they aren’t working then it’s down to the manager to find a way to fix things. But it takes openness–and a little bit of courage–from both parties to make them truly meaningful. It starts with acknowledging something’s wrong, saying that it’s time to slam on the brakes, and asking “where are we headed, and why?”.
I got the opportunity to have chats with Louise, Aoife and John to get their critical feedback and help move forward the next iteration of our career progression framework.
Israt facilitated a smashing, playful design activity in the interaction designers meetup. We did a lightning critique of a thing that wasn’t made of pixels! And then we each did 10-minute sketches of how we might make quick and basic improvements to it. It was the essence of what’s fun about designing things, all wrapped up in 30 minutes.
Lovely work putting this together Israt, Beth and Chanelle 💪
Good Work
Early-stage plans have been made to form a “skunkworks” team with a mission to overhaul our end-of-project outputs. My theory is that a combination of our continued growth as a company, remote-first working, our new(ish) visual identity and a slew of new folks has meant that some of our outputs have diverged slightly. It’s not necessarily a problem that needs a fix; it’s more of an opportunity to further improve how we tell our stories.
I observed a fab show-and-tell given by our team for a project we’ve been working on with Mind, and later in the week I was given feedback describing how the work “had helped really demonstrate the value of design” 💚
Good Stories
Last week I wrote about how I was excited to fix a puncture on my bike. This week I cautiously removed the wheel, tyre and inner tube, and dunked it in a tub of water looking for the nostalgic stream of bubbles to show me the hole, and… nowt. No puncture. Somehow all the air escaped from my tyre overnight with no obvious escape route. WTF.
On Sunday it was nice enough to sit outdoors in t-shirt and shorts at a country pub and eat lunch. I get the feeling, with the nights drawing in and days getting noticeably shorter, that we won’t get loads more of those days in 2021. The trade-off for that though is the joy of cosy autumn evenings being just around the corner 🍂
Marmite lovers know that they Marmite all the things these days (Marmite houmous? GTFO). But we discovered these little cheese and Marmite pinwheel pastries at M&S and HOLY SHIT they are the BOMB.
