Hello, I’m back! I had a delightful holiday last week. It started off in Birmingham at the British Open Brass Band Championships where we came second and qualified for the European Championships in Linz in 2026. This is a big deal in banding terms, and we are very very happy about it.
Gloucestershire brass band to represent England in European event — BBC News
I also took a short trip to the Netherlands to see my younger sibling and we spent some time exploring Amsterdam, Leiden and the Hague. What a gorgeous country!
Onto this week. Back to reality with a few bumps along the way…
The good
- This was my first week working with Chris, our new Head of Delivery. So far, so fantastic. We’re finding out how we like to work together, and we’re already able to speak frankly and hold space for disagreement and compromise between product and delivery.
- Denise also joined our team as a content designer, and is getting her sleeves rolled up and stuck in straight away.
- I’ve had three different people reach out to me this week to talk about blogging. After a few fallow years when many writers (including myself) went a bit quiet, I’m encouraged to see the recent uptick in working in the open and I’m here to encourage everyone who wants to to try it.
- I had a chat with some of the team about a draft roadmap. We strayed down a few conversational rabbit holes but in this circumstance that was ok — it all helped me to understand the bits I’d misinterpreted, forgotten or otherwise needed to be clearer about.
- I helped out with some staff engagement panels, which is one of the required steps in an SCS (senior civil service) recruitment campaign. I find these fascinating to hear how candidates at this level think and the questions that they ask.
- I’ve started an application for the Civil Service Future Leaders Scheme and booked a chat with a colleague who’s previously participated to understand their experience.
The bad
- This week I hit the ‘valley of despair’ on the Dunning-Kruger curve. That is, this week it dawned on me how steep the challenge of this new role is. Luckily I’m surrounded by great people and I’ve been brought up with a strong learning mindset so I know it will get better, but goodness gracious this week has been tough.
- Some of our work has been moving at lightning pace. There have been conversations happening every half hour or hour and we’ve had to stay nimble and lightly coordinated through check-ins and Slack messages. I’ve just spent the last hour of my Friday brain dumping into a document while everything is fresh in my mind, because I don’t trust myself to remember everything that happened on Monday.
- I was supposed to be hosting a new team member at the office on Thursday, and while I made it into the building I barely saw them because I kept being pulled into meetings. Something I say regularly and very much try to keep true to is that people come first: I cannot achieve anything without the team, so if they need me or they’re struggling I try to prioritise time with them. I wasn’t able to do that on Thursday and it’s grating on me that my actions couldn’t match my words.
- I’m feeling the SDinGov FOMO, but given the new job it would have been poor timing to leave the team for half a week. I’m hoping to see some blog posts pop up soon…
