The title is optimistic (as in, I have arrived), realistic (I have been introduced to upper management, at work, as the person who runs Design Sprints, where lots of people just talk about Design Thinking a lot) and also hesitant and insecure, because that’s just who I am.
The big news that I’m trying to share: I have now been asked to run a second Design Sprint with all the attention from top management, resources and prep time I need.
I talk about my first Design Sprint whenever I talk about my work. Because I base my job on the results of the first Design Sprint. What I do every day is what people told me needed to be done. I don’t have anyone telling me what to do specifically on a daily basis.
My job is even weirder than that. I recently talked to someone my favourite art gallery and the guy said “we’re all volunteering here - I mean sure, we get our salaries, but we’re working for passion, not money” and that resonated with me. I am outside the normal running of the business. I have a team that I built (on cake and niceness), but they do the work with me on the side of their actual work.
The plan was Change the company, change the town, and with that, the clinic. So that nobody has to die like my Anna, and no relative has to be suffer like I did. And of course so that the wonderful people working there have a functioning organisation.
So after less than half a year in this job I’ve dome so much running around, baking cake and talking to people that I am quite far down that route. The motivation holds, the internal work I am doing is showing results. I can trust my systems. It all works.
I need to maximise on that. Make clear, for example, how a community is different from a team. Luckily Microsoft has resources on that. We still don’t have a platform for storytelling. But all that is the subject of the design sprint as well. Hopefully we’ll get one, and get a nice adoption programme with it.
The people I work with seem to think they just need to work harder individually for things to work properly. I learned that in a conversation on Friday. Over cake, of course. Instant flashbacks to doctors who thought I was criticising them, when I was criticising the lack of digital capability in their organisation. It’ll be nice to get everyone in a room to dissolve this.
I need to get hosting and a website sorted. Thank god for the wayback machine. Because everything I wrote before is now relevant again, and now I actually have an audience.