Weeknote #27 — Smallfoot

What a week. Last weekend was largely full of family time and sporting events, with the Ashlyns festival on Saturday and a ruinous 100km bike ride followed by the World Cup final on Sunday, leaving little time for anything else. I had predicted that it was going to be a full-on week, and so it proved.

The bike ride completely zonked me out. Once you’ve been on longer rides of 100 miles plus it feels like a bit of a waste to go out for a short one (although I’m sure that’s not actually true health-wise). By chance I met up with a couple of local cycling friends at the festival and soon we were plotting to get out early on the bikes the next day, with me as usual egging everyone on for a longer distance. When we pushed off at 8:30am it was pretty warm and a couple of hours later the sun was brutal, beating us down with every turn of the pedals. It was one of those rides that left me feeling that no matter what I did, I just couldn’t quench my thirst for the rest of the day, despite having downed four water bottles’ worth of liquid on the ride itself.

Monday was largely spent prepping for the rest of the week. I had an early morning videoconference with everyone in the Hong Kong office to kick off our software rollout and then turned my attention to getting ready for all-day architecture and delivery planning workshops from Tuesday to Thursday.

The workshops went so well. Things that struck me during the week:

• There is still absolutely no substitute for business travel. Being together in a room, particularly when you are not all aligned at the start of the work, is such a rich experience. If we had tried to do this over videoconference or any other medium I am doubtful that we would ever have got to where we needed to be.
• Having said that, you are so vulnerable when you travel. The inbound team were diverted to Marseille due to a techical fault and were stuck there for 10 hours or so before being flown on to Heathrow[^1]. As they were finally coming in to land in London they were told by the staff that their luggage was still stuck in France. Not great for getting your head focused on the work in the coming week.
• Say the thing, and then say it again. And again. It is only when you see the ‘lightbulb moment’ on someone’s face that you realise how misaligned you had been and why the conversations have been so tricky up to that point. We had one of these moments late on the first day and you could almost hear the pieces clicking into place.
• A well-drawn diagram on a whiteboard is worth a thousand words. Don’t just explain the thing, look at it together. I now have a collection of whiteboard photos from the week; our scrawling would have made a great time-lapse video.
• Nobody has told me that our goals — or the way in which we will be going about them — are crazy, and we’ve shopped them around to quite a few people now. Confidence is building.
• Having said that, I am guilty of ‘wishful thinking’ in our overall timeline and didn’t leave enough of a gap for reviews and consultation along the way for the work we are doing right now. I don’t think I would ever have factored in the amount of time that it is taking even if I had been extra conservative.
• A few people in a room for a few days can get through a lot of coffee, tea, water and biscuits.

On Friday I had to run another smaller workshop on a different topic entirely. Same room, different people, with a few joining us via videoconference. This one fascinated me as I floated a point of principle at the start and asked whether everyone agreed with it — the conversation drifted five or six times over the course of half an hour before we were finally all in agreement. The rest of the conversation would have been built on sand if we hadn’t established this principle up front. The meeting generated a few actions but we aren’t able to change the bigger picture and system flows within the organisation. At least everyone there should now have a common understanding of where the problems are and the issues we need to manage in the short term.

We now only have one office left on our software rollout journey. Concerns about how good the network is in-country and how well the solution will perform once we go live are holding us back, although we met on Friday to agree a number of actions to push this forward. We really need to get this over the line so that we can fully focus on the larger piece of work that we have been discussing in our workshops all of this week. As we approach the end of the rollout I have had to be conscious of ensuring that this remains a ‘first class’ piece of work on the programme and has our attention despite the more fundamental changes that will follow; for the staff getting the new software it is a major upgrade and we need to ensure that we make it as smooth for them as possible.

At the end of last week I bought myself a couple of pairs of new work shoes, as mine reached the end of the line a while ago and had been looking pretty scruffy. I’d previously invested in a pair of Loakes, and although they were expensive I had been really happy with them so I figured I would go for the same again. Customer service at their shop was excellent, although within a few minutes I felt like a child for never having owned a pair of shoe trees and being told that my shoes were way too big. I have been buying size 11 since I was in my late teens but the salesman told me that I was actually a 9½, which is why my current pair had developed unsightly folds and creases. “When you came into the shop I could immediately see that your shoes were too big.” How embarrassing. I tried on a size 10 and then he pushed me to go smaller as there was still too much room. Apparently. Size 9 seemed a little snug but he told me he was happy with them and a few minutes later I was on my way with two pairs. Plus shoe trees, like a gentleman.

By Tuesday afternoon I was hobbling about, almost in tears. Blisters on both little toes and an ache in the knuckle of my left big toe had left me with a limp. I’d tried both pairs over two days and found that they were just as bad as each other. I’d gone from feeling like a child in the shop to feeling like an idiot outside of it, albeit an idiot in very shiny new shoes.

I took them back on Wednesday. Of course they wouldn’t accept them as the soles were now worn, but I wanted to make the point that they had left me crippled as well as to plead with them to do something — anything — to help. They agreed to take them back for a long visit on the in-house shoe stretcher, so I won’t see them again for a couple of weeks. Amusingly, the manager said something along the lines of “We tell our customers to wear them for 3–4 hours a day, and never to and from the office.” How can that be right for a pair of shoes that supposedly fit? Does everyone go through this and I’ve just missed out over the years? If this is part of being a grown-up I think I was happier being a kid. In all seriousness, I have a newfound respect for people with chronic pain — throbbing feet meant that it was so much more difficult to concentrate at work and I am so lucky that I could just remove the shoes and go back to my old ones.

School governing saw the usual mad scramble as we approached the end of term. My wife is a teaching assistant in another local school and this week we found ourselves having to juggle her commitments to end-of-term events on top of our own, a particularly difficult job as our eldest was leaving primary school forever and had a bunch of special events of his own to go to.

Over the past couple of weeks I had been collaborating with fellow governors on our annual newsletter and it was now up to me to drag it over the line. Every night after dinner I had edged it forward a little bit more until it was time to go to bed, and late on Wednesday evening after a bit of last-minute trimming I finally got it submitted for publication. Although I’m not off work for six weeks, the school summer holiday is a welcome reprieve from the pressure of keeping up-to-date with another set of actions before we start again in September.

Our school has had a wonderful set of results this year and I could not be more pleased for the children, and the staff that have helped to grow and support them. It’s such a privilege to be involved; the staff work so hard, and all the changes that our Headteacher has put in place over the past four years or so are really bearing fruit.

My eldest boy won a special end-of-school award for outstanding achievement in his class, giving us yet another reason to be proud of him. I really hope he starts secondary school in September in the same way that he finished primary and makes great friends. The school seem well-equipped to welcome him and his peers in a couple of months and I’m hoping that he’ll love it there.

On top of everything else my youngest boy turned nine. I distinctly remember sitting in my car all those years ago after a traumatic day at the hospital, tucking into a very late dinner from the only place I could think of.

I then got back to my house to find my in-laws had left the windows open and lights on, a terrible summer night combination.

It honestly feels like yesterday. Life is so short.

By Friday night I was so worn out I ended up going to bed the same time as the kids. I always know when I’m completely overtired as I find no joy in anything — TV, reading, writing, music — and have to admit defeat. I’m glad I did as we had an epic Saturday at the Silverstone Classic ahead of us, our fourth annual visit in a row and a lovely time spent with my boys, my dad and friends.

Next week: Out of workshops and back at the desk. Time to consolidate the conversations, turn them into action and keep the momentum going. I also need to catch up with a lot of email and make sure that any hot potatoes lurking in my inbox get dealt with before they overcook. And on Friday — it’s Kelis time.