Week 2 – 12 September

Gosh, Monday feels like a long time ago. I’m currently in that position of false certainty where you recognise the acronyms, start hearing the same idea articulated by someone else, understand the key facts around major projects and remember some people’s names. And that’s just enough to know when you think you can make a valuable contribution to a discussion. It’s just not enough to know whether that’s already been considered, and so you sound like a bore; will land really badly, so you sound like a drunk or is just wildly optimistic, so you sound like a child.

With that in mind, on Monday I decided to move to the narrow point of the double diamond by the end of the week. We’re at the precipice of some pretty big projects: completing our laptop rollout, going to market for replatforming our case management system and testing a smarter way of doing redaction. I’m keen to play my part in making these a success. I know the first thing I deliver will have symbolism so want to make a good choice, but I can see five different opportunities. Thanks to a conversation with Gemma, I decided to capture the thinking in a show & tell format and run it past the senior team. I called it a ‘playback and feedback’ session because I want to set a clear expectation of working in the open but really don’t want to get hung-up on Agile language.

I’ve had a small number of really thoughtful, constructive reactions to the presentation.    As usual, there isn’t one right answer.   

There were three conversations that I found particularly energising. I met Steve, our CFO. He’s relatively new to the CPS and responsible for making sure we’ve got a set of rigorous but proportionate controls in place. More importantly, he’s an absolute role-model for how to synthesise the personal and professional in a conversation with staff.

Moira and I spent an hour together talking about the design of the Future Casework Tools tender (it was meant to be half an hour, but we were finding it too interesting). There is no choice that is without risk, so I was trying to put myself in the position of someone bidding for the work in order to understand how we might structure it to play to different suppliers’ strengths.

I also enjoyed meeting Russell’s Modern Workplace team. Darryn asked a great question about what was on my bucketlist, which was an extremely effective way of getting me to talk imaginatively about some of the things we could do. I talked too much with too little knowledge, but left feeling really positive. (I just hope it didn’t entirely miss the mark for the audience!!)

And for the second week running there were no major operational incidents. It’s easy to take that for granted, so I’m reminding myself how privileged it is to be in that position. And how much work we need to do to ensure we stay in that position.

Next week my diary is dominated by the two-day Senior Leaders Conference in East Midlands. It’s a great opportunity to meet a lot of new people (without Teams to help me remember names) and gain a much richer understanding of their world and how we can help. I’m on course to run 30 miles this week so need to find a decent running route around ‘East Midlands’ to keep the pace next week.