Oh hi! It’s been a minute – in fact, three and a half months – since my last weeknote. That was not intentional.
Why the radio silence? Well, some pretty big stuff has been happening; both personally and professionally. Lots has changed. It didn’t feel right, at the time, to talk about that in a weeknote. Now it feels a bit safer to do so.
The one consistent thing in the past three months is that things keep changing. When they have changed, they have changed at break-neck speed.
In most cases, I knew a change was coming my way. But change is a process. You are never quite ready for it and you have to live with it to know how you feel. The change has also been, in some areas, different than I anticipated which has made life interesting.
I haven’t really figured out how I feel about a lot of it yet and I don’t completely know what it means for me.
New roomie
The most important thing that has happened is that I have moved in with my partner, Matt. Or, rather, he has moved in with me.
The first few weeks were filled with deconstructing furniture, reconstructing furniture, unpacking boxes, rearranging cupboards to make space for things that I didn’t know he had, getting old things taken away to be recycled or donated, painting and decorating, and more besides!
The house is still not completely righted yet; most of that practical stuff is over now though. He lives here. That’s a big change but it feels quite natural.
We are yet to argue over why the dishwasher was incorrectly stacked, or who is going to take out the bins. So that’s also a win!
New job
There have also been seismic changes at work. Chief among them for me; I’ve got a new job. I am now the Chief Executive for the Office for Digital Identities and Attributes (OfDIA). The promotion is officially only temporary for now; but it’s a step forward in my career nonetheless.
This temporary promotion has happened as a result of some wider policy changes connected to the work of my team. What we are doing remains the same – to implement the digital verification services measures in Part 2 of the Data (Use and Access) Act – but we are having to adapt in the context of the recent announcements.
So there’s been a big change for me and also big shift for the team as a whole.
I have been reflecting a lot on how each of us individually copes with change in that context. For a few different reasons.
I am now accountable for leading this team through this change. I don’t have the luxury of tagging onto others’ coat tails as they lead me through it. But at the same time, I am also experiencing the change personally. Perhaps even more than most; I’m one of the few people that has a different job to the one I had 3 months ago. I have to go through my own change journey in parallel.
Part of being a good civil servant is being able to adapt and respond to the events of the day; but that doesn’t mean that adaptation is easy. You kind of go through the five stages of grief with it. First it’s a shock. Then you work your way through to accepting it’s happened and get moving with the new work.
In this case it’s even weirder. Whilst many column inches have been spilled on recent announcements, and our team has bourne the brunt of work generated by it, I don’t actually think much has changed about what we will be doing long-term. It’s almost a phantom change with phantom grief!
On top of all the big picture changes the team is dealing with, they also have to deal with me. The person normally doing my job – Hannah – is perhaps the most impressive person I have ever worked for. She exudes the values of the Civil Service. She demonstrates professionalism, poise, openness and expertise in everything she does and has done in this team. This team exists and its culture persists because of her extraordinary leadership. Her shoes are not easy to fill. My steering of this team will inevitably be different, in ways that both I and the whole team are finding out together. I am balancing how to lean into what makes me unique and good as a leader, whilst also not departing too much from the ways the team are accustomed to doing things.
There is a skill – some might call it “resilience” – in being able to let go of your attachment to what is so that you can start to deliver what will now be. The transition is often difficult. I hope that I, and others, get through that swiftly but also that we can lead others through it too.
New developments
Among all of that, this team has kept on delivering.
This week, we’ve announced that the first conformity assessment body certifying products using our certification scheme has been accredited by the UK Accreditation Service. It is difficult to overstate how important this milestone is to the development of a trusted ecosystem.
Certification underpins so much of our daily lives and we don’t even realise it. The eggs we eat. The seat belts in our cars. The devices in our pockets. They are all safe because they are tested. I can now say that I’ve led a team to develop a conformity assessment process, aligned to international standards, and that has been independently assessed as working effectively. Not many people can say that! (I do realise this sounds incredibly niche and nerdy. It matters to me, even if it makes no sense to you and that’s ok).
Last week, we deployed a huge number of improvements to our GOV.UK digital service. I’m particularly pleased with these changes because I was allowed to get my hands dirty and did some early prototyping of the designs myself. Some of those concepts have survived the cut-throat world of user research and they’re now in the service! Generally though the changes are a leap beyond what was there before; the team has done a cracking job.
We are also cruising our way towards a number of other milestones at speed. I’ll share more on that once we’ve stuck the landing.