Weeknotes SE02E06
I said last week was busy, well, this week raised it up more than a little!
It’s going to be a different format again this week. I did some personal learning and made some mistakes, and so I want to just reflect on those. I’m positive Jordan’s weeknotes are going to be full of all the wonderful things we did as a team. And we really did do wonderful things. I reflected to a friend joining the department that it feels like a lot, but we’re all rowing our boats in the same direction. And that’s what you should know about our week, and all we did. It is very rare I think, and that’s worth celebrating.
For me, weeknotes are about transparency, but the act of doing them is also a personal weekly retro of sorts. I don’t expect many readers, maybe some people interested in user research at DAWE, and maybe some people interested in what the day to day of setting up ReOps looks like. I reckon Jordan is going to do a great job of celebrating all the things, so I’m just going to be selfish this week, and do some navel gazing on the nature of research operations and leadership, what it means to be a leader in operational spaces.
What did I learn?
It’s entirely fair to say I knew this already, but sometimes you have to relearn what you know. And so it was this week. Research operations isn’t just being organised, as we know, it also very specifically requires leadership. As an operations leader, when you fail to lead and start to manage, it is really easy to fall into the worst trap of all — doing everything for everyone. I know this lesson so much, I even wrote about it back in 2019! Ahh well, life is a winding and bumpy road, hey, friends?
Ops people, the helpers
I remember back in 2019, Steve Portigal gave an opening address at Design Research Australia. So much of what he said was peppered with all the things of Ops. I remember he said that Ops people are helpers, through and through. And it’s true. Every person I meet who does Ops is a helper. By that I mean, they find it hard to say no — they see each and every person’s needs in their own context, and do their very best to meet that need. Researchers are our users, as Holly Cole likes to say. We’re trained to see the unmet need, and want to meet it.
The tricky part about being a helping kind of person when your actual job is to liberate, and enable research and researchers to fly, (the same, I reflect as I’m writing, as it is for parents), it can be very hard to know when it is time to support, and when it is time to let go.
It could be said to be a long bow indeed, but for me, expressions of love are in all that we do. As a leader, I delight in enabling, giving my team the wings they need to fly as individuals, giving agency while making sure the team know I have their back. That’s easy. A decade of training and two or more decades leading, there’s nothing I enjoy more. Dr Maya Angelou never fails to inspire, and indeed she is there to remind me about the purpose of love, and the tension embedded within the ways we operationalise it.
In ReOps, there’s a hidden tension,
and that’s the bit I’m reflecting on, and trying hard to get right. You see, an Ops person is only as good as their capacity to be across everything. I wrote recently about adjusting warp and weft of a complex system. I need the researchers and all the people in the system as much as they need me. They’re not in my team per se — I’m not their leader — instead, we are individual actors working towards similar, but slightly different goals. Operations provides huge, but broadly distributed benefits (as a friend Professor Andrew Robinson said to me recently), with only a few people paying the cost (researchers and operations staff). That changes the dynamic. Giving everyone the wings they need to fly solo means also jeopardising my ability to help in the right way, across the system — to see the whole ‘tapestry’. You can see the easy slope towards being in the way, or not knowing how to not be in the way. I will qualify that I don’t think I spent the week being very much in the way. Indeed, it was such a pleasure to be able to help people quickly, smoothly get what they needed and set them on their way. It was a delight to have that knowledge across the system to enable something that normally takes 10 days to happen in two, these were all good things. But I did, once or twice, fail to see the exact moment when I could enable and set free. Because I hadn’t noticed the tension in when to let go, and when to support.
I don’t have any answers to managing that tension — I’d love to know how you do it, dear reader — if your job relies on being intimate with the whole system, how do you maintain a light touch — light enough to liberate, sufficiently strong enough to be able to pull on the warp and weft if you need to?
I guess I’ll return in my reflection to the other spaces where I like to think I lead with a light touch — in the ResearchOps Community, where I delight in being more and more irrelevant to the health of the community (for me, that’s the marker of a strong, actual community), in W+PSI, where a light touch is all I’ve ever been able to give. For me there, the answer is always individual, one-on-one time. Knowing a person’s mind, where they are going, is enough to maintain the red thread of trust and connection. Perhaps the answer lies there too — a distributed approach to ReOps, a common sense of purpose, each with a light hand on the warp and weft.
Happy weekend, all.
