Weeknotes SE02E14
It was a super short week for me as the whole household had been in staggered bursts coming down with a nasty cold that knocked us out one by one. Yes, we got tested, it was just a cold, phew! In any case, I think it turned into about a 2.5 day week of my normal 4 days.
We still got a lot done in ReOps terms, some of which is still in progress, so I’ll come back to it later, because I am still under the weather and want to make this short, and also because I just want to focus on one thing only:
The Unit of Delivery is the Team (thanks GDS Team for the inspiration!)
This week, I was sick all of Monday and could not speak or think, so I lay in bed all day, kids too. I watched the excellent movie Lion, which is a fantastically moving story about a boy who gets lost in India and ends up, adopted by a couple living in Tasmania. Among other things, seeing your home town through the eyes of others is always good. I also watched another old favourite, Amélie, which is a sumptuous piece of cinematography. I love how Amélie sees exactly the small machinations that she can do to affect positive, and sometimes profound change in her neighbours’ lives.
Tuesday was a very big day. Last week, Jordan had asked me to take a look at the mechanisms and functions of delivery of knowledge management in research operations and come back to him the following week, which meant doing a short (very short!) piece of ‘discovery’ on the current state of sourcing and making sense of research, of planning and doing research, of analysing and synthesising research, and of applying and sharing research. He asked me to report back on Wednesday, with essentially a rough understanding of the current state. I reached out to 4 teams with about 6 researchers with varying backgrounds, research methods and experiences to see if they’d be keen to be interviewed, or to help me understand the current state.
I won’t mention their names here, but if you are reading this, this whole post is to say, thank you ❤
Each of them gave varying amounts of time, with one team in particular working with the image below and writing lots of notes against each stage of the research lifecycle. I’m not sure it therefore gets to be called research, but it definitely gave me a clear picture of the processes and people involved, and the pain points along the way.
The researchers were honest and considered, and really contributed to enriching my understanding of their current (and desired future state in some cases). Given the last time I’d last done that in March, I’d done it differently (in a 3 hour workshop using the pace layers matrix), it was good to gain a greater level of detail from individuals — especially given I’d started with a single team of researchers, and we are now sitting at apparently something like 27 teams doing user research to varying degrees.
Note for anyone reading this not from my organisation: it’s worth knowing that at the end of the week, outside of work, I touched base with one of the participants of the pace layers workshop I did with Benson at EPIC last year, and he too reflected he’d found the research + operations lifecycle to be the most effective communication tool to date. I certainly found it to be effective, with little to no explanation required to describe what it is. Could be worth considering, next time you need to do any research on research operations!
When I reflect on the people who downed tools to help me through the week, and on the very many, many people who also put the work in on the Research Repositories project in the ReOps Community so that the research lifecycle is as sophisticated and usable as it is today, it’s incredibly apparent to me that nothing done well is ever done alone.
Alongside the researchers who provided their thoughts and experiences, I had help from Bill — the other member of this two person ReOps team, from the BIIS research team who helped with some synthesis. I used two templates — one made by our Export Audit team, and one made by Adrian and Finn from the Capability team. The end-to-end team (thanks Chris and Alz!) sent me along some design ideas too.
My teammate from my old team at Services Australia, John, gave up quite a bit of his own time putting together a mockup of a potential future state for us. I don’t really have words for how grateful I am for that really. The work we did there was a team effort too — largely executed by him, so when I described the future state I was thinking of in conversation with him, he knew exactly what I meant, no further words exchanged, and then the unexpected gift of a lovely mockup!
On Tuesday evening, I delivered a talk on research governance with Bri Norton with lessons learned from the Research Repositories project to the Design Research Melbourne meetup, headed up by Caylie Panuccio, Shane Burford and Emily Murray. Again, at that talk, we got to reflect on the team that got us there, and the wonderful people who allowed us to interview them so we could learn what we’d learned. I also acknowledged the team at Services Australia, because again, my knowledge of the governance of research data and research outputs was a journey I took with my team over the past 4 years. We mulled over problems together, and solved them together.
On Wednesday, when I presented my findings to Jordan, Magda, Mariam, and the two research leads from both of my main teams — Ruth and Helen, and Jordan said — you did all that? That’s impressive! Later that night, lying in bed, going over the happenings of the day, I felt ashamed that I’d just said, yes, to his question — the right answer was, is, and always will be: yes, we did. I assume he knew that, but just in case he didn’t —
we did it, all of us.
What else are you thinking about?
I’m starting to think about scale and the different ways it happens — slowly incrementally, or everything more or less at once. Or at least, these are the two ways I’ve so far experienced the act of scaling — I can feel my mind toying with the idea, just in the back of my head — about how that influences what you do and how, the kinds of bets you place on yourself as a decision maker, and the circles of influence you might have in both scenarios. Benson and I are doing a little bit (quite truly, 30 mins a fortnight!) on the pace layers matrix at the moment, and he’s introduced me to the idea of the way circles of influence might be one of the factors that enable or inhibit change.
Of course, with my PhD thesis hat on, where I’m really considering what factors are involved in creating momentum within individuals to make positive change happen, I see it as one of several factors, but the cogs are turning on that.
I also had a little bit of insight (the benefit of walking away from the research and resting on Monday, my study day, instead, which is that change requires choice (which in turn requires a bunch of other things), and that when there is more than one person involved, there is choice, and then there is what is left once a choice (towards or away from change) is made. Less than no choice, it feels more like anti-choice — the vacuum that’s left in the wake of someone making a choice to do, or not do something. The other parties are left either to follow, or (say if a child is involved, and the choice is to not take parental leave) to fill the void left behind (to take parental leave because someone has to). That feels like a breakthrough for me (it is the first ‘new’ insight I’ve had on it all for a bit), but I can see a lot of relevance to work too — I think of Donella Meadows’ book Thinking in Systems, and I can see this choice/anti-choice as the flow she talks about in systems. Given flows are leverage points, understanding this little nub of an idea has my spidey senses a tingling. Watch this space :)
