Weeknotes - as published on Medium

I’ve always been one to blog, but it’s been now and then when something bothers or excites me, and I have something to say about it. Check it out. I reckon I need to hone this skill and share more regularly. Taking inspiration from Cassie Robinson. and my colleague at The Children’s Society with her Friday ‘fluffy egg’ e-mails, I’ve seen how it can help both communicating what I’m learning, but also in help me actually reflect on what I’m doing. I’ve also just read Jenny Vass’s What (on earth) are Weeknotes — which I would advise reading if you’ve still question marks above your pretty little head. I’ve been told I go at a hundred miles an hour and need to recalibrate my action vs reflection balance. So I’m going to aim to do this every week or every couple of weeks, trying not to make a religion out of it — because then it becomes a mundane task and I really want it to have meaning. This as also been published on medium, well, because everyone uses that.

WHAT WE’VE BEEN UP TO

I kicked off the week with breakfast with my friend Ché Ramsden, Innovations Manager at Amnesty International UK. Apart from us gurgling about her little one and sharing about how innovation and ‘test and learn’ is working in our respective organisations, we spoke about the wider innovation community in the sector — and how we would love to do more sharing and learning across it (see more on this later). Hopefully soon we will look at setting up another innovation community meet-up. Watch this space.

As part of my role at The Children’s Society (TCS), I manage a groundbreaking partnership with Bethnal Green Ventures (BGV), in which social tech ventures are sponsored and supported by TCS on the 13 week accelerator programme. I’ve been doing this for 2 years now and I can honestly say it’s probably the best part of my job. BGV has just recently moved into a new co-working space in Whitechapel, alongside companies like Centre for Acceleration Technology (CAST) and a number of other well known start-ups.

I must just go on a tangent for a second here to say how inspired I am not just by this co-working space — but by the vision of the founders. Yearning to create something more imaginative and meaningful than classic co-working, ex-corporate lawyer Rupert Dean and property designer and developer Phil Nevin decided to think greater than the daily grind. The duo became obsessed with the notion of ‘Why’. Why do we do what we do? Why does it matter? And what is the formula behind happy and successful business? I feel this mindset is what makes the difference — we should all be driven by asking these questions of ourselves on a daily basis. For Phil and Rupert, all answers pointed to purpose:their mission became to unite, inspire and amplify purpose-driven businesses. I feel like I need to applaud!

A couple of days this week was spent finalising and kicking off my workplan for a new set of commissioned work for an Academy Trust in South London. I say I do things like this in my spare time but I don’t really have any spare time! I’ve just finished a consultation and business case for the Trust — about the inclusion of a sixth form in one of their secondary schools. I’ve never done that kind of work before so it was great to help them out as they put the case to the DfE, and learn something new in the process! I’m terribly excited about the next phase of work, which involves me digging deeply into my fundraising skill pockets. More on this in the coming weeks.

WHAT WE’VE LEARNED

We are just over halfway on the BGV accelerator, now focusing on investors and partnerships — my favourite part of the programme. If myself and the teams learned one thing from the ‘what makes investors tick’ session, it was that every single investor is thinking about exactly the same thing: RISK AND REWARD. And our job, is to show them how these two balance. We discussed in depth each type of investor and how they tend to give. Ventures Capitals, Angels, Crowdfunding, Corporates, Grant givers like Trusts and Foundations. But for all these, your research into them is going to be most important. All investors will usually publish an investment thesis / approach / mandate which gives you the information about the risks they’re willing to take and the rewards they’re looking for. Always, always — Ask questions first and pitch second. And for those that have been turned down at some point, investors also get it wrong. Bessemer Venture Partners, for example, have published their anti-portfolio. These are investments they declined, each of which they had the opportunity to invest in, and each of which later blossomed into a tremendously successful company. The likes of which include AirBnB, Apple, Ebay and Google.

The Children’s Society is also finalising our Digital Fund application to the National Lottery Community Fund. I know I am not alone in feeling that the journey on this one has been frustrating. After being told we had moved into the second phase of applications by e-mail — and that somebody will be in contact — we waited 2 months…2 months of chasing to get a phonecall in to look at next steps. When finally we got the phonecall in the diary, we were told we had one week to turn the full proposal around to get to the July panel. Having dealt with NLCF before on many occasions — this, in fact, did not surprise us. And luckily, we had already embarked on detailed user and design research for our proposal. ALso, to be fair to the Lottery, this fund is in its essence, a ‘test and learn’ activity. They’ve never done this before, and as with us, are still learning about how it could work better.

The Children’s Society is in an interesting space in this regard. We have acknowledged that this path to true transformation will require a lot of hard work, organisational commitment, senior leadership and trustee buy-in and investment investment investment. As one of my colleagues who will hate to be named, stated: “If we look at it starkly — at the organisational level, we have made little progress in making the fundamental changes necessary to enable basic good digital practices by default. Our specialist design capacity is siloed, our investment in digital is not remotely proportional to the scale of the challenge, and we are structured in such a way that discourages multidisciplinary working. We might think we are doing the right thing, but we aren’t yet doing it well, and we aren’t moving at pace”.

However, my colleague is a recovering perfectionist. I think deep down there is optimism and we all feel that our movement is in the right direction. We are highly focused on systems change (addressing the root causes of social problems, which are often intractable and embedded in networks of cause and effect) and are training and encouraging people to test and learn in this space. We are growing our approach to service design and digital through our practice base (frontline practitioners and policy advisors). We are embedding agile and lean start-up working practices in parts of the organisation (I’ve written another blog about this)— and it’s all working. But it’s working fairly slowly. And commitment it patchy. Perhaps knowledge is patchy too. Maybe it comes back to that “why” question. Why do we do what we do? Why does it matter? For Phil and Rupert from X+Why it was “what is the formula behind happy and successful business?” For us it’s more like “what is the formula behind a strong charity making change for young people?”

We have some of the answers and others will emerge the further we build. I’ve been encouraged reading Digital Transformation at Scale alongside other books / resources to fill my mind with this stuff and see how it’s being done elsewhere. The launch of a large-scale digital transformation programme in national government led by the Government Digital Service (GDS) in 2010 set the standards for digital ways of working in the public sector (being launched this July for ALL government services, not just digital ones — basically now, all public facing transactional services MUST meet the standard). These standards, building on 10 underlying design principles, demand that new services — whether developed internally or by external suppliers — implement fundamental good practices. These include:

• understanding user needs,
• doing user research,
• having multi-disciplinary teams,
• iterating and improving
• testing the end-to-end service

New digital services are assessed against these criteria and are not allowed to launch until they pass. My colleague Adam Groves (who I would highly recommend following) stated this in an internal memo: “As a result of GDS’ work, the UK government rapidly came to be recognised as a world leader in digital services. Moreover, what started as a change at national government is increasingly being taken to local government. Authorities such as Croydon, Hackney, Essex, Brighton and Camden are applying the lessons from GDS into their contexts. This includes the development of a Local Government Digital Service Standard. Just as the national standard began with digital services but will now apply to whole services, we might expect a similar shift at the local level. That is certainly the aim of those who are driving this agenda”. We hope to see this approach sweeping the charity sector soon.

WHAT WE CELEBRATE

Spent the day on Wednesday at the Impact Hub in Birmingham with our very own Innovation Community — about 30 people from across the organisation who are innovating: affecting change across systems and tackling problems for young people in new ways. We also had all of the practitioners on our systems changers programme in attendance (see what they are learning).

We talked about digital disruption, capturing change and learning for innovation, service design with young people in mind, case clinics and action learning sets for problem solving.

I was super duper proud of my team — the seedlings of the innovation community from fundraising and supporter engagement perspective — who put together a really engaging exercise around one of our ‘in development’ Christmas fundraising products. They gave people the opportunity to do some assumptions testing and think about how they would do a quick and early stage prototype to test the assumption with only £100 in hand.

We also had Imandeep Kaur from the Impact Hub, who helped facilitate our systems changers programme, talk, and thoroughly inspire the group.

One of the best development days I’ve had in a long while — and as I said earlier, one which I hope we can open up further.

MY NEXT WEEK

I’m excited for London Tech Week. I look forward to this every year. I’ve booked into a number of events including:

• AND Chat: Five Common Challenges In Agile Transformation (by AND Digital)
• Innovations, Tech and Espresso Martinis (Taylor Vinters)
• Capgemini’s Ethical AI discussion: what it means for you and your customers and how to address it
• Techfest Main Stage: Tom Cheesewright | High Frequency Change

The other big thing going on this week is the ‘download session’ on our mapping of the challenges in the systems focused on mental health. We’ve spent out time doing discovery research into these systems, the challenges and key issues — and then where best we feel The Children’s Society and partners can make a difference.

It’s been unwieldy at best — and for someone that likes things neat, cut and dried — I’ve had to put my OCD in my pocket. Having now done our first ideation session, we will be looking at the additional lines of enquiry generated, the list of solutions and how the group thought we could prototype and test these and readying of R&D propositions to take to market off the back of this.

Lastly, pretty psyched for a session being run for our Supporter Engagement senior leaders on Wednesday by a guy called Rob Woods who founded Bright Spot Fundraising. People who know me know I’m pretty cynical about this stuff in general — but this looks positive. It looks practical and interactive. These sessions have been designed to help senior managers understand and embody leadership behaviours aligned with The Children’s Society’s Supporter Engagement approach and will be based on The Three Keys To Supporter-Focused Leadership, the research report Rob created for the Commission on the Donor Experience.

The three themes are vision, people and culture. The memo says: “Rob will explain the areas in which over many years he has noticed the way that excellent leaders do things differently to others. Using real examples and stories Rob will bring these to life and, as a group, participants will explore which of these tactics they’d each like to test in their own work”. Groovy.

Mythbusting "Agility"

Discussing agility in charities, especially larger, more traditional charities is tricky. My mind is a bit of a haze on this topic. It’s a sticky subject. 

Having just read that under one third of agile projects in charities are failing because the teams are too geographically dispersed, while 34% have failed because the teams didn't plan before getting started or didn't plan sufficiently as the project developed – doesn’t fill me with hope. 

Especially when you have more than half of Chief Information Officers in the UK thinking that the agile methodology is just a fad.

Agile Working or Agile Development Methodology?

I mean, what even, is agility? Conversations I’ve had about agility either focus on flexible, remote working or on a methodology that promotes iterative working. And most of them just focus on agility in the IT space, not on greater business transformation.

Non-Traditional Project Management

In light of these challenges, let’s pull the strands apart and examine more closely:

Charities, especially larger ones, struggle with working in silos. These are often age-old structures, derived from teams with particular remits that aren’t allowed or don’t want to work outside of their job. My work across different charities has led me to often hear “why is that team doing that, it’s not their job, it’s ours”. 

Agile, by its very nature, is an alternative to traditional project management that brings job functions together with more focus and purpose. It empowers people across the organisation to collaborate, make decisions and develop everything from the customer’s point of view.

Non-Traditional Budgeting

Budgeting becomes a challenge when all budgets are allocated to teams rather than to plans or programmes of work, which utilise virtual teams to achieve outcomes. Budgeting in this way reinforces the silos and it then becomes tricky to share resource. Budgeting in this way requires a different way of thinking and although I feel many senior leaders ‘get it’, there’s a real struggle to make it real, to make it happen. To bite the bullet. Reverting back to the way things have always been done, is safe. Agility requires a bit of risk taking.

Definitions are important

Perhaps it is important to define to the organisation the principles behind agility – what it looks like in practice – and what it is not. Agile is about evolution and collaborative experimentation. It’s about trust. When it is explained and communicated, tangible examples of how it works and how it could work in context should be provided. Every time. People need to see behind ‘the jargon curtain’ to a simple approach that works.

It’s also about user stories being at the centre of the adoption of agile. 

Nor is it "working from home" or working without structure...

I was recently speaking to a friend of mine in the civil service. I mentioned that people think agile working only means working from home rather than being in an office – and taking advantage of that fact! This example sits on the long list of reasons why it’s important to understand what agility means. Agility is not an unstructured project without a beginning and end. This notion, in fact, puts the term in danger of becoming a maligned buzzword in financial circles, because of the connotations that ‘make it seem very difficult to budget for’.  

My friend wisely replied to my statement by saying “agile isn’t flexible or unstructured. Agile in user centric.” He said that he feels charities are falling apart because they are not learning about their customers and iterating on their offer.

It's user-centred

Dan Sutch, director at CAST, highlights how agile can work well for charities:  “One thing that agile approaches really push is the focus on user-value (or user behaviour). Within the charity sector it is vital that this focus is pushed/reinforced as it’s so crucial to ensure their expertise is presented in ways that actually get used.” So if your charity supports vulnerable people, for instance, agile could be a useful way to put yourself in your audience’s shoes by understanding what they want and need.

Agile changes how people think and behave

It’s very interesting to see how even the most traditional-thinking staff from all parts of charities react when they start to take this agile philosophy on board. Suddenly they start to think in a much more integrated and flexible way. They gather user stories. They do user acceptance testing. And most interestingly of all they do all this even though it isn’t an official part of their job, which is exactly the kind of engagement that is required to achieving business transformation.

In the end it's about leadership

In all my research, I came across a brilliant quote from Jim Bowes, CEO of digital agency Manifesto. I think this sums up nicely what I have been trying to get at – but failing possibly to articulate. Jim does it really well: “In my experience it’s not any specific methodology that causes the success or failure of projects within charities – it’s much more likely to be whether a good vision has been set, that clearly relates to organisational goals and whether the right team is in place to realise the project.”

Haze dissipated.

Kirsten is a guest authour on the Tech For Good Hub, where this post was originally published.