A /now page, for sharing what I’m currently focusing on.
Updated 6th March 2025:
Now that spring is properly in the air, it feels like the *real* new year / new start, and I’m emerging blinking into the sunshine to look around at what this coming year might hold.
What I am continuing to do:
I have found myself doing more work around DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), anti-racism, and cultural competence(mainly writing and delivering courses in-house to public services teams, on behalf of Tai Pawb), which wasn’t a deliberate direction of development but which I have discovered I enjoy very much. I bring my lived experience (as a foreign citizen, not a white person, who is also non-binary and neurodivergent) to create spaces for open discussion and learning. The main feedback I get is that it’s a useful and welcome space to ask all the questions people don’t usually get to ask, and worry about getting wrong “out there” (outside of the training room).
I have been doing training and bespoke sessions (sort of mentoring / coaching / facilitated workshops all wrapped into one) around team dynamics and how groups work together, helping leaders to support their teams when things are sticky. I hit on a nice insight the other day, in that I work with teams in transitions: beginnings, times of significant change (for example embedding new ways of working), or endings. I am very fond of the Berkana Institute two loops model, where I see myself operating in the hospicing and transition / bridging areas. I will write about that in more detail some day.
Facilitation is my strongest skillsetand continues to play a major role in my work. I am exploring how I can expand and share this, beyond me designing and facilitating sessions (which I will also continue to do because I love nerding out about that stuff!!).
What I am leaving behind:
I went to #NotWestminster in Huddersfield again this year, and I have a feeling this will be my last. While the work of local democracy and change will always be of interest to me as a citizen, and the brilliant #NotWestminster team will remain for ever close to my heart, my direction of travel is diverging increasingly from local authority and local democracy settings. Time for me to say goodbye and farewell, I think.
Updated 15th July 2024:
At an event I attended recently, David Robinson of The Relationships Project posed the question, what are we doing next week, in the coming year, and what’s our direction for the next 5 years? So for me:
- This week – continue developing facilitation skills training for people doing co-production in public services (not training facilitators, but distilling the values and skills that you might need if you work in a public service and have to gather people together to do meaningful engagement, citizen involvement, and/or co-production).
- This coming year – expand my facilitation practice into explicit team dynamics and conflict transformation areas (beyond the business as usual stuff, I want to do more untangling of the weeds under the surface when things aren’t quite so straightforward). I’m putting this intention out into the Universe, and inviting the possibilities!
- The next 5 years – I don’t know what shape this is going to take yet, but I want to look into grief work in organisational change (whenever there is a change, even a positive one, we have to let go of something to make space for the new; I believe we need to attend to this process of letting go and grieving).
I also have a permanent and ongoing fascination with how we can measure relationships and culture change (in an ethical and affirming way, obvs). I collect my occasional thoughts on the blog under the “Measurement” tag.
………………………………………………
On my reading shelf:
About dying and grief (both on a personal and collective level):
- Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief (Cindy Milstein)
- The Grieving Brain (Mary-Frances O’Connor)
- Option B (Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant)
- You Are Not Alone (Cariad Lloyd)
- Modern Loss (Rebecca Soffer & Gabrielle Birkner)
- Ashes To Admin (Evie King)
- The Silly Thing (Esther Ramsay-Jones)
- Being Mortal (Atul Gawande)
- Stiff (Mary Roach)
- Grave (Allison C. Meier)
- On Death and Dying (Elizabeth Kubler-Ross)
- Necessary Losses (Judith Viorst)
- Living your Dying (Stanley Keleman)
- The Smell of Rain on Dust (Martin Prechtel)
- Geometry of Grief (Michael Frame)
- The Wild Edge of Sorrow (Francis Weller)
- With the End in Mind (Kathryn Mannix)
- Tending Grief (Camille Sapara Barton)
- Dying for a Chat (Dr Ranjana Srivastava)
- The Tibetan Book of the Dead (translated by Robert A.F. Thurman)
- Notes on Grief(Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
- What remains? (Rupert Callender)
I have long been interested in end-of-life doula training. I may well explore this more concretely in the coming years. In the meantime I’m very open to conversations about all of the above!