At work:
- Health and social care event: continued planning, a new venue has been offered and secured, phew, so it’s just about sorting out final details and reminding everyone to attend (with the updated location info)!
- Health and social care engagement materials: continuing to work on the outputs, have done all the low hanging fruit and have 1 big complex summary to work on now!
- Website engagement project: moving steadily towards the website launch, and attending to comms and updating people on how their contributions have been instrumental in shaping the finished work.
- Catchment partnership project: work session with the client and planning an upcoming stakeholder meeting.
- Team reflection session: facilitating a session in April to support a distributed team to come together, connect, reflect and plan. I’d started desigining it a while ago as this has been under discussion for a while, but I finalised the session plan and sent it off to the client for review.
- Co-production resources: the new resource library launched at the end of February but I had a few bits of mop-up to do, like writing up SOPs (standard operating procedures!), and booking a review / check-in with the project lead.
Deliverables this week:
- Introduction to co-production, part 1 of 2: a short online workshop to set some foundational concepts, which will be followed-up in a few weeks with a session on applying those in practice. Went well and received good feedback 🙂
- Cultural competence training: the first of 3 online sessions I am running this month for a Welsh local authority. Went well and received good feedback 😉
- Cultural competency training: first time I delivered a training session for a new organisation, as part of a broader course they run – they were very happy with my content and delivery, and there should be future opportunities to do more of this work now we’re in each others’ worlds.
- (Sometimes we say competency and sometimes competence, there’s a nuance there but it’s detail. I go with what the organisation has circulated in its training adverts!)
Development this week:
- “Managing change” leadership workshop: met the client to get a bit more context, and now have to pull together a session outline to inform their decision-making (they are talking to a few potential providers). I was also asked to register my details on their freelancer database, which led me to review and update my c.v., and write a few things about my facilitation experience and style, and about inclusion. A useful exercise!
- Supporting a team’s transformation work: met the client to get a bit more context, and decided to put in a joint expression of interest with a colleague and friend I work closely with. It’s going to be fiercely competitive as it’s such an interesting (and rare!) kind of contract, but we’re going to propose something anyway. The exercise itself will be useful, even if nothing comes of it.
- Facilitating a board’s strategic session: have been recommended to a client to design and facilitate an away day in north Wales in April, had the kick-off meeting, and will sketch out a proposed session plan once I receive the supporting documents. I’ve actually done strategic support work for this organisation in previous years, so it’s familiar territory, and interesting to see the progression over time.
At home:
- Not quite home and not quite work – but an organisation that I’m on the board for is going through some crucial decision-making at the moment, so I’m providing increased support to the executive team this month.
- Booked flights to go work from my mum’s for a week at the end of April, as she’s having a cataract operation so I’m going to take her to and from the hospital, and stick around until her recovery is well under way.
- I got the car windows tinted in preparation for a long drive to Belgium with a carload of presents. It helps with security, when the contents aren’t visible. It does makes me laugh that I drive an Audi A3 with a custom number plate and now tinted windows, like a massive wanker! 😀 But I like driving and I love my car, so.
- A good week with 3 pilates 🙂
- No swim this weekend, high tide was in the middle of the afternoons and I had other plans. Waiting for early morning weekend swims at high tide to come back round soon.
- Missed Welsh class because work feels like it’s ramping up (it’s financial year end and lots of projects have to be completed and invoiced) and I had a little panic about not getting everything done. Meh. (Having compiled this weeknote now and seeing how much I’ve done, yes, work is indeed ramping up.)
- Took myself to Bristol to see Lieven Scheire‘s show about AI, which was super interesting. Took away lots of useful understanding of aspects of AI, like neural networks and training and deep learning and generative AI and agentic AI, though the factoid that blew my mind is that our mobile phones contain 100,000 times more computing power than what was required for the manned moon landing in 1969 (2 super computers on the spaceship and the servers on the ground together). LIKE, WHOA.
