What happened?

• 1 interview with a public health person in a Local Authority, 1 interview with a charity, 1 interview with a participant who was a family member of someone who gambled and one webinar about Women, Domestic Abuse and Gambling Related Harms
• 2 sessions with our lived experience team members
• 2 sessions on alpha phase dependencies
• 1 catch up with Ann and 1 intro meeting with the team who are working on equivalent work in Wales
• Desk research about friends and family who are affected by somebody’s gambling

What was good?

Its been another varied week, we are plugging away with user research with friends and family of people who gamble, but our method of recruitment (identifying people via charities or stakeholder groups) means this has been slow going. That means, however, that weve been able to do some really useful desk research and I’ve had to bend my head round a whole new set of experiences and impacts. I’m having lots of thoughts about user journeys and how we might design people’s journeys through information and I’ve got a starting point I want to test, but we are still waiting for the next round of procurement and a new supplier onboarding, so this is a little way off.

Alongside this I’ve been trying to make sense of the design patterns I’ve been collecting, an sort these into a structured approach that I can use to gather together relevant examples of approaches to things we might need to test in alpha. This isn’t made easier by the fact that a lot of websites are actually blocked at work, but I’m gathering what I have, and noting down what I can’t access.

In other good news the pay framework stuff is all over now and we have all had our final scores and confirmation of our assessed levels. I’m pleased with how this has turned out and I’m glad its all over, but I’m also feeling a little bit silly about how worried I was about the whole thing.

What was hard?

To be honest it hasn’t been a particularly difficult couple of weeks, I had a couple of migraines and a bit of a cold but I got over them fairly quickly. I’ve had a little difficulty a couple of days to get started, particularly after a bad nights sleep (this always happens when husband has to travel for work) but otherwise generally fine.

And what else?

I’ve been doing lots of reading and not all around the protect, some other things include:

• This by Dean Vipond A short(ish) history of the NHS design system, Part 6: 2022 — where next? | by Dean Vipond | Medium
• This: S&P Dow Jones partners with Kalshi for index-based events contracts, use prediction data | Reuters
• ‘I can’t afford to lose £3,000’: the ‘gameshow’ that made contestants gamble their own money | Television | The Guardian
• Making content reusable across Personalised Prevention Services — NHS
• Who gets to name the future? Who gets to name the future? — by Nicole Michaelis Nicole Michaelis

I’ve crocheted two cat ear granny square thingamijigs like this: Granny Square Crochet Cat Ear Beanie Pattern (PDF) — Etsy UK but don’t buy a pattern for this, you don’t need one, whack together 4 granny squares, jobs a good ‘un (though you can’t knock the hustle of the crochet chancers selling patterns like this).

I had Friday off and I went for a little London jaunt, to Bone Daddies, Lazy Oaf, Liberty (christmas shop — totally overwhelming), and then to Camden to see The Avalanches at The Roundhouse. They were brilliant and very fun, plus I bumped into Simon on the way which was very lovely.

Weeknotes S23 Ep11 was originally published in Web of Weeknotes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi, welcome to my MonthNotes — reflective notes looking back over the past month, loosely based on a set of questions which help me reflect. They’re my own personal notes, views, etc.

Regular structured reflection increases happiness, productivity and job performance and decreases the likelihood of burnout. And the process itself of writing these notes helps me.

“Find out who you are, and do it on purpose.” Dolly Parton

“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.” Virginia Woolf*

1. What did you experiment with?

• Inspired by Cate Hall, I experimented with seeking feedback using Admonymous. If you’ve got any feedback for me, please try it out — it’s quick, easy, and anonymous:

“If you aren’t trying to get real feedback from people who know you, you’re cooking without tasting. This is the lowest hanging fruit for self-improvement, but few people really try to pick it.”*

2. What made you proud?

• Elsevier’s MindLife has won an award for the best global welbeing program — and, whilst MindLife is now part of our culture at Elsevier and involves a large number of people, this wouldn’t have been possible without Beck, the driving force behind the program, so I was delighted to also see her rightly recognised for her personal contribution and named as the Hero of the Year.
• The results of our annual employee opinion survey: for the third year in a row we’ve again made great progress with engagement in my business unit, thanks to a huge collective effort. Engagement has improved +10pts in three years, from 57 to 67; and eNPS has improved +15pts in that time, from +18 to +33:

“Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” Simon Sinek

• A colleague said to me:
  “You can’t quantify your contributions. I deeply value them.”
• Seeing another one of the winning ideas from our AI hackathon last year move into production, making it all the way from idea and prototype through MVP and testing to successful implementation

3. What concepts did you learn?

• Ubuntu (HT Chris):*

This ancient Nguni Bantu term (from languages like Zulu and Xhosa) that roughly translates to ‘humanity,’ ‘humanness,’ or ‘humanity to others’. The underpinning conept/philosophy of Ubuntu is one of interconnectedness:
‘I am because we are,’* which is often summarized by the Zulu proverb ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,’ meaning

“a person is a person through other people”.*

• Human-centred leadership:

Not a new concept as such, but new language/terminology (for me at least).
Of course, different people define the term differently.

• Self-determination theory:

SDT is a theory about human motivation that says people thrive when three basic psychological needs are supported: autonomy (acting with a sense of choice and ownership rather than pressure or control), competence (feeling effective, feeling capable of meeting challenges and mastering tasks), and relatedness (feeling connected to others, feeling cared for, connected, and socially supported).

The more an environment supports these three needs, the more likely people are to feel energized, engaged, and psychologically healthy.* That is, the same conditions that improve motivation and performance also support people’s wellbeing/wellness.*

• Scenius: (HT Tendayi Viki)*

We often think of creative genius as being a quality that is held by an individual. But ‘scenius’— a term coined by Brian Eno — reframes it as a quality that emerges from a scene of people, something collective and communal, less about individual brilliance and more about collaboration and community.*

• Creative abrasion:

This term, coined by Jerry Hirshberg* and later popularized by Linda A. Hill,* describes the constructive intellectual friction that hones and improves ideas through healthy debate of diverse perspectives

• Psychosocial hazards (HT Helen):

Under work health and safety laws in Australia, businesses must manage the risk of ‘psychosocial hazards’ in the workplace. “A psychosocial hazard is anything that could cause psychological harm (e.g. harm someone’s mental health). Common psychosocial hazards at work include:

• job demands
• low job control
• poor support
• lack of role clarity
• poor organisational change management
• inadequate reward and recognition
• poor organisational justice
• traumatic events or material
• remote or isolated work
• poor physical environment
• violence and aggression
• bullying
• harassment, including sexual and gender-based harassment, and
• conflict or poor workplace relationships and interactions.”*

“The visible result of farming, the harvest, depends on the invisible quality of the field.” Otto Scharmer

4. What else did you learn?

• If you’re sleep deprived and short on time, the science says move: high-intensity exercise is strongly associated with higher cognitive functioning.
• Only 17.7% of us are highly self-awareness of how we behave at work.
• I explored how AI is influencing human behaviour in the workplace, from communication and critical thinking to decision-making and judgement, in a webinar on ‘The Human Response to AI’.

“The success of an intervention depends on the inner condition of the intervener.” Bill O’Brien

5. What did you get reminded of?

• The evolution of manager ‘Readmes’, and why I tried to write mine differently and gave it a different name: “The idea was that a manager would take the time to write up their leadership style, what they valued, and their principles. A fad that started in 2017, hit its peak in 2018, and then faded.” (HT rands)*

“Development unfolds through a cycle: awareness, experimentation, experience, reflection.”* (HT Georgina Woudstra)*

• People would like change to happen now, everywhere and by agreement — but that’s not possible: you have to choose just one or two of those three elements.*
• My garden of forking paths
• The value of working in the open (HT Tobi Lutke)
• “Time outdoors is not a reward for working hard. It is one of the few reliable ways to step out of cognitive overload.”
• The benefit of an arbitrary (enabling) constraint:

“The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.” Kierkegaard

“The real bottlenecks are rarely systems, markets or strategies.
More often they sit within our own thinking, habits and self-stories.”
Jonathan Passmore

6. What books did you read?

• The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig

“The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.”
Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener

7. What poems touched you?

(Note: I don’t like poetry.)

• ‘When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,’ by Walt Whitman
  (HT Tom Geraghty)
• ‘Taking Part in the Gathering,’ by Shitou Xiqian (HT Tess Bailey):

“We and everything we perceive
are interwoven and not interwoven.
And this interweaving goes on and on,
while each thing stands in its own place.”

• ‘The Journey,’ by Mary Oliver (HT Helena Clayton)
• ‘Singularity,’ by Marie Howe
• ‘I am the Song,’ by Charles Causley (HT Susan)
• ‘Someone Else, Someone New,’ by Henry Shukman
• ‘Beeny cliff,’ by Thomas Hardy (HT Henry Shukman)
• ‘I found her out there,’ by Thomas Hardy (HT Henry Shukman)

“The sky clears, the sun appears;
Rain falls, the earth is wet.” Mumon Ekai

8. What was fun?

• Celebrity Traitors
• Hiking up the Napf (1408m — higher than Ben Nevis, the highest peak in the UK, at 1345m), in the Emmental region of Switzerland:

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
Thoreau (HT Matt Haig)

9. What did you enjoy?

• Music: Listening to albums (Abbey Road, Bad, Nina & Piano, This Music May Contain Hope), and discovering new music, including Tiny Desk concerts by Ludovico Einaudi,* Abdullah Ibrahim, Michael Kiwanuka, Hermanos Gutiérrez & the Kronos Quartet, Leo Zero’s unofficial remixes, Letta Mubulu, and the Kronos Quartet’s recording of Vladimir Martynov’s ‘The Beatitudes’.
• Hearing my dad share happy memories and anecdotes, including him doing an impression of David Hockney winning the annual art prize at school (again) — he was the year below my dad at school.*
• Crunching through beechnuts in Ashton park
• Calling in on an old friend, who’s moved to Old Basing
• Training for a weekend with Sophie Johnson at Bonhays in Dorset. It was a course on the foundations of Nei Gong, including the (first half of the) foundational moving set of the Ji Ben Qi Gong

‘Yin leads, Yang follows’

• Staying with an old friend in Switzerland for a weekend

“We all want quiet. We all want beauty… We all need space. Unless we have it, we cannot reach that sense of quiet in which whispers of better things come to us gently.” Octavia Hill, one of the founders of the National Trust (HT Stefan)

10. What are you looking forward to in November?

• The launch of new reports from Belbin on team resilience*
• Seeing friends
• Leading a forum for the Chief of Staff Network on the topic of managing up
• Seeing colleagues in New York
• A holiday in the New Forest

11. What song is in your head right now?

I love asking people this question (which is similar to one of rands’s questions), and this is my answer right now:

October 2026 was originally published in Web of Weeknotes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[week ending 23/10/2026]

Who did you talk to outside of your organisation? Joint meeting with SFH and Rhapsody, discussing new product offers and what we could do contract-wise together.

Regular meeting with Nervecentre senior folk, talking progress, AVT, roadmaps, release schedules, SaaS and much more.

What would you have liked to do more of? Simon and I met with a colleague who is working elsewhere in the Trust, but has a cyber security masters degree and is doing some really cool stuff in their own time. I was impressed with the amount of preparation they did and their unflappable enthusiam.

What do you wish you could have changed? I was Gold on call three times this week (I think it is all the time I took off in the summer catching up on the rota). The hospital is really busy and there are patients being cared for in less than ideal places. The Trust called a critical incident this week due to the pressures of being able to deal with the demand and the challenges of flow leading to increased corridor care. There are lots of actions taking place trying to improve the situation, but it feels worrying given that we’re not even in winter proper.

Like much of the world, we had our own set of actions arising from the understanding about the vulnerabilities in PHP. Simon and team did a good job of understanding our position and seeking assurances from our suppliers. I also sighed a personal sigh of relief as I’d written a couple of PHP-based websites in the past, which thankfully have long been decommissioned.

What did you learn? The week started with our Black History Month event. As ever there was a lot to learn; a lot to celebrate and a lot to feel frustrated and angry about. It was great to see John Oni, a retired surgeon who’d been on the stakeholder panel when I was interviewed for my role at NUH. He gave the keynote, which was an impressive tour de force. He talked about Dr Aggrey Burke, who challenged racial bias in the medical school system, noticing that there was a shortage of black and female students being shortlisted. He discovered that a new computer system used as part of the appointment process served to make the inherent racism in the selection process even more efficient. Burke was the first black consultant at St Georges hospital. The story of a black person being the first person in a given scenario or industry is not a new one, but it is depressing to still hearing this happening in recent history. John also challenged us to think about the important difference between optics and reality; that we need to look behind the statements and the gloss and see if the actions to address racism are really resulting in change. He reminded us of the work stood up in various organisations in the wake of George Floyd’s death, only to be dismantled when politics change.

Sue and Catherine reminded us that Black History is British History and gave an allies’ perspective and Kebba talked about how to approach meaningful engagement in clinical research. Lovelyn gave us a reading from her book (well done!!). I left the event, with a firm challenge around what else can I do to be a better, more prominant ally for those from the global majority. There’s a couple of things I followed up this week that are a start.

This week I went to the Coroner’s Court, accompanying Lisa. I’d not been to a session before, and so there was a lot to learn and understand. I thought the coroner did a great job of grasping lots of complex information rapidly and yet explaining what was going on to all present.

What did you achieve? Simon showed me some of the stuff he’d been doing with Agents in Copilot. With his help I did a bit of playing with setting up my own agent. More to explore but I really liked the way the structure was set up to see what was going on.

What are you looking forward to next week?

• Shorter week due to celebrating one of my son’s birthdays
• Care Group performance meetings
• Delivering a lecture at UoN — as part of my continuting role as Honorary Professor

Interesting Stuff read/consumed:

• Chapter 10: Organisational Friction — how effort disappears into the cracks by Chris Parsons. Chris was kind enough to note I’d mentioned him in a previous weeknote, but my output pales into insignificance compared to the mighty thinking coming from his big brain. I found myself nodding to lots of this article and also quite a bit of “oh, so *that’s* why”. There’s so many nuggets in the article, but I’ll pick out two from the array of gold on offer. 1) “Measurement can itself create friction. A diagnostic demanding weeks of new data entry has contradicted its purpose. Nor should the ratio become a productivity weapon. Its purpose is disciplined visibility, not false precision.” and 2) “The journey is then traced from end to end, paying particular attention to the interfaces where responsibility, information, technology, or authority pass between people, teams, or systems. At each point, labour can be classified as purpose-delivering, protective or avoidable, while elapsed delay is measured separately so that necessary work is not confused with waiting, rework, or queueing”
• If your team is too busy doing their ‘normal job’ to experiment with AI, you’re preparing them to be replaced by Geoffrey Huntley. I went down a bit of rabbit hole with this one and read about Ralphing, which I’m still not fully sure I understand, but is about doing small managed iterations of AI-generated code rather than getting it to do the whole things in one go. Fascinating. I want to read more from Huntley.
• Bizarre love triangle by Simon Morgan-Wilson. Some more wise word from the Product guru.
• Life as a vibecoder… I built Norway in Lego. Sort of. Lego and AI — what’s not to love.

Books finished this week:

• Fiction: None.
• Non-Fiction: None

Currently Reading:

• Fiction: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
• Non-Fiction: Next Made Real from PA Consulting.
• Non-Fiction: How to Hear God by Pete Grieg

Weeknotes s08e18 was originally published in Web of Weeknotes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What happened?

• 1 end of Discovery show and tell
• 1 training session on PPIE (Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement) and 1 on lived experience of Gambling Harms (by GamCare)
• 1 training completed on Prototyping with AI from IDEO
• 1 new operational organisational thingamijig
• 1 Flu Jab

What went well?

I feel like this week there’s actually been a line drawn under the discovery and we have moved forward. Of course it’s not as straightforward as completing something and stopping entirely, the work carries on and I still have a lot in my brain about what the next phase brings.

I’ve been super cagey in these weeknotes about what I’ve actually been working on but with the discovery complete I feel like I can finally talk about it a little more openly, with the caveats that I’m not representing policy in this space and this blog is purely musings for me based on things I am learning or doing. We now have a blog post out there though, so that also helps:

Exploring how digital services can prevent gambling harms — Digital health and social care

Since April I’ve been working on this discovery which is part of work happening under the Gambling Levy. So, it’s kinda nice to think back to the beginning of discovery when I knew nothing about the domain, how it all fitted together and more. Since then I’ve read tonnes, heard so many stories of people’s experiences and I am so pleased that I’ve got the opportunity to work on something which really has the potential to improve people’s experiences. It’s not always been easy, hearing people’s lived experience is still incredibly difficult at times, but it’s important.

The team are moving into doing more research in the next few weeks with friends and family of people who gamble, which will be really interesting, so I’ve been doing some research and learning about that group. We have also taken the step to bring our lived experience team members more into the project which has been so great.

Anyway, the team held our end of discovery show and tell which was pretty well attended and had a lot of good conversation and questions in the chat, so I think we are well set up for the next phase already, but the work to prepare and onboard a supplier will start soon.

In the meantime, I’m balancing my time a little better and haven’t been full-time on the project because I wanted to give my brain a bit of a rest, so I’ve been doing some reading (an actual book! Addiction by Design) and doing some training and have actually got to a couple of training sessions under my belt which has felt nice.

I completed the IDEO training Prototyping with AI which was interesting, I learned some new techniques which made me feel at once impressed but also scared — which I think is the current feeling of a lot of people. There were a couple of times where I fell into some slight rabbit holes, like generating storyboards with Robert Smith. And look, I know sharing your AI things is pure cringe, but honestly the joy I got in making Robert Smith do a whole range of silly things really tickled me.

What was hard?

More organisational stuff is happening at work, we have moved under a new director and there have been some really high level outlines of how things will look in the future. There’s still a lot of questions and conjecture and noise, and some of it has been difficult to take in this week, like I mentioned last week(note) “it just adds an additional layer of uncertainty at an already tough time.”

The GDAD pay framework stuff has all been submitted and initial moderations have been done, so my brain has moved out of anxiety phase (OMG I need to make sure I prove my worth) and into a new phase of anxiety (how have I been marked and when will I knooooooow?!). So yeah, trying to quieten my brain.

And what else?

• I completed the Chaos Goth scarf and then immediately got obsessed with making skinny scarves and made 5 of them, so it looks like people will be getting scarves for christmas. I also became a bit obsessed with making mohair skinny scarves, so they might just be my new personality now.

• I watched The Dropout again, given all the hype about You Can See Everything, I figured I should actually remind myself what the story was. Anyway, a quick google now tells me I’m not the only one doing that right now:

You Can See Everything mania lifts viewership for The Dropout by 186% | You Can See Everything | The Guardian

• I listened to the new Avalanches record (I can’t wait to see them next month). I didn’t listen to the new Fontaines record because as with the last one I much prefer to be waaaaay behind the times and come to that maybe in 2–3 years. Also their hype is kinda annoying me at the moment and yeah I like them but, ruuuugh, it really is a lot.

Ok and that will do I think. Have a good weekend, stay dry xx

Weeknotes S23 Ep10 was originally published in Web of Weeknotes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[week ending 09/10/2026]

Back again after a gap where the Trust continues to be under scrutiny, so I have been mindful and respectful of that.

Who did you talk to outside of your organisation? A call with Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire colleagues and a call with DrDoctor.

What did you learn? I joined the REACH staff network meeting this week, and was saddened to hear feedback from the network about negative personal experiences. This was particularly sobering as we enter Black History Month, where the theme is Honouring Our Communities and it felt like there was still such a lack of progress to truly achieve the equality deserved.

What did you enjoy? Doing Trust induction for new starters. Previously we’ve been doing this on Teams, where the Exec rota’d in for that day drops in, does their slot and goes. This time was the first week doing it face to face and I got to chat with some of the new starters before the session started and it was fabulous. I loved hearing people’s stories of how they had come to NUH and a common theme of ambition from all the people who I talked to. It was a fabulous start to the week.

Visiting the Business Support Unit within Clinical Engineering. I met Dawn and the team and heard what an amazing job they do in coordinating the work fo all the medical equipment used around the Trust. I didn’t realise how much kit goes in and out of the Trust on top of what our teams can do themselves. I also saw the challening environment the team worked in. Their work area are portacabins on the roof of the main building, put there temporarily about 30 years ago, so the place is really showing its age. In the photo below there is a sign on the window saying “Don’t Open Window. Broken. Leaking”.

What did you achieve? Quite a bit of work this week, taking to different people about SARs; checking in on progress, reviewing some material to be disclosed, doing some correspondence with some families. Marc, Jeremy and I also got a bit of time to go back to an action tracker we’d started last year and updated progress.

Presented three papers to our Trust Leadership Team (TLT) meeting; Digital and Data Strategic Group Monthly Chairs Report, Update on Letters backlog and the change in accountable officer and an update on the Getting Our Data Right programme.

A very good Data Protection and Cyber Security Panel, where we caught up on a few key items that have been around for a while.

Other stuff:

• First 1–2–1 with the new Trust chair Elaine.
• Really engaging Board Development Session, thinking about how to move forward with hope.

What are you looking forward to next week?

• A get together with all the CIOs from across the East Midlands
• Digital and Data Strategic Group meeting

Interesting Stuff read/consumed:

• The Meeting Before the Meeting by Kwesi Afful. A insight into making meeting work when you are a wheelchair.
• We Fired the Consultants. Copilot Has a Lovely Slide Template. A bit near the bone about AI being consumed by AI and noone left to do the strategic thinking.
• Changing the Engines Mid-Flight: When ‘Announceability’ Overtakes Deliverability by Chris Parsons. Always read anything from this NHS Legend, reflecting on the massive challenges with the NHSE/DHSC merger.
• Digital Transformation at Scale: What It Really Takes by Matthew Gould
• Watch out for AI Slop Grenades by Mario Meir-Huber. “mass produced documents, presentations and sheets that someone else needs to check. Often, these documents are produced without proper review or editing. It is a fire-and-forget mentality and this is exactly what slop grenades are about.”
• Separating the wheat from the chaff in an age of AI prompting by Josh Hutchison

Books finished this week:

• Fiction: The Dictators Wife by Freya Berry.
• Non-Fiction: None

Currently Reading:

• Fiction: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
• Non-Fiction: Next Made Real from PA Consulting.
• Non-Fiction: How to Hear God by Pete Grieg

Weeknotes s08e17 was originally published in Web of Weeknotes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I am tired, this often happens at this time of year. Octobers are seemingly difficult for me, I don’t know if its a bit of burnout from going full pelt for most of the year, mourning that the summer is over, or a general response to a change in temperature and daylight. Either way, I am feeling like I need to start taking things a bit slower, and keep on top of my energy levels.

Last weeknote I wrote and thought I’d published but then actually hadn’t. I thought that nobody was reading it, but only realised I think last friday or Saturday that I hadn’t actually published it at all. So even though I hit publish last week, it was actually from the week previous, so this note is another 2 week increment. Does that make sense? Please bear with me, as I said, I’m tired.

What happened?

• 2 years as a Service Designer, it was my anniversary on the 1st October which is kinda weird, it’s gone very quickly

• 1 discovery report being drafted
• 2 migraine
• 1 co-design catch up with someone from further afield in government (the team actually spoke to 2 but I had one of those migraine mentioned above)
• 2 vision writing sessions
• 1 user research planning session
• 1 GDAD pay framework reviewer meeting
• 1 ‘fk it, lets ship it’ submission of my GDAD pay framework submission
• 2 Directors moving on
• 1 team move under a new part of the department

What was good?

Another quieter couple of weeks in terms of the work to be done, we are finalising our discovery report so it means that all the focus has been on that; finalising our narrative, defining the roadmap for alphas and generally just agreeing what we are doing next and why. I’ve been trying to make sure everything stays true to what is being agreed and what we have clear evidence to pursue.

At this point its difficult to keep a grip on all that as there are multiple writers of the final deck which means maintaining a really steady eye on it all and making sure that everything can be backed up.

I say it’s been quieter but it’s not been that way for all the team, procurement activities for our alpha have been taking up a lot of other members of the team’s time. So it’s been quieter for me, but thats because people are not always around to be working on these things togther.

Anyway, I think we are now in a good place with a starting point for a longer-term vision, roadmap and something which situates our (digital) work in the wider programme.

What was hard?

As I said above, I’m tired, but that tiredness is also possibly down to a bit of a perfect storm of just stuff happening.

The department is almost 2 years into the merger with NHS England and in-amongst that comes all the corporate comms, frustrations of people not getting information, people leaving under voluntary exit schemes (putting pressure on) and headcount not being replaced which just generally creates an atmosphere of nervousness.

When you add into this pressure of mid-year reviews, feeling assessed as part of GDAD pay framework, its a lot, so when anything new comes up it can feel really really unsettling. So when a meeting goes into your diary at the last minute and your DD prompts everyone to make sure they attend, even when trying to suggest it’s not anything to be worried about, my brain at least is ALL THE WORRY.

So this week we learned that both directors in our team are leaving, and that the team itself is being split up and placed within different functions in the department. With that, our team are being moved under the CTO team, alongside technology and cyber. There’s lots of positive spin being put on this, but with everything else I am finding it more difficult to really know how this is going to work out, particularly as we will be moved into a silo further away from policy colleagues who we work with regularly, and into a team with more of a technology than UCD focus. Like I said, alongside everything else it just adds an additional layer of uncertainty at an already tough time.

I also heard murmurings this week of a piece of work being planned which is allegedly a 2 week discovery which needs user research but will also use AI for prototyping and testing in order to develop an MVP by the new year. I don’t know enough about the scope to know if this is the right approach or completely insane, but what I do worry about is setting precedents or expectations for how this kind of work gets done, and I’m feeling stressed about my role and what on earth the future even is for me and other UCD professionals in this weird new world.

I did buy an AI prototyping course, so I’m going to make a start on that soon, but I fear it may not be enough.

In amongst all this, I had my meeting with my GDAD pay framework reviewer, a Head of UCD in an ALB of the department. I think I actually was possibly the first person to do this, and (given some of the context mentioned above) I felt really uncertain and nervous about thew whole thing. These meetings are supposed to be an opportunity to get an independent view about your submission before you submit it.

I found it quite difficult because there wasn’t a great amount of detail about how to structure these conversations to make them genuinely useful, either for the reviewer or the person being reviewed, and you have an hour with someone (who is lovely) but who you don’t know and doesn’t know you. As a result I kinda felt like I was ‘defending my thesis’ rather than getting really useful input about what I could or should add or change to improve my submission.

I ended up just noting down the questions I was being asked, and reduced some of the context of my answers to create a number of ‘mop up’ paragraphs to the end of answers to make it clear that I had knowledge or some experience of aspects of the framework that my current role doesn’t enable me to use. I have no idea if this is right still, but I got so frustrated with tweaking it all that I just submitted it to get it over with.

And what else?

• God I bloody loved this — ever since I heard Harry talking about his love of Radiohead at an awards speech a while back I was wondering what something like this would be like:

Harry Styles & Thom Yorke | Musicians on Musicians

• The Traitors Celebrities is back on TV so that’s the current essential viewing. Claudia in a Coffin? Yes. Richard E Grant and Jerry Hall both demonstrating how being posh and rich firmly puts you in your own little universe? Yes. Lovely Joe Lycett? Yes. Hannah Fry being a solid gold legend? Yes. And more bloody Romesh? Also yes.

• My Chaos Goth Scarf has reached a point of actually being a scarf, it still needs to be a little longer but it has grown a little every day, which I guess is the objective. Its a bit of a wonkathon, in that I appear to have lost about 4 stitches or maybe like 6 stitches but hey, once you wear it it’s hardly noticeable.

OK and that’ll do, see you in another two weeks (assuming I remember to actually post this) byeeeeee.

Weeknotes S23 Ep9 was originally published in Web of Weeknotes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Some personal news

I’m leaving the NHS App team and NHS England at the end of March 2027. I accepted an offer of voluntary redundancy earlier this year but have been relatively quiet about it as it felt so far away. Now it’s less than 6 months to go.

I have mixed feelings about leaving an organisation where I’ve spent so many years. I’ve worked with some brilliant people on some impactful, high-profile products, first at NHS Digital and then NHS England. And there are exciting plans for the future. But I was looking for a change and the offer of voluntary redundancy came at the right time.

My immediate plans are to take a few months off work, enjoy spring/summer 2027 (it’s an Ashes summer!) and spend some quality time with my kids. I have some ideas about where I’d like to take my career next — I’ll look to share something in the new year.

Portfolio planning

NHS App Quarterly Planning followed its usual format but the decisions and trade-offs felt chunkier than usual this time. There are always priority calls to make, but the number and weight of those decisions was higher than usual. Some of that came from our own strategic priorities but a fair proportion are driven by other teams with dependencies on NHS App teams.

The decision-making was helped by the preparation teams had done. Estimates of the size of the work involved, as well as the capabilities and people needed, all came to bear as they worked out how to stack and sequence priorities. “If we focus on X and timebox it to 2 months, that means we can start on Y when the engineers are due to complete Z.” These planning events are where product prioritisation meets the realities of delivery planning — you need both to develop a credible plan for a portfolio of multiple products and teams.

How we plan

During a chat about OKRs in a group of my peers, I shared some info about how we do quarterly planning and goal-setting in the NHS App.

We don’t use OKRs, but there are some OKR elements in what we do — with delivery planning (capacity, dependencies, risks, etc) layered on top. This is the template we ask all teams to use:

We ask for:

• Outcome: What are you trying to achieve with this work? What is the impact it will have on users and the NHS? How will this influence the care of a patient?
• Output: What do you expect to deliver in order to achieve this impact
• Key result: How will you measure success? What is the current baseline? Do you have a target or an estimate for the size of the impact? Maximum 2 metrics per roadmap item.
• Delivery plan: List goals or milestones for each sprint in the quarter. These will not be taken as commitments :-)
• Dependencies & Risks: What are your dependencies (internal or external)? Have these been t-shirt sized? Have the relevant team(s) agreed these in their plan? What are your key risks?
• Single greatest concern: From your overall plan for the quarter, what is your greatest risk e.g. resourcing, skills or an external dependency?

Cultural highlights of the month

• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
• 30 Rock
• The Princess Bride — an outdoor screening in a local park
• Junior Bake Off — I don’t much care for Senior Bake Off but the junior version is very charming and has a lot of Harry Hill
• England v Sri Lanka at the Oval

Some links

• Why we’re expanding our ‘Authorised access’ pilot before wider rollout — NHS Wales App team
• Access is only the beginning — NHS App design history
• Design owns coherence — Peter Merholz

Monthnote: September 2026 was originally published in Web of Weeknotes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi, welcome to my MonthNotes — reflective notes looking back over the past month, loosely based on a set of questions which help me reflect. They’re my own personal notes, views, etc.

Regular structured reflection increases happiness, productivity and job performance and decreases the likelihood of burnout. And the process itself of writing these notes helps me.

“We’re still right here in the center of it all. Nothing changes but the scenery.” Hungry Paul

1. What gave you hope?

• The long-delayed ‘Hillsborough Law’ finally being approved by MPs. Hopefully it will actually become law later this year.

2. What did you experiment with?

• Writing a poem (I think it’s probably over 30 years since I’ve done that)

3. What helped you?

• Discussing team coaching with Fiona Siseman and hearing about her experience coaching at Spotify.
• Meeting up with Matt Barker to discuss high performance coaching
• Meeting up with Abi Blakeslee to discuss coaching & training people in different settings about regulating their nervous system
• Meeting up with Alex Martynov and learning about focusing* in coaching and integrating the principles of Internal Family Systems into coaching*
• Meeting up with Anne Kennedy from the Association for Coaching to discuss enabling a team coaching culture
• Reading Rebecca Rutschmann on AI in coaching (in Coaching Perspectves, Issue 50):

“AI operates within a fundamental constraint: it responds to what is said. It cannot sit with what is not said. It cannot feel the slight shift in energy when a client’s passing comment carries far more weight than the words suggest. It cannot hold the silence that sometimes does more work than any question. It cannot rupture, and repair, and have that repair deepen a relationship into something the client has never quite experienced before. It cannot be genuinely affected by what it witnesses. And that genuine affectedness is doing invisible and irreplaceable work in every coaching conversation that contains it.
The relational container is a feature of good coaching. The specific human quality of being witnessed, challenged, and cared for by another person who is also, in some sense, changed by the encounter, is the medium through which coaching works. This cannot be replicated by a system that, however sophisticated, is ultimately pattern-matching on language.”

“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Teddy Roosevelt (cf‘Expertise without empathy is just noise.’)

4. What made you proud?

• LeapSpace won the 2026 CODiE Award for Best Generative AI Solution. This achievement follows a rigorous evaluation process that included expert judging by industry leaders and technology practitioners. It reflects the excellence and innovation of the team and the impact of Elsevier’s research-grade AI solution built for trust, transparency, and complex research workflows. The judges’ feedback highlighted many of LeapSpace’s strengths:

“The product look and feel was awesome, filled with rich functionalities for a user/researcher at academia or industries.”
“Great product for the research and academic community, reducing barriers to entry and continuation in research.”

• Elsevier had some great results for the first half of the year: a step up in growth,* driven by higher value add solutions and supported by increasing pace of new product introductions*
• Elsevier Mexico has been certified by Great Place To Work, and Elsevier India has been re-certified for the second consecutive year. ‘Great Place To Work’ is a global authority on workplace culture, with certifications based entirely on employee feedback.

5. What concepts did you learn?

• ‘Temporal awareness’ (HT Brene Brown)* — the ability to understand and manage time horizons, gauge how much time you have to act under pressure, and maintain perspective against changing circumstances. (“How much time do I really have here? How do I slow down my team without losing a sense of productive urgency?)*
• ‘Symphonic awareness’ (HT Brene Brown) — Dan Pink poularized this concept in his book A Whole New Mind. It’s the ability to combine separate, unrelated pieces into a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts.
• ‘Plant blindness’* — a lack of interest, awareness and appreciation for plants in urban societies (HT Chloe)
• ‘Nature deficit disorder’ —the negative effects on mental well-being and behavioral problems that result from a lack of time outdoors

6. What frameworks did you learn?

• The THINK framework — a structured approach to help communication by encouraging you to think before communicting:*

• Deloitte identified six signature traits of inclusive leadership
• ‘HALTS’ — this acronym stands for: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired, Sick, Stressed. Some people use the shorter version HALT.* These factors, which are often hidden, affect how we behave and act, and can compromise our decision making, particularly when we’re under pressure (aka ‘Red’). So this tool can act as a checklist,* reminding us to pause and if necessary address these states and shift out of them before we then proceed and act/make our decisions from a more balanced state (aka ‘Blue’).* For me, this is a great addition to my Red2Blue coaching toolkit.*

7. What else did you learn?

• When you’re working with AI, it’s useful to bear in mind the Elephant-Goldfish Model (HT Dave Rensin)*
• McKinsey are predicting that “protecting cognitive capacity as a strategic organizational resource will increasingly differentiate organizations that adapt, innovate, and thrive through change.”*
• A few years ago (in 2023), Kim Scott reframed her concept of ‘radical candor’ as ‘compassionate candor’.*
• ‘Hardening your heart’ is a traditionally seen as a sin in Judaism
  (HT Dr Jeffrey Rutstein). As part of Yom Kippur and its preparation on Erev Yom Kippur, Jews traditionally ask for forgiveness for “the sin we have committed before Thee by hardening our hearts”.*
• A pair of new check-out questions for a team:

“Where are we in tune?’ & ‘Where are we out of tune?’

• There seem to be an increasing number of signals of a growing demand for nervous system-informed coaching,* based on the links between a leader’s regulation and high-performance outcomes. Even McKinsey are talking about “when leaders regulate themselves and strengthen relationships, organizations hold together under strain. Decisions move faster and land better, disagreement sharpens thinking without turning personal, and new ideas surface rather than shut down.”*

“You cannot manage other people unless you manage yourself first.”
Peter F. Drucker (HT Jeremy Hunter)

8. What did you get reminded of?

• Regulating your nervous system isn’t just a personal wellness practice — it’s also a core leadership function. As management consultancy Egon Zehnder puts it in the HBR, “Organizations that take this need seriously will unleash a new level of performance by enabling their leaders, and their cultures, to operate with greater regulation, connection, and care.”*

“Under stress, people do not default to their best thinking but instead revert to their most practiced and primitive survival strategies”*

• The value of the situational leadership model: I realised with a particular group of people I was working with that I was operating in one style (‘delegating/empowering /monitoring’), and I needed to adapt and operate in a style that was more aligned to their level of ‘performance readiness’.
• The importance of investing in and supporting managers — they’re the #1 factor in burnout, enjoyment, and retention.
• Katzenbach and Smith’s ‘Team Performance Curve’ doesn’t apply to teams consisting of people who share the same specialist skills (aka ‘extra-dependent teams’), and trying to make such a team work together more can be counter-productive.*
• Working in the House of Lords
• When I was given the advice “slowly slowly catchee monkey,” by David Natzler, before he was appointed the Clerk of the House of Commons, Parliament’s most senior legal and constitutional adviser.
• Meeting Sir Richard Wilson in the Cabinet Office in my first year as a crown servant on the Fast Stream programme, when he was Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service, shortly before he retired and was made a Life Peer — this month he gave his valedictory speech in the House of Lords. This was part of my training at the Civil Service College, where I also met Peter Hennessy, who gave his valedictory speech in the House of Lords* just a couple of months ago.
• ‘Action creates clarity’ (HT Yullia):

“As you start to walk on the way, the way appears” Rumi

9. What books did you read?

• Strong Ground, by Brene Brown
• Using Polyvagal Theory to Optimize Healthcare Excellence, by Randy Brazie, Geoffrey Vanderpal, and Abi Blakeslee

10. What poems touched you?

(Note: I don’t like poetry.)

• ‘Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,’ by Rilke (aka Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, Sonnet XIII)
• ‘All at once,’ by Clint Smith
• ‘Let the quiet come,’* by Henry Shukman*
• ‘The Seed Inside of Us,’ By Hetty Monksea
• ‘Bluebells,’ by Hetty Monksea
• ‘The Heart is a Tricky Customer,’ by Hetty Monksea
• ‘Heart Dance’, by Hetty Monksea
• ‘One train may hide another,’ by Kenneth Koch (HT Alex Martynov)
• ‘Vermeer,’ by Wisława Szymborska
• ‘Hat,’ by Shel Silverstein (HT Tom Geraghty):

11. What was fun?

• Watching ‘La Petite Bande’* at the Alliance française in Cambridge
• Ali G making a come back — at Wimbledon.
• Hearing Mark Moore’s story about nearly doing a house music album with Prince in 1989. He then played an unreleased demo that Prince had recorded and sent to him at that time
• Meeting up with friends to see The Tempest in the gardens of one of the Cambridge colleges, even though it poured down with rain!
• Going to the Blue Ball Inn in Grantchester for the first time

“Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.” Vicki Corona* (HT Thomas Gartenmann)

12. What did you enjoy?

• Seeing colleagues in Germany
• Watching the Wimbledon tennis finals
• Watching Leonard and Hungry Paul
• Eating a plum for the first time this year
• Eating blackberries for the first time this year, at Milton Country Park
• An evening by the river at Grantchester

“A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.” Walt Whitman*

13. What are you looking forward to in August?

• A holiday in Ireland
• Going to watch cricket — England vs Pakistan, in a test match at Lords

July 2026 was originally published in Web of Weeknotes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi, welcome to my MonthNotes — reflective notes looking back over the past month, loosely based on a set of questions which help me reflect. They’re my own personal notes, views, etc.

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative,” Oscar Wilde

Regular structured reflection increases happiness, productivity and job performance and decreases the likelihood of burnout. And the process itself of writing these notes helps me.

“A man (or womans) task in life is to give birth to himself and become what he potentially is.” Erick Frock (HT Dean)

1. What was difficult?

• Stuff I don’t write about here.
• Some other stuff I don’t write about here.

2. What did you learn?

• The phrase ‘amygdala hijack’* was coined by Daniel Goleman in his 1995 book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. The phrase describes how the amygdala in the brain can ‘take over’ before our thinking brain can intervene, causing very fast, impulsive or reflexive behaviours (related to our fight or flight responses) that are disproportionate to the situation and we may regret later. I knew the phenomenon and the phrase; I didn’t know it came from Goleman.
• The 3–3–3 method is a time-management/productivity method popularized by Oliver Burkeman. It provides a way to cut down overwhelming to-do lists by dividing your day into actions across three categories:

3 Hours of Deep Work: Spend your first or highest-energy block of the day focused entirely on your single most important project or goal.

3 Shorter Tasks: urgent or nagging tasks that you have been putting off, which require less intensive focus.

3 Maintenance Activities: Finish with three life or work maintenance chores (like clearing emails, exercising, or tidying) to keep things running smoothly.

3. What did you get reminded of?

• The scientific evidence continues to reinforce what we know: spending time in nature helps our mental health. The evidence most clearly shows how spending time in nature often helps reduce anxiety, depressive symptoms, and heart rate, and increase positive affect and relaxation as well.
• The Foreign Office’s standard responses in a time of crisis, according to Yes, Minister — aka The 4-Stage Strategy (HT Alok):

Stage 1: Say that nothing is going to happen.

Stage 2: Say that something may be going to happen, but we should do nothing about it.

Stage 3: Say that maybe we should do something about it, but there is nothing we can do.

Stage 4: Say that maybe there was something we could have done, but it is too late now.

4. What books did you read?

• Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar (HT the chap I met in a lift who was holding a copy and recommended it to me!).* I read it the traditional way, ie chapters 1–56, in that order—which is just the first of the two “official” ways to read the novel.* I plan to go back and read it the other way soon.

“One should only read books that bite and sting one. If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow to the head, what’s the point in reading? A book must be the axe which smashes the frozen sea within us.” Kafka

5. What poems touched you?

(Note: I don’t like poetry.)

• ‘Passenger,’ by Henry Shukman
• ‘Failing and Flying,’ by (HT Tom Geraghty):

“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly”

6. What was fun?

• Watching the Lord of the Ring triology
• Going to watch cricket — England vs Pakistan, in a test match at Lords:

7. What did you enjoy?

• Eating a fig for the first time this year
• Discovering Golders Hill Park, with its pergola and animals, and Hampstead Garden Suburb
• The return of Ludwig
• Celebrating my dad’s 90th birthday

A holiday in Ireland:

• Rock of Cashel
• Beara peninsula
• Dursey island, and the cable car to get to it
• Crocosmia and fusia everywhere
• the Dzogchen Beara temple
• Hooded crows, dolphins, and seals
• Rhubarb cake, still warm out of the oven
• Swimming in the sea and in a lake
• Uragh stone circle
• A solitary rose petal on the floor, amongst stones

“The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” W.B. Yeats

8. What are you looking forward to in September?

• Seeing colleagues in Amsterdam
• Running a workshop with Abi Blakeslee in London
• The final module of my team coaching training
• Going to a Ceilidh

August 2026 was originally published in Web of Weeknotes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Regular structured reflection increases happiness, productivity and job performance and decreases the likelihood of burnout. And the process of writing these notes helps me.

I welcome honest feedback on anything and everything. You can leave me anonymous feedback at: https://www.admonymous.co/richard-mclean

“A person is a number of different people, depending on who is judging him.” Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, p47

1. What went well?

• The final in-person module in the learning journey for my team coaching diploma:

2. What was difficult?

• Having a sore lower back — for the first time in years

“The agenda is subject to reality,” Joan Halifax

3. What did you experiment with?

• Having a 1:1 somatic coaching session with Eric Larson*
• Running a feedback exercise with a team to help build mutual accountability, using a fomat I hadn’t used before
• Using a rock paper scissors championship as a high-energy wrap up activity to close a training session (HT Helen)
• Running a workshop in London with Abi Blakeslee:

Abi is a world-leading expert in nervous system regulation. She has a Ph.D. in Clinical Somatic Psychology and is a Senior Faculty member of Somatic Experiencing International. She has trained thousands of practitioners worldwide, co-authored a book on applying nervous system theory in professional settings, and is a sought-after keynote speaker and certification trainer.

We called the workshop ‘Sneaky powerful: Leveraging the hidden driver of performance.’ Drawing on nervous system science, we explored how to apply findings from neurobiology to everyday behaviours at work that hold people back from performing at their best.

Our core premise was that performance at work is rarely solely about processes, skill or willpower: it’s also about nervous system state. Your best strategic thinking, your worst meeting behaviour, your gut reaction to criticism — they all trace back to the same hidden system.

Physiology drives behaviour before conscious thought kicks in, so we looked at how to read your nervous system, catch the moments it’s quietly running the show, and regulate. Learning how to do so — and helping others do the same — is a performance lever that skill-building or structural changes can’t reach. We tried to make the workshop experiential and practical, with activities, discussion, and takeaways people could use the same day.

The ‘sneaky powerful’ angle has two aspects. First, this is a low-visibility skill — most people don’t realize that their nervous system state (not just their judgment) is driving how they show up, their leadership style, team culture, and decision quality in the moment. Second, many techniques for resetting your state require you to detach from the work setting — eg in order to exerise, go for a walk, connect with a loved one, lie down, or meditate. But it’s also possible to regulate your nervous system through much more subtle techniques that you can even do during a meeting without anyone else being aware.

“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.” Mortimer Adler

4. Who inspired you?

• Emily Dowdeswell:

Two years into her role as Director of Cambridge Curiosity & Imagination, she’s still fizzing with ideas and she’s leading incredible growth and innovation, whilst staying true to the charity’s values:

“You look at first and you don’t see anything, and then you look again and you realise how beautiful it is.” Young Artscaper, Fenland

• Jill & Max:

I’ve been hearing a lot and reading a lot about AI and “the risk of cognitive offloading and the erosion of critical thinking skills,”* about how AI poses a “threat to intellectual work,” how AI makes it easy for us not to think, a concern that AI is taking away the quest for knowledge discovery, and CEOs reporting AI leading to “de-skilling in their organizations.”

So, particularly against that backdrop, it’s inspiring to work with people like Jill & Max, who are leading work to develop AI that frees up researchers from routine work and creates more space for curiosity, creativity and the critical thinking that drives discovery. For example, by exposing uncertainty, evidence and conflicting viewpoints rather than simply generating the most plausible response. This way, the hard thinking in research still happens, just better supported.

5. What made you proud?

• LeapSpace now draws on 23+ million full-text peer-reviewed articles and books, representing >50% of recent global research citations, and 2.6 billion cited references from Scopus.*
• An idependent Advisory Board — an external group of international academics — now provides guidance on the algorithms and content standards used to surface and evaluate publisher-neutral content within LeapSpace.
• Elsevier has (again) been ranked #1 best company globally for work-life balance

6. What concepts did you learn?

• ‘Judgment work’ is work that requires the ability to weigh trade-offs, read a room and move people to a decision — that is, the ability to form a nuanced interpretation of emotional and social cues, navigate ambiguity, and decide what ‘good’ looks like in context. According to the World Economic Forum and BCG (Boston Consulting Group),* AI adoption is making human judgement a more valuable skill. (They also say there’s also a healthy place in future jobs markets for interpersonal work that requires emotional intelligence, where outcomes depend on trust or persuasion.)
• Hofstadter’s law:

“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law.”

• ‘High context vs Low context communicators’ — terms were originally coined by anthropologist Edward T. Hall in The Silent Language (1959) and then picked up by Erin Meyer in The Culture Map (2014). As Cara Bellingham explains, at its core, the difference between these two personality types/communication styles “comes down to one question: ‘How much of what you say is explicitly stated and how much is left between the lines?’”

“Low-context communicators prefer clear and direct language. They want detailed follow-ups after meetings, written rules, and explicit agreements. For them, being clear is being kind.

“High-context communicators rely on reading between the lines, observing and interpreting tone and body language. They often deliver messages softly or indirectly to protect team harmony and relationships. For them, over-explaining every detail can feel patronising or unnecessary.”*

7. What else did you learn?

• Somalist is a global directory of somatic practitioners and trauma-aware bodyworkers, created to make skilled body-based work more accessible.

8. What did you get reminded of?

• The circle of appropriation:

‘When you speak to others, say only three quarters of it,’
Wumen Huikai, Gateless Gate, case 33

• Inclusion is a daily choice — not simply a corporate initiative, but a mindset that shapes how we listen, collaborate and create opportunities for others (HT Wayne)
• Under pressure, behaviour isn’t driven by personality or motivation. It’s driven by physiology — the autonomic state people are operating from in that moment.*

“I learned long ago. Never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty. And besides, the pig likes it.”* George Bernard Shaw (HT Ali)

• A key unlock for productivity is emotion regulation,* and “intentional emotional regulation requires the ability to sense, track, and feel the sensations that get interpreted into emotions — the capacity to interocept.”*
• To effectively lead change, leaders must learn to meaningfully manage their own and others’ anxiety. Building psychological safety is therefore a key enabler for effective change management, as is building trust and the ability to recognize the state of your nervous system and regulate yourself.
• Making mixtapes (HT Joel)
• My #CurryConfession (HT Oli)
• The Chimp Paradox (HT Lynette)
• Mary Jane Drummond,* who “inspired those around her not only to envision education differently but also to live life differently.” Mary was part of the panel who recruited me as a trustee for Cambridge Curiosity & Imagnation, and I remember her wry amusement in the interview at my tales of why I care so much about governance.
• Seeing Machester City’s lawyer David Pannick (who I remember from when I worked in the House of Lords) in London two years ago, at the time of the independent commission that has found the club guilty of breaching 114 financial rules #Sham
• We often wait until someone is dead before we put into words how much they have touched us
• Sharing experience & learnings and asking questions are often seen as contrasting approaches (just as some people draw a hard and fast distinction between mentoring and coaching). Yet, as Amy Edmonson suggests, this can be a false dichotomy.
• High performance comes through taking action and making progress. It’s achieved through trying, learning and iterating, not through waiting and planning for perfection. You get there by working toward the right outcome, setting high standards, and staying engaged as things develop and unfold. Holding back until every detail is resolved delays delivering value. Iteration wins. (HT J&J for the reminder)
• If you meditate a lot, it can lead to some extraordinary experiences

“There are more questions than answers,
And the more I find out the less I know.” (HT Zach)

9. What book did you read?

• Effortless Living: Wu-Wei and the Spontaneous State of Natural Harmony, by Jason Gregory (HT Elly)

“‘It’s dark because you’re trying too hard,’ said Susila. ‘Dark because you want it to be light. Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. “Lightly, child, lightly. You’ve got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.” I was so preposterously serious in those days. … Lightly, lightly — it was the best advice ever given me. … So throw away all your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling.’” Aldous Huxley, The Island (HT Tim Ferris)

10. What poems touched you?

(Note: I don’t like poetry.)

“If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, that is poetry.” Emily Dickinson

• ‘The loved ones,’ by Wendell Berry (HT Susan Cain)
• ‘I go among trees,’ by Wendell Berry
• ‘Traces,’ by Phach Huynh
• ‘Their Lonely Betters,’ by W.H. Auden
• ‘Waters of Ae,’ by Henry Shukman
• ‘Sometimes,’ by Mary Oliver
• ‘I ask Percy how I should live my life,’ by Mary Oliver
• ‘The first time Percy came back,’ by Mary Oliver
• ‘World Within A Woman’s Heart,’ by Hetty Monksea
• ‘Eight months,’ by Hetty Monksea
• ‘Rooftop Wonderings,’ by Hetty Monksea
• ‘A love poem,’ by RN:

“You are the bowl to my tangle of spaghetti,
You are the butter melting and coating each strand,
Sometimes you are the black pepper that makes me sneeze.”

11. What was fun?

• Playing badminton
• Eating dinner at Vanderlyle
• Going to a ceilidh:

12. What did you enjoy?

• Watching Planet Earth III: seals ganging up on a great white shark, sea angels, archer fish, angel shark, clown frog fish!
• Seeing colleagues in Amsterdam
• Picking blackberries, knowing that it would probably be the last time I pick them this year — and then making apple and blackberry crumble (twice)
• A retro to close a project — rewarding to hear when people have found work deeply meaningful
• A classical music concert at Stapleford Granary — the Ensemble Augelletti*
• Jacob Collier joyfully showing why music moves us (HT Lauren Currie)
• Moments of synchronisity
• Feeling the freshness of the orange on my face as the sun set over the fields opposite our house

“We do not become what we know.
We become what we repeatedly pay attention to.” — Dr Chaouki Abdallah*

“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.” — Mary Oliver

13. What are you looking forward to in October?

• Calling in on an old friend
• Going back to Bonhays in Dorset to train for a weekend with Sophie Johnson — I’ll be doing a course on the foundations of Nei Gong, including the foundational moving set of the Ji Ben Qi Gong
• Going to stay with an old friend in Switzerland for a weekend
• Going Lindy Hop dancing for the first time in ~20 years!

September 2026 was originally published in Web of Weeknotes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.