South West Test and Learn Network
Yesterday I attended the kick-off of the new South West Test and Learn Network. This wasn’t the sort of networking event where you collect business cards that will eventually get lost in a drawer. Instead this was the kind where people meet in anticipation of creating or achieving something together. Much more exciting!
The room and my place in it
Though I am confident in my skills and experience, I couldn’t help but notice a seniority gap in the room. During introductions I discovered most of my fellow delegates were leading teams, or even whole departments. However, despite being a practitioner, I was treated as an equal throughout the day.
Whenever I attend events like this I’m always grateful for the opportunity, but I confess I quietly wonder what I am bringing to the table. I was pleasantly surprised, though. I got to talk – a lot (too much? Let’s hope not!). And people actually listened. Not the polite nodding-while-scanning-the-room kind of listening, but genuine curiosity. Particularly when I talked about my thoughts and experiences of digital inclusion, accessibility, and UX design.
Turns out, when you ask “what about the invisible data for people who were excluded?” in a room full of strategists, they don’t glaze over. They take notes.
Making friends and influencing people
Multiple people came and spoke to me about a small thing I’d made for my team – “Top Trumps” cards for each person that explain our skills and how best to work with us. I won’t take credit for the original idea, but the design I used for my own card has been a resounding success both in my own organisation and apparently beyond!
The fact that people were so enthusiastic about wanting to adopt my design was unexpected. But these are the daily struggles we all face, aren’t they – Knowing exactly what skills we each have around us, when job titles are vague and we’re working in organisations of thousands of people. It was heartening to discover that people love my simple, slightly daft solution!
I was pleased to meet several people who do similar Digital Inclusion and Accessibility work to me and we bonded over the usual frustrations – specifically, how to be included in procurement processes to prevent our organisations from blindly buying inaccessible products in the first place, rather than discovering the problem six months later when it’s launched and customers start telling us they can’t use it. We’ve agreed to properly catch up and share resources, and if I had taken nothing else from the day, it would still have felt like enough! Inclusion work can feel really daunting when you’re a tiny team with a mountain to climb, but making these contacts makes the work feel more achievable.
The quiet observer
My tendency when I go to events like this is to watch how things unfold, and observe behaviours. It’s a neurodivergent habit formed over many years of having to mask in social situations, but it can also be quite enlightening.
Something we struggle with in local government is working in silos. We are huge, fragmented organisations covering a vast range of specialisms. Over the course of the day, however, I noticed this tendency towards silo working sneaking in.
The event had just done the exact thing our organisations do every day. To break us into smaller groups, they gave us areas of focus – different topics for different teams. That’s how to create silos 101. Unfortunately we all know from our own organisations that we cannot hope to address huge challenges like culture change or community connection from inside a silo, it would be like trying to dry yourself off while still standing in the shower.
I also noticed that we potentially missed an opportunity to be the experiment ourselves. Had we collectively agreed on a solvable problem, the groups we split into could have each agreed on a different method of approach and we could have compared outcomes. After all, discovering successful ways of working is one of the biggest questions we’d all like to answer.
I didn’t say this out loud as I was observing it. Partly because I was still forming the thought, and partly because I wasn’t sure if pointing out a structural flaw in the event itself was considered “good networking”. But writing this now: the irony wasn’t lost on me.
This is not to say that the format we’re going with is wrong. Arguably as long as we collectively get something out of the exercise there is no “wrong” here, and I look forward to seeing what comes out of the subjects that were chosen.
Would I go again?
Yes, absolutely. I’m looking forward to continuing to connect with this wonderful group of people. But next time I hope I find the courage to gently ask:
Are we designing experiments that reflect how messy real collaboration is – or how tidy we wish it was?
What was most exciting was the commitment amongst us all to work in the open, and to collectively figure out what that might look like in real time.
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