NHS Digital – 10 weeks

Ten weeks ago I started a new role as Lead Service Designer at NHS Digital. I started that role from the ‘comfort’ of my spare bedroom during a global pandemic. It’s been difficult. It feels important to state these last two points because life as a remote designer sometimes feels like it’s been normalised – for me it feels anything but normal.

Shaping my role

I’ve spent the last 10 weeks figuring out the shape of my role. I feel lucky to be joining a corner of NHS Digital that has a fairly high level of design maturity. Over the last few years Citizen Health Tech have delivered NHS.uk as we now know it, the NHS App, NHS Login (our identity verification system) and played a significant part in the Covid 19 response.

My role is to help position NHS.uk as a ‘front door’ for transactional services. This means designing and delivering services that cut across products and measuring our success against wider health outcomes.

The way I see it at 10 weeks in is my role breaks down into 3 parts (I like threes you’ll notice):

1. Strategy: constructing and communicating a vision then laying the foundations for change
2. Delivery: leading end-to-end service teams that cut across silos to deliver transactional services
3. People: Helping the design community be the best they can be

I’ve been deliberately vague here because I’m still figuring exactly what it means to deliver on these 3 areas but having them had felt like an anchor. I’ve even started colour coding my diary so I can see how much time I’m spending on each.

Putting in place survival techniques

This work is hard – there are no two ways about it. It is hard in any organisation but I’m working in one of the most complex systems on the planet – during a healthcare crisis.

The reality of this complexity and my lack of control over 99% of it has dawned on me this week. And ultimately this is why I’m writing this blog. I want to hold myself to account on the things I’ve decided to do differently. These break down into ways of thinking and things to do.

Ways of thinking

I’ve done a lot of thinking over the last week. I thought about all the difficult things I’ve been through in my life and how I got through each of those times. I also reflected on how difficult I find ‘starting’. This is because I want to master things immediately. I’ve never managed to stick at a hobby for long for this very reason. Jobs have always been more long lasting but my feelings in the early days are the same. This is said while staring longingly at the £40 yoga mat I purchased in week 2 of lockdown!

Add to this the fact that when you start a new job you automatically compare it to what you just left – but this isn’t a fair comparison. We should compare the start of a new job to the start of your last job – not the end of your last job. It’s ridiculous to think I could compare something I’ve known for 5 years with something I’ve known for 10 weeks.

I’ve also been working with a coach recently. Two aspects of coaching have been important that feel relevant here. Firstly I did some work to figure out my values. One of my values is impact. So picking something meaningful that will be my beacon through the difficult times feels important. Having something I can aim for so I can let some of the other stuff go.

Another technique has been the concept of your inner leader. My inner leader is an older version of myself who is incredibly chic and sits in her window seat overlooking the beach with a sense of calm. She is supposed to calm me down during times of panic but recently I’ve also been thinking about the pressure I put on myself to achieve. I’ve been thinking about how this job will just be one of many things I’m proud of when I’m older. Painting a picture of this in my head (while driving down the M1) has helped. Seeing the books I’ll write, the house I’ll build, the business I’ll help to succeed and the friends and family that are around me has helped take the pressure off this job as being the key to my success.

So I’m going to tell myself 3 things moving forwards:

1. You find starting difficult – give it time
2. Eyes on the prize – pick one thing and care most about the things that will get you closer to this
3. Your success in life doesn’t depend on this job

Things to do differently

Lastly I wanted to think about what I can do to preserve how I feel now and put some preventative measures in place.

Things are going to be tough and I want to give myself the best chance of getting through the next 10 weeks so I’ll be:

1. Prioritising self care – for me this means time to think and reflect. Morning journaling, evening baths and long walks.
2. Keeping track of where I’ve added value – I did this in the first 2 weeks but I let the habit slip. I’m going to bring it back so I can hopefully start to bank some small wins. I might even colour code these too (crazy I know!)
3. Getting support/inspiration from outside the organisation – I have some wonderfully supportive colleagues, some of whom I’ve still never met face-to-face. However my wider design network has always been a great source of support and I also miss events. I need to tap back into this.

Being a designer in the world we all now find ourselves in feels different. Starting a new role without real human interaction in a complex system when you struggle with uncertainty is a challenge to say the least. But I’m doing the best with what I have.

I hope to share every 10 weeks (or so) as I live through my 20 and 30 week milestones.