Weeknote 11: Leaving Lloyds

Today is the Lloyds Innovation Teams festive get together. Thursday is my last day with Lloyds.

When I first launched Joy I had a few chats with people about work opportunities. I was still at NHSD at the time and was being guided by my gut feeling about work. I knew I wanted something hands on and low stress.

At the time Mike Laurie was looking for service designers for the innovation team. We had a chat and immediately got on. The work Mike described sounded interesting, some of which was in the sustainability space. Working in an innovation team sounded fun. And the role was hands on.

The last 12 (almost) weeks have been a bit of a mixed bag.

On the positive side working in a large bank wasn’t nearly as scary and corporate as I thought it might be. Lloyds have a supportive design community and the people there are lovely. They are genuinely looking to design and build technology and services that make things better for people.

The role was hands on which I wanted. I ran a large round of user research which was great for brushing up on my skills in that area and regaining my confidence. I got back into concepting and low fidelity wire framing. I also really enjoyed mentoring another colleague who was new to design research.

I learnt more about innovation tools, methods and approaches. I found the rigour around business modelling particularly interesting. Using internal data on customers to size the monetary value of potential opportunities was something I hadn’t had much exposure to before. Service design could benefit from adopting this style of quantitative rigour.

Lastly and most importantly the team were lovely. I had my fears that as a contractor I would be treated as an outside but I was welcomed into the team from Day 1 and it’s lovely to be invited to be a part of the festive celebrations.

On the flip side there were some struggles and some learnings.

I still feel like I don’t fit in large organisations. After 14 years working in small ones maybe it’s just not my world. Maybe I’ll always be annoyed by how long it takes to get anything done. Maybe I’ll never have any interest in target operating models or value streams.

Design and innovation are not natural partners. This is still a curiosity to me that it was such a struggle to get the two approaches working well together – but it was. I have a suspicion it comes down to people and their attachment to process, on both sides. I hope the team make progress with this.

Sadly I experienced some bad management which led to a particularly upsetting few weeks. It makes me sad and angry that, usually white men, can reach positions of power when they seemingly have no idea how to treat other humans with basic respect. Sadly this is not new news and not unique. I’m proud that I called out that people should not be referred to as resources.

This coincided with me witnessing racism in user research and working with the team to address what happened while sharing the story openly.

With my energy reserves low after NHSD these parallel experiences were draining. I made the conscious decision to step away from Lloyds at this point. It felt empowering to be able to do that. To end a contract when agreed with no hard feelings on either side. I liked the sense of control being a contractor gave me in that moment.

Lastly, working in innovation taught me I need to move further up the reality spectrum. Things need to be more real for me. Not so real that I’m risking people’s lives with my design but there needs to be some hope that something tangible will be implemented as a result of my work.

I have mixed feelings about this being the first contract I took on. In one sense I feel like I bottled it. Like I didn’t have faith in myself or my business to focus on direct client work from the start. But I also see how it gave me financial stability in the early stages of the business.

Maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe it was a few months of relatively low stress work that got me back into hands on work and introduced me to some fun new people.

Next stop Joy. I’ll be incorporating the business this week – finally. And opening a business bank account (which feels like a milestone). Next week will be my final weeknote before a nice long festive break. I’ll be reflecting on what I’ve achieved and learnt with Joy so far and the plan for the next quarter.