August 2022

What I’m celebrating 🎉, learning 🎓, and finding challenging 🚧 this month.

🎉 Something I’m celebrating:

• Taking a big leap into a new organisation and new sector by starting my role at Opencast this month. Settling in and finding the process of making a professional home here really exciting and energising.
• Writing and posting about my learnings from working to bring design to health and social care. This is hard (see below), but I’m doing it!
• The Opencast Team! For the warm welcome, for making me feel at home and part of the gang already. Too many people to tag here, but of course a special mention to the UCD and SD peeps!

🎓 Something I’m learning:

• Fascinating to see behind the curtains of Opencast ‘growing up’ into a larger and more distributed company. Learning a lot from seeing the team and leaders be deliberate with putting processes in place to support the culture and everyday running of the company. Aware growth brings many changes and challenges, and interested to see how this team will grow not just in numbers.
• Loving the clarity and openness of a competency framework that sets out each role at Opencast and what is expected in terms of consultancy and technical practice. Lots of thinking has clearly gone into this and it makes professional development, feedback, and progression clear and open.
• Learning what the office at Opencast is really for! Spoiler alert, not long commutes to a half-empty place and sitting on calls all day, phew. Thinking lots about hybrid work and the immense opportunities it brings for work and life and communities. How hybrid hard to get right and causes widespread dysfunction. And how Opencast can keep building on the great model we have to continue getting this right. Loved the Ezra Klein Show’s episode ‘The Office is Dying, it’s time to rethink how we work’ on this topic, highly recommend it!

🚧 Something I’m finding challenging:

• Reflecting on over 5 years of working to bring design to the NHS across various roles. Wondering about the impact and legacy of this work. Wanting to share and support others continuing or starting the same journey, but finding it difficult to articulate and summarise all I learnt over a relatively long period of time. And feeling very aware I don’t have all the answers and didn’t get it right all of the time. I tried anyway, you can find my first few posts this topic here.

Originally published at https://uteschauberger.com.