Posts, page 3 of 4

Job hunting and interviewing can be so stressful—the anxiety and social pressures of that experience is often compounded even more for those that are neurodivergent. What advice would you give someone with ADHD that is job hunting, interviewing, etc?

ADHD Jesse

# #adhd #neurodiversity #job-interview in quotes

My boss put me forward to participate in a course called Be The Leader You Can Be, which is run by the folks at https://www.futureengagedeliver.com/. Our trainer introduced us to the concept of FED:

  • Future - where are you going?
  • Engage - Are you taking people with you?
  • Deliver - delivering through people and helping them grow

Growing your leadership covered three things:

  • Notice your energy
  • Conscious practice
  • Actively build your support team

John shared a Peter Drucker quote:

Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.

The group discussed the quote and keywords and phrases that came up were authenticity, honesty, ernegy is contagious, channel your energy, consider where your energy is sourced, e.g. home, social, work. John broadened the definition of energy by describing 4 types of energy and to consider these energies when making change:

  • physical
    • positive leaning: presence, action, pace, drive, getting things done
    • negative leaning: aggresive, chaotic, exhausting, distracting
  • intellectual
    • positive leaning: expertise, innovation, analysis, logic, challenge
    • negative leaning: paralysis, patronising, slow, unclear
  • emotional
    • positive leaning: empathy, caring, connection, vulnerability, passion
    • negative leaning: intrusive, indulgent, manipulative, emotive
  • spiritual
    • positive leaning: values, belief, ambition, purpose, cause, meaning
    • negative leaning: dogmatic, idealistic, idealogical, irrational

A group member made the point that depending on the context, it doesn't hold true that the energies can be easily categorised into positive or negative. E.g. in a prison context, you do not want to show your vulnerable side to prisoners.

We also talked about how an energy can dominate an organisation to its detriment. Leadership is required to create a space to introduce other energies.

Then we switched to 3 modes and discussed the differences between the modes:

  • leader mode
    • Focused on the "why"
    • Keywords: long-term, vision, hope, purpose, growing others, culture, relationships, inspiration, responsibility, context
  • operator mode
    • Focused on the "what"
    • Keywords: executing, taking directions, task focused, actions, short-term, repetitive, tangible, autopilot
  • manager mode
    • Focused on the "how"
    • Keywords: delegating, prioritising, planning, analysing, efficiency, directing, controlling, supervising

First jobs tend to be operator mode. Mine was a paper boy. I had well-bounded responsibility, knew exactly what I needed to do and when, performance was easy to measure.

# #leadership #workshop in posts

This week I've taken the time to watch a few things and write a tweet thread that proved popular.

Inquiry: Challenges In Implementing Digital Change

First up, was the Public Accounts Committee inquiry into Challenges In Implementing Digital Change. The committee used the written evidence well to ask the witness well-formed questions. Yet one member demonstrated the lack of understanding that one of the pieces of evidence opened with:

"We draw attention to the lack of awareness and understanding across senior levels in government (both politicians and civil servants) about what ‘digital transformation’ actually is." - CDC0001 - Challenges in implementing digital change

Dan Carden MP, instead of using the evidence to fill in his knowledge gaps, gave his ideas on how to implement digital change:

Surely starting every system from scratch in one department and the numbers of failures we've seen, if you were creating a system from the beginning wouldn't you set one system up across government - video

Overtime, we've learnt small is generally better (don't prematurely optimise though). But thanks for your ideas Dan.

The whole inquiry is worth a watch. The witnesses do well, which is encouraging, yet frequent naive questions or points made by the committee somewhat proves the point of the inquiry. Ironic.

Consciously Hybrid, the film

I found this film via Tech Market View, who reviewed the Netflix-style documentary:

The film does indeed capture very well the challenges organisations face as they attempt to juggle legacy debt alongside new cloud platforms, and the dual IT environments these create.

HPE have a shiny manifesto too, which does repeats the themes many people say in the public sector, yet nothing gets done about them, e.g. "Current challenges such as legacy procurement and budget processes that are predominantly focussed on capital expenditure, only perpetuate the budget drain caused by legacy IT."

I was nodding at everything Tracey Jessup (CDIO of UK Parliament) was saying... "Work with treasury to think how to alter the Green Book and make sure it can best meet what's needed in the current cloud environment whilst also hitting everything it needs to around transparency for the public and the treasury."

The documentary features many more public sector people. Good to know there's a growing consensus on what the major systemic blockers to digital transformation are.

Suggestion: formally detach the DDaT function from Civil Service pay controls

I did a tweet thread! And it picked up some interest. What do you think Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO)?

# #digital-transformation #pay in posts

I've made a pact with Bex last week to write a blog post if she did (and she did). So here's my last minute contributions on a brilliant speaking workshop I attended a few weeks back run by Dylan.

Eleven of us from various bits of MoJ D&T were hosted by Dylan on Zoom over 2 days, 5 hours each day. Dylan ran a few warm-up exercises to get us all limbered up, then eased into the topics.

A few highlights for me were:

  • threat model what could go wrong with connecting with your audience
  • a good talk lasts around 18 minutes according to TED. Go longer if you're telling a good story.
  • Dylan met Peter Hintjens, which triggered a memory of Peter's blog post A Protocol for Dying (he underwent voluntary euthanasia a few months after publishing)
  • learning about @reverentgeek
  • if presenting at home, smarten yourself up and present standing up
  • thoroughly entertained and educated by the 3 minute talks the 11 other attendees gave
  • takes a lot of time to put together a 3 minute talk with or without slides. becomes easier with practice

Now I need to put what I learnt into practice!

Find out more about the speaking workshop on Dylan's website. I wholeheartedly recommend.

# #speaking in posts

Noteworthy new music to my ears:

A bit of classical:

New releases:

Podcast highlights:

News:

# #music in posts

Notes from a talk called Difficult listening and having difficult conversations by David Yee.

  • we're not listening if we're not paying attention, inferring meaning and building shared understanding
  • inferring meaning - paying attention = jumping to conclusions
  • inferring meaning - building shared understanding = misalignment
  • paying attention
    • respecting the gift
    • focusing on the speaker
    • reducing noise
  • inferring meaning
    • critical thinking
    • short-term memory
    • non-verbal messages
  • building shared understanding
    • reflection
    • response
    • validation and conversation satisfaction
  • challenges:
    • you can't hear, plus tactics for reducing distraction
      • turn on do not disturb
      • quit group chat if you can
      • full-screen video
      • take sparse notes, deliberately
      • notice and reduce surrounding noise
      • acknowledge distraction you can't avoid
      • try again later if distractions can't be moved
    • you hear only what you expect to hear, plus tactics for identifying meaning
      • honor the sanctity of conversation
      • note your own defensive or misinterpreted reactions
      • paraphrase for content
      • prompt for detail
      • ask open questions
    • strong emotions and empathetic listening, plus tactics for navigation hard conversations
      • acknowledge your own feelings and internal monologue, get out of your own head after acknowledgement
      • respect pauses. journalists know how to do this. let silence work.
      • check your power. consider whether advice is right for the context
      • check your nonverbal cues
      • make deliberate space for emotion without trying to solve it
        • unless emergency, resist the urge to be helpful immediately
        • ensure counterpart is heard and understood
      • know when to walk away. ask to pause until people have calmed down

# #listening in posts

Pagham is on the south coast. There's a nature reserve, a lagoon and a shingle beach. Somersaulting wind surfers put on a great display. The wind on West Wittering beach made for easy kite flying.

Made it back to the caravan as the weather turned. Listened to the Voyage to Brobdingnag, Gulliver's Travels.

Littlehampton sea front for 3 hours, wet at the start, a decent sunset at the end.

A quick recce to Bignor Hill car park to plan for a later star gaze. Half light to the west, dark to the east. Saw the moon peep over the hill, so we ran up the top and were treated to a harvest moon, which the boy noted was pumpkin colour. It was halloween as well. This episode of Ramblings describes a night walk at full moon from Amberley to Bignor Hill via the South Downs way.

Next day, segway session, cleared caravan, afternoon tea for lunch in Amberley and a walk along the River Arun.

# #places in posts

This week, I've been off work. I have more time to listen to things. Since the first lockdown, I've lost the 2 hours a day commutting with headphones on. That's about 240 hours over 6 months! Lots that I've missed. And I'm driving less. Listening time happens when I walk and when I'm at the gym, rarely when I'm sitting passively at home. Watching YouTube or TV gets me listening at home.

BBC stuff:

Noteworthy new music to my ears:

New releases:

  • Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez, a compilation of the tracks Gorillaz have released over the last year.
  • Alice in Wonderland by Nahre Sol. Stunning piano player. She has a great Youtube channel. But nothing making me want to listen a second time. I was reminded of Lubomyr Melnyk as I listened to some of her arpeggio pieces. Melnyk's music truly captivates and is hypnotic. I saw him play once at the Royal Festival Hall.

# #music in posts

Small, post-lockdown adventures:

  • The boy and I went out for ate breakfast at a local cafe. I had Aussie Eggs, he had a kids fry up.
  • Met a friend in a park. She's bringing our annual local festival online!
  • Met with up with my friend Mark at a pub last night!

I made some music yesterday on my Akai MPC X. For the drums, I took inspiration from Massive Attack's Teardrop.

Over the past couple of months I've markedly improved note taking and organising life using digital tools. The two tools I most use are Roam Research and Notion. I'm going to try out Raindrop.io for bookmarking.

# #lockdown #note-making #making-music in posts

Happy Valley in Croydon Borough

I'm enjoying my week off work.

The boy and I went to Happy Valley and flew a kite in one of the meadows surrounded by woodland. In the evening had a few beers in my road's communal garden with 10 of my closest neighbours :-) And one of my neighbour's finished fixing my bike! Neighbours are great.

I cycled to Selsdon Wood and back, and discovered the Vanguard Way, which is now on my walk list. And went for a walk with a friend in the evening.

I took delivery of an Akai MPC X and made some tunes. Very steep learning curve. There's so many great people to learn from on YouTube, on just any topic. YouTube is revolutionary when it comes to learning from people's tacit knowledge. Originally found this article from this twitter thread where one tweet refers to YouTube as "the internet of know-how".

Massively available video recordings of practitioners in action change this entirely. Through these videos, learners can now partially replicate the master-apprentice relationship, opening up skill domains and economic niches that were previously cordoned off by personal access.

Also, found homes for things I don't need anymore. Facebook Marketplace and local buy/sell groups is the only time I venture on to Facebook. I had a quick look over the fence at the social feed. Still awful.

And the boy went back to school and is enjoying it! On the walk back home, after school, I noticed people drinking pints outside one of the locals.

# #walking #places #making-music in posts