Monthnote: March 2025
This is my first set of monthnotes in 2025. At the time it felt like too much to reflect on January and February. With that in mind, I’ll also include some notes here that cover the year to date.
As this is my first monthnotes in a while, a reminder of why I write these. I’ve found it useful when other people have been clear about this in their own monthly or weekly notes.
Firstly, my monthnotes are for self-reflection. I remember and process things best by writing about them. It’s also easy to forget what I’ve done, or where I’ve been, so these notes become useful diary entries to look back on over time.
I am still careful with what I share in the context of my job – but I’m always happy if anyone in my team at TPXimpact, or if any of our clients want to ask me to expand on what I write about. I might sometimes have been a little vague about something, but that’s probably because it’s within the context of working in a PLC business, or it’s a situation that involves respecting the privacy of other people. This is working in the open but with care and consideration for the responsibilities of my role as someone who manages and leads teams.
Work
Work has generally been fine since the start of the year. I’m finding a reasonable balance between internal ops, business-facing work and planning. This is alongside some regular work with clients, and some speaking as part of our training programmes.
I find that the right balance for me is to make sure that I have one or two things outside of internal-facing work each week. This gives my week focus and momentum, as it usually includes some type of travel and in-person engagements.
Some highlights over the past few months have included our DT Camp event, bringing together all of our Digital Transformation business in London back in January. We spent the day together at The Royal Institution which was a great choice of venue. It was also the first time I’ve had our whole design team in one room in over 12 months, which was an important reminder of the importance of these moments.
I’ve also had good days in Wales and Scotland working with our leadership training programmes. I’ve talked about these in previous monthnotes, but it was a real highlight spending a day with a new group of leaders in Llandudno back in February (working with the CDPS Academy team again on Leading modern digital services). Sometimes the discussion and topics really land well, and I came away from this one particularly energised and with lots of new ideas to think about. It was also nice to briefly visit a seaside resort I don’t think I’d been to since my early childhood. It’s something I love about my role, that it occasionally takes me outside of city centres, to every corner of the UK – I ought to make a list (or a map) of all the places I’ve visited at some point for work.
Other notable travel in the past few months has taken me to Liverpool and York to work with both existing and potential new clients, as well as some time in both our Manchester and London hubs.
I’ve also attended a couple of breakfast events that we’ve hosted in our London hub this year. The Digital Forum event in January was excellent – hosted by Polly Cook and Jess Ferguson and focused on the topic of making the shift to preventative healthcare. The Service Patterns event we then co-hosted in March with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) – as part of Services Week – was also excellent – there’s a video of that event here.
Inside TPXimpact, we have been managing a few bigger changes to how we work in our design leadership space over the past few months. I want to say a big thank you to both Vicky Brown and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino who have now both moved on from roles in my leadership team. Vicky hasn’t gone far, and is working in a new role with our client services team – doing a great job there so far. Alex worked closely with me as our Design Director for the past 18 months, and I’m really grateful for all the work she did supporting me and working with our teams during this time.
Overall, it’s been busy over the past 3-months – Q4 always looks like this in a consultancy business, and there’s been the usual big focus on planning and preparing for the next financial year. These days, I’m very familiar with these business and reporting cycles – it will be my eight-year anniversary in this role (or variations of this role) in August this year.
Health
I’ve had continued fun a games with my ENT referral since my health updates back in October. This ended in some disappointing news when I finally saw my ENT specialist again last week. I’m now being referred to another specialist in Manchester for more tests, which I anticipate isn’t going to happen quickly.
I often share the health system failures I experience… The latest was that my appointment with a specialist was cancelled in February, 10 minutes before it was due to start. The reason? No one had realised the consultant was on holiday when booking a series of appointments, mostly for people on long waiting lists like me. It’s another example of NHS systems that rely on manual checks, processes, and (probably) spreadsheets and email.
What I’ve been writing
I’ve been deliberately stepping up and finding my feet with writing again this year. I had mostly stopped blogging when focussing on writing a book in 2021 and have used my personal blog less since that point – more for updates and reflections like this post, and with a handful of original blog posts each year.
I’m definitely back in a thinking and reflecting period. Mostly making sense of AI in the context of design and digital transformation. I’m not going to list all the recent posts I’ve written here – you can find them all on this blog by searching or by browsing some of the topics – like Digital Transformation.
I do sometimes worry about sharing what I’ve written more widely – in part because I’ve had people pointing to my work as self-promotion in the past. It’s not. But if it helps others and helps shape work elsewhere, then great. I also get asked: “Why bother” if you’re not self-promoting or trying to build an audience. For me, it’s the process and the accountability of working in the open that’s still the most important thing.
A couple of posts I will highlight from the past month.
- Things get smaller the further you step away from them: This is about taking a mental health day for a long walk. It best describes how everything in the world had been feeling at the start of this year, and how I’ve struggled to hold it all. I’m finding my own ways to do that now.
- Service pattern people: If you’re interested in strategic service design, then this is my own attempt to help move this type of work forward. It’s an area I’ve worked in and thought about a lot since 2016. I’ve also tidied up previous posts and tagging on this blog, so you can more easily find everything I’ve written about service patterns.
Writing is also part of my process of planning for a new talk this summer. I’ll be speaking at UX Scotland in June 2025. This is my first visit since their very first event in 2013. It’s also the tenth edition of the conference. My talk will be a reflection on how UX and design have changed since that first conference, but will also be my own optimistic take on ‘design in the AI-era’ – all the writing I’m doing exploring this topic will eventually feed into this.
What I’ve been reading
I’ve been reading less so far this year.
Back in January, I read Wintering by Katherine May, and I have started The Life Impossible by Matt Haig, which I’m enjoying so far.
I’m trying to buy fewer books, but have just purchased all three of Celeste Ng‘s novels. On more work-related topics, I’ve now got a paperback copy of The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies. I previously started the audiobook of this, but decided I needed to read it instead. It’s the sort of book I will need to take notes on to understand the ideas fully.
More walking…
Besides my mental health day in the Langdales (see the blog post I’ve linked to above), I’ve also been out on a few other walks since Christmas and as the weather improves.
I did a very wintery walk at the very start of the year from Grasmere up to Blea Rigg and Tarn Crag via Easedale Tarn. This was followed by a short visit in February back to Helm Crag, with my son Zac starting to check off some of his own smaller Wainwrights. I also did my own walk to complete Broom Fell via a return visit to Lord’s Seat from the Whinlater visitors centre. This one was significant as it got me to the halfway point on the list of 214 Wainwrights summits.
Since then I’ve been out to Knott Rigg and Ard Crags – a walk that came with it’s own short story. I’m now at 114 Wainwrights completed in total with the big Langdale walk.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.