June 2024

Moving into winter now and half of the year has gone!

The Vibe

Well winter certainly descended this year. I felt it more than usual having switched to walking the dog in the mornings. The 6:20am wake up was now in complete darkness and so got to witness a few sunrises. We’ve had a few cold days - no frosts, but the days where it’s windy are icy.

The weather has challenged my whole exercise regime. I’ve kept up my long walks with Frankie on the weekend, but I have not visited the gym that often. I find the short days of winter take it out of me. It’s hard to be motivated and stay motivated. There are quite a lot of personal projects that have not received the time they deserve, and part of that is just feeling mentally spent at the end of the day.

The main reason for that is the merger. I’m now fully involved in merger work and being challenged by how things are being done. There’s a lot of rhetoric about codesign and collaboration, but they are just words on a page. There’s very little productive collaboration or engagement baked into any of the processes, and we are defaulting back to the good old hierarchy. And I’m so far down the ranks that it’s impossible to influence decision-making, flag risks, or contribute to anything meaningful. Despite 5 years of experience doing this exact thing, I, and most of my colleagues, have been siloed and ignored.

All the talk about well-being and being people-centred flies out the window in this situation. I keep trying to limit my personal investment in this thing - it is just a job, but it’s so hard to do that from a professional integrity perspective. I don’t let projects fail, I don’t let mediocre work continue, I don’t keep making the same mistakes. But that’s also when I can influence the process and what’s happening. I don’t have that now, so it’s just one frustration after another.

So, the professional face goes on at work, but there are cracks. I know I come off sometimes as a critic, but offering critique is not the same. It’s just that managerialism brings a complete lack of practicality or awareness of the work required. Knowing the jobs to be done is not the same as how the job is done, which becomes more obvious daily. There’s a massive disconnect between the numbers on the spreadsheet and how to achieve the expected outcomes.

My beef comes from our current work that requires 1800 courses to be developed in 18 months, all produced in 10-week cycles. This is the first project I’ve ever worked on where no one can or will tell me, “What is a course? What are the expectations of what will be in a course within this time frame? What is the deliverable? What does ‘done’ look like?”. I have led projects, managed them, planned, developed, cost and implemented them from inception to completion - this is the first time I don’t know what we’re doing!

Anyway, life outside of work has been good. My Aunt and Uncle visited. However, Frankie was not a fan of a new male in the house and made my Uncle feel quite intimidated. He is such a different dog around others, especially men in our home. I know it’s the protecting nature of the pack, but we will need to do some training on this.

On one of the weekends, we headed out to K1 winery and did a tasting in their very pretty cellar door, looking across the pond and the trees still in their autumn hues.

I did manage to do one creative thing — building Alt Adelaide as a parody to the branding due to be unveiled on the 15th of July. Curious how it pans out.

Watched

Listened

I've been listening to a lot of Scene on Radio over the last few months, but I got stuck on the Seeing Whiteness series. I stopped not because of the quality, but because of an idea from Chenjerai Kumanyika - who spoke of Race as a Technology.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Yeah but I have to be honest. I'm proud of Blackness but I've come to see it less as my, you know, an identity, and more as, like, a technology.

John Biewen: Meaning?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Yeah, it’s kind of a weird word, but I see it as a technology because I see Blackness as not something that is hardwired into our biology, that just determines who we are. Instead it’s something that we use. And I have to think about it like that because I have to recognise the way that it can also be used against us. And when it's being used against us, I cast a sceptical and pessimistic eye toward it. Right? But, you know, I'm trying to be sensitive to, like, where Blackness, where the technology of Blackness fails. You use that technology, and it doesn't tell you what you need to know about a group of people or a person. But also to navigate in this white supremacist country and to live with a sense of political clarity and joy and possibility, I also tap into that other side of Blackness I was talking about earlier. And I'm optimistic about, you know, tapping into those resources

That stopped in me in my tracks and I needed to stop and think through that. I still want to unpack the idea more, but I've started listening again.