Monthnotes — March 2020
When I began writing my monthnotes in September last year, I could never have anticipated that six months later I’d be working from home full-time in the midst of a global pandemic.
At Deeson, we’ve been set up for full remote working for many years now, so the impact on our day-to-day operations wasn’t too great. We took the decision to move to home working quite early to help protect our teams and reduce our potential for spreading coronavirus to more vulnerable people.
Even with that preparedness, we’ve still had a lot to learn.
We’ve all had to learn about what it’s like to work from home full-time, while adjusting to the fundamentally different lifestyles we will lead for the next few months.
On a more practical level we’ve been redesigning client workshops that we used to deliver face to face for our clients — taking account of the different capabilities and experience of workshopping over video conference.
It’s been good to see the Deeson team and colleagues across the wider Panoply group coming together to share experiences and learn about how we can best continue our work in this new environment.
We’ve also worked hard to support clients — reprioritising projects to accommodate their new priorities and mobilising teams to rapidly scope and deploy new solutions to problems that didn’t even exist this time last month.
Thinking more widely about what we’ve seen happen in the past few weeks, you can read my observations about the power of pivots in my final newsletter for Deeson.
Today marks the end of my four-year stint as Managing Director at Deeson.
There are so many highlights from my time in this role that it’s hard to pick out favourites. Being part of the agency’s transformation into a leading UK digital agency that works with high profile clients has been a joy.
I’ve gained a lot of fulfilment from seeing Deeson teams and clients working together to deliver great work — whether that’s strategy consultancy, experience design or complex technology implementations.
And our progress in increasing diversity within our workforce is something I’m also particularly proud of.
I also wrote a blog post about my reflections on four years leading the agency and my ten leadership lessons I took away from the experience.
I’ve loved working with team members to take the agency forward and I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Tim Deeson — agency founder — who hired me in 2014 to help take the agency forward and has been a valued colleague, friend and advisor ever since.
I’m moving on to work once again with Tim and Dr Ronald Ashri within our parent group, The Panoply. I’ll be joining leading conversational AI consultancy Greenshoot Labs as Chief Growth Officer as well as working on wider cross-group initiatives too.
So while tomorrow marks a new start for me professionally, that change does seem somewhat insignificant compared to what’s happening beyond our four walls and the amazing work being delivered by people in public and essential services in the UK and worldwide right now.
Their work helping the country get through the immediate future and deal with the recovery from Covid-19 in our societies and economies is something that we should all be immensely grateful for.
I hope one legacy from our shared experience of a global pandemic is a greater professional and societal respect for people working in public and essential services. Their contributions to society have been taken for granted for far too long.
