2025 Weeknote 41 : Transformation is a team sport

October 6 – 12

My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, often focused on work, but with personal stuff, too. Learn more about weeknotes.

Professional weeknotes

This week was largely one of getting back into the swing of things post-vacation. It’s also the start of the fourth quarter, so it feels like now’s the time to wrap-up the year. Here’s a bit of what’s up…

• As discussed in past posts, I’m still working on an approach to reviewing and updating our team structures to meet the challenges of the moment. I discussed “squad model” and Team Topologies stuff with my leadership team this week and while they want to chat a bit more (and we will), I’m about ready to launch a broader mini-team to spend time over the next few months investigating these organizational ideas and how they might apply to our specific situation. We’ll start with an environment scan, picking up what’s around us and inside our teams today, spending extra time on identifying problems we need to solve. In the past I would have gone away by myself, read up on everything, and come back with a grand plan. But not this time. This time I’m taking a portion of the team with me on the journey. Not everyone needs to have an epiphany on the mountaintop. But I want to de-mystify the process. To that end, and to get get things going, I plan to:
  • Setup a series of meetings / discussions /working sessions to explore these issues. Also assign a mix of books, articles, videos, and more to spark thinking. We’ll use sticky notes, whiteboards, conversation, and some kind of online space for sharing thoughts as we go through the process. The goal? Assess current state, identify problems to solve, explore new models, and determine what—if anything—to pursue, and how.
  • Include all four managers that report to me, each of which leads a specific skills-oriented team. Existing leaders need to be included because they are in a position to represent their teams’ interests, and they are also more-senior folks that should be participating in these kinds of discussions anyway.
  • Include one staff member from each team those managers lead. We need to ensure the interests and perspectives of team members are included in the process, without the filter of the manager always coloring the discussion. It’s also a professional development opportunity—grappling with bigger questions of org structure, mission, and future vision that most folks don’t engage with regularly.
  • I’ll pull in our HR folks at appropriate points, when we get closer to envisioning new structures and roles. Our organization believes in providing opportunities for growth and respecting the needs of individual team members, and HR can act as back pressure against going too far, too fast. Plus, our HR leader has worked in an “agency model” before, with success, and may be able to provide some thoughts.
  • This should all get going in the next week or so, as time’s-a-wastin’!
• I’m realizing that my interest in discussing team structures and our future is kind of the next phase of my own development as a “team turnaround” professional. In the last several years and last 2-3 jobs I’ve gotten good at fixing broken teams, especially when they are completely broken. But going from “fixed” to “really good” is the next wave, and I’m not as good at that yet. That’s my goal above. We already have a good team. But how do you make one great? That’s the skill set I’m trying to build now. The only question is, what does the future hold for a team turnaround artist that’s already turned around their team?
• Meanwhile, the Consult > Analyze > Deliver (CAD) model we developed over the past year is also undergoing some changes. This was created to clearly identify an intake process for new work, but also to clarify what needs to happen to ensure those new work efforts are successfully managed through their lifecycles. We’ve run into trouble because each of the three phases has become the unique domain of three separate teams, causing hand-off or transitional strains that have slowed service delivery and frustrated each of the teams. (This is addressed in the Team Topologies stuff I noted earlier.) So we’re trying to figure out where CAD goes next. More on that soon, I’m sure.
• Finally, we made some progress this week in our efforts to figure out a digital ADA compliance plan. We now know we’re taking a lead role in managing the county’s response to the new rules. We’re pushing to make this more of a team effort, but everyone is unsure of how to get started and what their role will be. So now our team has to develop a strategy and framework for how to manage risks, remediation, and re-education for everyone that produces digital content or digital services. We also took a meeting with a potential vendor, and have another for this coming week. This is all a bit nerve-wracking because we’re being asked to lead a menagerie of agencies from the sidelines and, so far, do not have any resources with which to do it. We still think we can make things better, and we still think we can get resources. Suffice it to say it’s gonna be a wild ride and it will be fascinating to see how things play out after the deadline next spring.

Professional links

• For those that might like an intro to Team Topologies, there are a ton of resources on YouTube. I’ve only started scratching the surface. But this one—a presentation by one of the authors from last year—seems to do a pretty good job and delving into the concepts:

• And one other item this week—a podcast: How to Lead with Courage in Chaotic Times. I recently shared this with some leadership colleagues, but failed to share it here. This 30-minute discussion is great for folks in any kind of leadership role in a world of ambiguity or low-grade chaos. Which is most of us, right? Worth a listen.

Personal weeknotes

Okay, so most of my personal stuff this week is… not cheery or fun. Sorry.

A few weeks back my parents started staying in an assisted living facility outside Toledo, and to my shock, they’ve stayed there, despite their house still being available across town. This was a surprising relief. But in the past week that relief has turned into new concerns.

My mother’s dementia continues to advance and despite all my father’s attempts to manage that decline, she’s getting increasingly irritable, which then tips my father over into (likely) psychosomatic symptoms he now thinks are a months-long appendicitis (as diagnosed by his chiropractor—don’t get me started). He’s so stressed he’s talking about doing what Mom is asking for all the time, “go home,” without remembering any of the dementia care training he’s learned. (The whole “I want to go home” stuff in dementia is not about being in a particular place. It’s an expression of emotional discomfort.) He might just move back into their house and bring on a phalanx of private professionals to handle things from there. The problem, of course, is that (a) they need 24×7 live-in care, an enormous cost that (b) would not yield any better results. It’s maddening.

The sad truth? Dementia (in this case vascular dementia) is a degenerative disease with plateaus of relative calm between sharp declines. The final destination is, of course, death, as brain structures continue to fail, eventually degrading autonomic functions.

My father is so emotionally compromised in this moment (as one would expect) he cannot think clearly and has placed his faith—literally—in prayer, miracles, and faith healers to make everything go back to the way things were. Admitting the truth of the situation would be admitting defeat, admitting that biology will, in fact, win in the end. A former colleague of his described him as “the most hard-headed person” he’d ever met. Yep. Hard-headdedness is great when you’re actually right about something. When you’re not… well… woof.

My siblings and I held a call over the weekend to discuss current state and next steps, but we’re at a loss on exactly what to do next. We’re trying to be supportive and guide good choices. But we fear we’re watching a slow-motion car crash in progress.

Meanwhile, despite all the chaos, I gotta finish this post so I can get outside (in some remarkably nice fall weather) and walk a 5K today, as part of a health incentive program administered by our benefits team. Thankfully you can do this 5K anywhere you want, so I can just walk out my front door, walk, track of the distance, and file my results anytime in the next week or so. And that alone yields a $50 benefits discount. I should give a shout-out to the benefits team on LinkedIn or something, because this program is the best I’ve had in any job, in any industry, across my career.

Gotta go. Stay sane out there, everyone. These days, that’s actually enough.

About this week’s header photo