A year of work in progress – day 65 (Gestation)

Day 65 – 8 April 2014 and day 7 of the A to Z Blogging Challenge.

It’s the panda breeding season. It’s the time of year when love is in the air for Tian Tian and Yang Guang, the Edinburgh pandas (and presumably all other pandas) and soon we may hear the patter of tiny panda feet. How cute!

Soon, how soon? Giant pandas are notoriously difficult to predict when it comes to giving birth. They are strange creatures, carnivores with an herbivorous diet and a female that is only in oestrous for three days a year so timing is everything.   Their normal gestation period can last anything from 95 to 160 days and so you have plenty of time to paint the nursery.

They are not like most animals that have a fixed gestation period or at least a much shorter range. With us it is nearly always 9 months, like it or lump it but pandas adjust their gestation depending upon the prevailing conditions.

A hamster can take as little as 16 days while a hippopotamus can take 250 days and an elephant has an eye watering 645 days to wait.

But organisations have a gestation period as well. It doesn’t matter how much you push or pull there is going to be a fixed time between when an idea is conceived and when it pops out for its bottom to be spanked.

Ideas need to grow and foment. People need time to come to their own understanding. They need to talk about them and mull them over. Word needs to spread, bridges need to be built and colleagues need to be persuaded.

Ideas need to be succoured until they are ready to stand on their own two or four feet.

All organisations have a gestation period. Sometimes they are hamsters, others are elephants and perhaps there are even pandas.

It was the Digital Durham board meeting again this morning. The programme is picking up speed and is ahead of schedule. We now have nine local authorities who have come together to deliver benefit across the region and that in itself is a fabulous achievement. All parties are working with a single objective in mind and that is to improve the welfare of the people of the region through access to better broadband.

This is not a technical problem, it is a social problem. Better broadband means better jobs, better education, better access to services and a better role for the region in the global economy.

I met two more tier 4 managers: Claire, the Strategic Manager Quality and Dev elopement (in CAS) and Andrew, the Finance Manager-CAS/Capital (in Resources). Although their roles were different there was a lot of similarity. Both relished the variety and the opportunity to work with a wide range of people, improve process, develop their teams and help deliver high quality services to the people of the county.

Claire was focussed on ensuring quality to meet the exacting assurance inspections from Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission among others. Andrew was focussed on providing accurate information to support decision making in an environment that can change overnight. Data and information runs through both of their roles.

Learning points for today: If you’re stuck for something to open a conversation with a bloke, try football; the key is to talk the language of your customers; paperless people are starting to appear, at least in meetings and; in the future we’ll look quaint and old fashioned.

Today’s enjoyment rating 9/10 – great Digital Durham board.