James Arthur Cattell

Week notes › 2025

Week 40, 2025

We have a date!

Completed my 2ᶮᵈ week at The Pension Regulator (TPR) 🥳 I've now heard back from all members of the new Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) working group. This means we have a preferred date for the group's 1ˢᵗ meeting in November. Its not unanimous, but we need to crack on.

Work in public (service)

Had some lovely feedback from 1 of the DDaT working group members. They liked my public kanban board and week notes. Will share the feedback internally.

Also very grateful to Lisa Allen for feedback on week 39's note. I share my note here, on socials and internally at TPR, so its important to use the right language. This is especially true about the pensions industry, which I have a lot to learn about.

Also thankful for my other half, the awesome Janet Hughes. She shared the "donkey, sheep, fox, owl" model for thinking about language and its impact.

Janet suggested I'm sometimes too much of a sheep, i.e. full of integrity but lacking in political awareness. An example is talking publicly about "Open Pensions" without 1ˢᵗ discussing the concept internally with TPR comms teams.

The Civil Service code guides us to be honest, objective, impartial and do everything with integrity. I once had my integrity called into question for tweeting about Microsoft too much (even though I was being critical). So its probable I've over compensated for a while.

What I actually need to be is more owl, i.e. full of integrity and political awareness. This means seeking more permission and less forgiveness. I can easily achieve this by getting a 2ᶮᵈ pair of eyes to check anything new or that gives me pause.

Volunteering

Last week I listed all the volunteering I do, with the aim of picking just 3 of them and stopping the rest.

I've decided to focus on volunteering for:

This means relinquishing my UKGovCamp treasurer role (which will take a month or 2), DeliverCon and anything else I'm still involved in.

Feels good to have made that decision.

What I learnt this week