A notebook to track organizational bugs

As someone who has come under three different major bureaucracies in the past eight years (and many different sub-elements of each one), I find a suggestion from Dame Julia Cleverdon, the chair of trustees for the UK’s Teach First program, to be an interesting one. She suggests that people joining new organizations should:

“keep a notebook and write down everything that strikes them as crazy in the first few months—because a year in, those things will seem normal. And two years in, when they have gained in experience and confidence, they should get that notebook out and start changing those things.”

It’s an approach that neatly balances the fact that people new to organizations probably think about them most creatively, while recognizing that experience is necessary to be influential and to be able to anticipate the full consequences of reforms.

Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. Between 2005 and 2007 I completed an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. I worked for five years for the Canadian federal government, including completing the Accelerated Economist Training Program, and then completed a PhD in Political Science at the University of Toronto in 2023. View all posts by Milan