Monthnote: February to October 2026
Not really a monthnote… more of a half-year note? A pretty poor showing on my part for blog writing this year - but in my defence, I have reasons…
One of those is that I quit my job… and have a new role - starting next week!
I’ve been debating for weeks about how to update on this - and to be honest, I remembered this whole exercise of writing is for me and documenting my thoughts. I want to be able to come back to this post and remember this tricky period.
None of what I’m saying is a reflection on anyone personally, it is what it is as they say.
So here we go.
Problems at work
My last post in January outlined some challenges at work. Well, suffice to say those challenges were not addressed, in fact got worse.
I suppose there are always reasons to leave a job, or look for a new one. For me it came down to two different things. Long term problems and then a short-term jolt…
Long-term - growing organisational debt
Firstly, I had an increasing feeling that the environment and conditions for doing good work were getting worse. For quite a while, I’ve been feeling a bit lost at work - asking questions of the organisation and not getting good (or any) answers.
Looking back at my posts - it’s actually quite shocking how long I’ve been having these thoughts, my yearnotes from 2024 and 2025 frame work very much as a ‘struggle’.
I think this long term decline can be put down to growing ‘organisational debt’. I’ve read a few things over the years about this concept (can’t remember where unfortunately) but think it applies well to the situation where I worked. The term originated specifically in relation to software development, and most people will know it as ‘technical debt’ which can be defined as:
Technical debt refers to the future costs associated with relying on shortcuts or suboptimal decisions made during software development.
I think in my context - I’d widen the definition to include all sorts of aspects of work:
- organisational
- strategic
- resourcing
The list could go on… but I think you get the picture.
We had for too long, just got by. This may resonate with other charities to be fair - but in ours, it was severe. And unfortunately it started to affect everyone - myself included.
I found myself spending a significant part of my time and headspace on organisational strategy and asking the organisation what I thought were simple questions about our approach to work and our strategy (or lack of).
A little bit of this questioning is down to the hidden cost of digital work. Something Ash talks about in this report. But part of this I’m sad to say is just down to poor leadership. And I don’t say that lightly.
Charity work relies in large part on goodwill. The problem is, when that starts to run low, or I think in my case run out completely, then there are some very difficult questions which sometimes don’t have good answers.
It wasn’t just me thinking this way - colleagues were openly talking about the problems. There was a recognition that our working culture had declined and a desire to ‘get back to the good days’… without a realisation that actually the culture was linked to the work. Sometimes what staff need is a coherent strategy, which they can buy into (enough). I think a good working culture flows from this.
So, fair to say work hadn’t been great for a while. But not in itself enough to call it a day…
The trigger
The next bit is ugly unfortunately, and there’s no way around it. In June staff were informed that the charity didn’t have any professional indemnity insurance covering the services we provided. A huge governance failure leading to us having to close down our services and website to the public immediately. I’ve never been involved in something like this before, but it was a total mess. A huge governance failure on the part of the charity… particularly senior management and trustees. The potential consequences of this were really huge - with our nursing team who provided services to the public fearing they’d be struck off.
Closing our services - given our line of work was a significant decision. Our advance decision service was (and continues to be) closed.
I think of this insurance f*ck up as a ‘precipitating incident’ because one of the things that happened when this came to light is that the governance failure turned into something bigger.
Rightly, the immediate focus was on fixing the insurance problem. But what happened is that staff (myself included) decided that this was a moment to ask difficult questions of the organisation and use it to take stock of what we’d been doing, why and if anything bigger needed to change.
The problem was that in a crisis - no one was thinking clearly. Decisions weren’t getting made - and when they were didn’t really make sense. Emotions were running high - communication broke down completely and it really was a tough moment for everyone personally and the organisation as a whole. Throughout, I remember thinking I could see far more scenarios where the charity would fold or stop operating completely than finding a way through.
I don’t think we were well equipped to deal with the fallout, at any level. The trustees, senior management, middle management - it really was messy.
Eventually the insurance issue was resolved, but it became clear that significant damage had been done. Most people I spoke to were either thinking of how to get out - or pretty despondent about the future.
The decision to leave
During the frustrating periods of work over the past years, one of the things I asked myself at work was whether this was a place where I could do good work.
Most times my answer to this was something along the lines of “well the big stuff isn’t quite right, but individually I can do some interesting work”.
But if I’m being brutally honest, the past year (maybe longer) as I became more focused on big picture stuff, strategy etc I was doing less ‘practitioner’ type work and more organisational design/strategy stuff - and it’s here where the answer changed.
…and then the crisis happened.
This was more than enough for me to make a decision that maybe I should’ve made a long time ago. I decided that the charity was most definitely no longer a place to do good work. Something had broken, and I saw absolutely no way to get back to a headspace where I was thinking constructively or positively about work.
I started looking for roles. I’ll write another post about this as I found the job search quite interesting (but challenging). As a self-described ‘digital generalist’ I had to figure out what that meant for my job search and also reckon with a big picture question of long-term career thinking and balancing that with general life stuff…
Sadly I was not the only person to leave. I think the current count is three members of staff. I would expect more to come.
Next week I start a new role at the Royal National Institute for the Deaf (RNID).
Anyway… glad to have finally got this written.