Baking bread in an unfamiliar kitchen

One day I am going to write a book about making bread and sandwiches. I think that day might be soon, or at least I hope so. As I recall JRR Tolkien wrote The Hobbit in the 1930s and then finished Lord of the Rings in the 1950s. Is this blog post my The Hobbit? No. 

But it is about bread and sandwiches.

And it’s not about work. Right now I find my energy and ability to write about work is really low. I fell out of the habit of writing as a result.

Can we draw some lessons from baking bread in an unfamiliar kitchen that can be applied to work? Sure we can. Let’s get them out of the way:

  • Test your methods in unfamiliar environments. It makes them better

  • Think about what your minimum viable toolkit is

  • Verify that things are as they seem*

  • Iterate your practice based on experiences

*AKA the oven is lying to you

So, to bread.

There is no recipe in this blog post. When I write my forthcoming book about bread and sandwiches, title TBC, I am resolved to lead with the recipe rather than the preamble / life story. The state of online recipes is pretty much a meme in that regard and I want people to be able to get going. Then there can be the post-amble (?) and the life story which people can read at their leisure while the bread is in the oven for 35 minutes at 240 degrees.

In recent years when we go on holiday it’s to a self-catering place somewhere by the seaside in the UK**. I like to make bread. It’s rewarding to make a decent loaf in an unfamiliar kitchen. Bread from the supermarket is bad. Bread from the fancy pants baker is overpriced and also there might not be a fancy pants baker nearby.

I pack a minimum viable bread kit. At the time of writing it consists of:

  • A loaf tin

  • An oven thermometer

  • Some razor blades

  • Some baking parchment

  • Digital scales

  • A jar of sourdough starter wrapped in a plastic bag

Note that the loaf tin serves a dual purpose because it acts as a receptacle for the other items.

I have never seen a loaf tin in a self catering place. It is better to have a loaf tin than (say) make a round loaf because bread from a loaf tin is more convenient for sandwiches and you are going to be going on walks and having picnic lunch, ok?

You need an oven thermometer because all ovens lie. Your own oven is lying to you every day. “Sure I am at 240 degrees right now beep beep” it says. Is it at 240 degrees right now? No it is not beep beep my ass. We were on holiday in Rye on the English south coast. The oven said it was hot but it wasn’t hot enough to melt the cheese on a pizza. You had to max out the temperature to even cook anything. I didn’t make bread that time because the oven was not fit for purpose. But I resolved to always take an oven thermometer with me so that I could know the truth on my own terms. Ovens can run hotter than they claim as well, or have patchy distribution of heat. Once I managed to make bread in an Aga but that was a whole other feat against all odds and not for now.

Razor blades are for making a slash in the top of the loaf like they do in the movies about bread and also in the fancy pants bakers. This is the least necessary item of equipment and I think I might phase it out. I have never been thanked for the slash on the top of the loaf by consumers of the bread. The slash can prevent air gaps in the crust so it’s not without utility but I tend to be able to avoid those by keeping a close eye on how much the bread has risen.

Baking parchment might just be the most useful kitchen product there is. I would gladly do an endorsement deal for Big Parchment. I always line my loaf tin with baking parchment because one time I made some sourdough bread and the non-stick coating came off the tin and onto the crust. I have not looked back ever since that important learning experience. I used to travel with a roll of baking parchment but then I realised I can take a metre or so of baking parchment and fold it up small.

From the data available to me fewer than 20% of places can be expected to have digital scales. No host is expecting their guests to be baking a loaf of bread. You might be able to measure quantities with a measuring jug, and it’s likely there’s going to be one in the place. But will it have the measures for liquids *and* flour down the side? It’s your risk. Hey maybe you can measure quantities by eye good on you. Maybe you are an American and can do that thing with cups but my friend that is not me. I want some digital scales. The are light and you can use them for other stuff because you are catering for yourself and maybe there’s a nice recipe you want to try for dinner.

I use a jam jar for my sourdough starters. You can read more about my sourdough starter practice in my forthcoming book about bread and sandwiches, title TBC. The jam jar is in a plastic bag because one time it leaked all over my luggage.

When I am on holiday I like to keep it simple and bake a white sourdough loaf. I have a variety of loaves of bread that I make and you can read more about them in my forthcoming book about bread and sandwiches, title TBC. 

I also make bread rolls, with yeast. I don’t travel with yeast or God forbid a bag of strong white bread flour because those are readily available in the supermarket. If there is a fancy pants baker in town you might be able to get really nice flour and some fresh yeast too.

What I appreciate is how different the white loaves turn out compared with one I’d make at home. They’re still decent, but with just a few small changes to conditions and method the results aren’t anywhere near the same. I do think you build up a familiar balance of environment and technique over time and don’t pay attention to- or interrogate it. It’s something that’s worth testing in an unfamiliar place now and again.


**I would not do any of this if I was travelling outside of the UK. I could get away with the razor blades if I prepared ahead of time and really needed a shave but I don’t know how I would justify taking my precious jar of microbes into another country.

Time passing

It’s coming up to 5 years since I joined Citizens Advice.This week I realised that pretty much everybody who was in the leadership team I joined has left. Sure, that team doesn’t exist in the same way any more, there have been several iterations and moves and minor reorganisations but still, it made me think.

Often I feel like I’m standing still while everything else is moving around me. And that’s not to say there’s anything wrong with standing still. Not at all. It doesn’t mean there isn’t progress in that stillness, or that stillness can’t be a strength.

I don’t like to rush.

At the same time even if there’s a great deal of heat and light being made around you it can be nice to be a part of it if it’s the good kind of energy. Purpose not panic.  I’m not averse to that. Hey I can be versatile.

That 5 years isn’t really 5 years in a conventional sense anyway because of the pandemic. Maybe it’s more like 2 and a half years. Or 10 years.

I am trying to get into the new London office at least once a week now. It is actually nice. It’s also productive, as long as I can ensure I’ve got a day with few video calls. Even if the office is say 20% full there’s only just enough private space for people to sit on calls. Back when I started at Citizens Advice in the old London office it was impossible to get a meeting room. It was impossible to get a desk too if you came in after 09:30 on most days, which I had to do due to childcare.

I remember in my first week when I didn’t understand the room booking rules because nobody had explained them to me I had not been able to get a desk and I had settled in one of phone booth cubicle things. I went to get a drink and when I came back the person who had booked the phone booth cubicle thing had taken all of my stuff and put it one the floor in a pile about 5 metres away from the door. Neither of us said anything. That was a strange day.

But that was then, in an office that wasn’t fit for purpose then and then became redundant overnight when the first lockdown happened, and then as things started opening up it continued to be largely redundant because it was too big and people weren’t coming into the office and lots of new people had joined the organisation and they didn’t live anywhere near London. That last bit, shifting the centre of gravity away from London not really intentionally but as a result of a period of time when ‘place’ meant less, that was a good outcome I think. Particularly as an organisation that serves clients across England and Wales*

I get uncomfortable referring to things coming out of the pandemic as being ‘good’ but hopefully you get my drift.

And so I also thought there would be this great hollowing out of the centre of London itself and that that could at the very least be interesting to see. But when I’m out and about nowadays it doesn’t seem that different to me. Seems very full. Lots of people look very smart still. Nobody in pyjamas in Clerkenwell. I find myself thinking about what to wear just a little bit. No dude pants. Also I need a haircut, I haven’t had one since January. Unlike during the pandemic when I gradually turned into a courtier from the Stuart era I don’t have the excuse of the barbers being closed.

We had a really nice holiday in Pembrokeshire. We were trying out having our summer holiday in the summer half term so my eldest child who is now a teenager gets more time with friends in the summer holiday itself. It worked well. Each year is an iteration on the previous one, we’re learning. An overnight stay in a city on the way is definitely the way to go. Glasgow last year was great. Cardiff this year was great too.

Going back to where I started I am aware that before too long we won’t be going on holidays with the kids. I guess there’s something about making the absolute most of it, in the moment. Perhaps that’s what’s on my mind in general. Am I making the most of it? I mean, I could be standing still and making the most of it - several moments in South Wales benefited from standing still and taking it in after all.

30 minutes is up. Thanks for reading. 

* Note that the national organisation Citizens Advice that I work for has offices in Birmingham, Leeds, and Cardiff as well as London. And that's in addition to the Network of ~240 Local Citizens Advice across England and Wales.

Reset?

Ok 30 minutes on the clockwork timer in the shape of an apple let’s go.

Thinking about the demise of that small corner of Twitter as a viable public service internet community. Not sure exactly when it happened but it’s been a while.

And it makes me think “what did I do all of that for?”

It seems odd. Like, very much another time. I can’t imagine doing another data driven cake longitudinal study, let alone shouting out to any Dan Barretts who aren’t me. I know hardly anybody was interested in my shrine to The Incredible Hulk (it’s currently in a packing box).

I am on Bluesky. I am checking it every day. It’s kind of nice? Maybe getting more viable as a thing? But I doubt it will be the same as the other thing was. And I’m not the same as I was for those years when I was putting in that effort on the internet.

Not to say I won’t ever put effort in on the internet. But that part of me really is a wasted muscle right now. I’ve enjoyed reading weeknotes from people on Bluesky. I can’t imagine getting into the same weeknotes swing I was in whenever it was, 7 or 8 years ago maybe.

Still a big cloud of standing fog in my head about the pandemic and what happened there, plus how it’s changed me. I feel like my engagement with that public service internet community I mentioned suffered particularly badly during 2020 and 2021. I was in the middle of many shared narratives of what was happening with people on the internet many of whom I met occasionally in real life (which was great) and now I have no idea what’s going on.

Still not got back into reading books. Really struggling with public transport, maybe slightly better in the past 6 weeks.

This morning I walked past a former colleague from Citizens Advice on the way back from the school run. They were on a call and I recognised them from their rather distinctive voice. They left Citizens Advice a few years ago. I wonder if they recognised me?

Nearly 5 years at that Citizens Advice as the Head of Data Science now. I honestly thought there would have been more to write about on the internet about this job but I guess circumstances and also actual substance means I was wrong.

I am doing a pretty good job. I know on my own terms I have had a positive impact. The team I am in is really good. A genuinely diverse group who are going from strength to strength. It has taken a while to get to this place - I’d say the last 18 months have been the best. And yes, the work that we do is interesting and valuable. I certainly didn’t expect myself to develop actual expertise in data specifics but here we are. Domain knowledge baby.

There was a period in this role of maybe 2 years that was really punishing. There were a few reasons behind that that I won’t go into now, maybe another time. But that particular punishing time has been over for a while.

It’s a big organisation, and a complicated one. Much of my work is kind of… blogging adjacent? Curating spaces to talk about data. Keeping logs of materials and resources with lots of links that people can refer back to. Sticking at it.

I like how we proactively go out and offer to help people. In a big organisation having that attitude, and that broad understanding that can come with considering the data as a whole and how it fits together, it’s a bit of a superpower. I’ll put that in the playbook. And the curating the spaces and keeping the logs of materials and links. Like, if a common complaint is that people keep reinventing the wheel then do everything you can to point out that the wheel has already been invented. Be kind with it though, maybe they’ll come up with a better wheel or notice that three other teams are working on Project Invent The Wheel right now.

Yeah anyway.

Work is giving me the space to do other things even if my energies are fairly low. I continue to improve my bread making and will write a book about sandwiches one day. I am building guitar effects pedals and am slowly getting better at that too. I already had far too many guitar effects pedals and now I have a growing collection of guitar effects pedals that are homemade and not very good. I did send one to a friend in the post, that was nice.

More energy would be good. Thanks for reading.

Start the week with data

I am the Head of Data Science at Citizens Advice. In a job like mine you delivery and achievement tends to happen through the team. I don't have many things I can say I did all by myself. Thinking back on the last year or so though there is one thing that I think has been particularly successful that I made happen. It's a weekly open forum called 'Start the week with data'.

I wrote about data conversations before. These kinds of forums evolve in my experience. Sometimes you decide they need a change or don't need to happen anymore. Sometimes you think they need to happen but others just aren't feeling it for whatever reason. Generally I like to stick at things for a while before deciding it's time to stop. Start the week with data has been going since May 2022. It was last year when it really came into its own. So yes, sticking at it.

Start the week with data is informed by the principles I set out in that data conversations blog post, especially "conversation not presentation" and "keep it frequent".

Every Monday morning we have a 30 minute video call with a speaker on something to do with data at Citizens Advice. Usually it's 15 minutes speaking to some slides and then the rest of the call for that all important conversation. I chair or maybe it's conduct the session. I sign off every session with "thank you for starting your week with data" which is neat and hasn't got old yet.

The invite list started as the Senior Leadership team but has grown organically to be wider than that. Every session is recorded and linked from a rolling log which is a Google doc. Slides are linked there too if they were used. All the presentations are good, but especially good ones are marked on the log with a fire emoji. Finally there's an email at the end of every week to the invite list telling them what's coming up on Monday and linking to the materials from that week's session.

The emails are especially repetitious. Also my inbox is mostly people declining Start the week with data. But every week numbers are pretty good - 25 to 40 people from all over this fairly big and diverse organisation.

The thing that made Start the week with data in 2023 so good was the variety in the programme. This forum isn't just the data experts talking about the expert data work they've done (although we have that too). We had 35 sessions with 24 different speakers from teams like

  • Operations
  • Finance
  • Business Development
  • Technology
  • Policy and Advocacy
  • Product and Delivery
  • Evaluation
  • Expert Advice and Content
  • and more

The point is that everybody is working with data and can tell an interesting story about it that will be relevant to others.

One of my favourite sessions last year was our Finance team talking about the most successful systems migration I've ever seen. I'd never known a systems migration go well. And there was a strong piece of practical data improvement at the heart of the work, taking the opportunity to change data structures so that they could provide more meaningful insight.

We also get brand new insights at the session, like investigating access gaps for our clients across England and Wales. And we see things that absolutely everybody in the organisation should know, like fundamentals about our client base or how we measure our financial and social impact.

Another benefit of sticking with a forum like this for a while is you get the opportunity to revisit topics and see how they've developed. Or you hear about the next steps in a piece of data work that have been facilitated by something delivered earlier.

Managing to do 35 sessions isn't bad, especially accounting for holidays. It is a fair amount of effort to curate a programme like this, but the fact of doing that helps to build connections and visibility across the organisation for me. There's also something rewarding about encouraging people that they have an interesting story to tell. Every week I say please volunteer a topic if you want to and on the occasions people do come forward it makes me happy. But most of the effort is on me to keep that forward plan going. I think it's worth it though.

Recently a colleague said how much they appreciate the session because it's always relevant to them and their work and it gives them insight into what's happening at Citizens Advice in an effective way. I will take that as a win.

This is the work. It's fairly simple but it does require sustained effort to keep it going. If you're in a role where you're leading data improvement in a fairly large organisation I recommend giving something similar a try.

Thanks for reading.

Data conversations: some practical examples

We’re learning a great deal on our data journey at Citizens Advice. I think it’s worth sharing where we’re at.

18 months ago I would have recommended “talking about your data more”. I still recommend that of course!

Given experience in the intervening time I’m able to describe something more than that original intent, with some structure to it as well.

Maybe you work in an organisation where everything I describe here happens already. That’s great, I’d love to hear about your experiences.

Maybe the data you work with is different to ours —perhaps larger and updated more frequently, or smaller and updated less frequently. I think that the things I’m describing here could still be useful.

The ‘data’ that I’m talking about here are things like:

  • Channel activity for example website and telephone
  • Client volumes and demographics
  • Topic trends at high- and more detailed levels
  • Client outcomes — experience and satisfaction from survey data

Principles

There are a few guiding principles behind what we’re doing. I think the most important one is

Conversation, not presentation

Everything I’m describing here should encourage everybody to talk about the data. It’s not a one-shot pitch — this is ongoing practice and there’s no end to it. Shared understanding builds over time and feedback is essential.

Talk about the whole picture

We have a complex organisation with many channels and services. We try to make sure that we are talking about the relationships between things rather than focusing on isolated data sets.

Using as few products at possible

We have a main data product called the ‘Service Dashboard’ which brings a wide variety of our data together in one place. We try to use this product to meet the needs of as many audiences as we can.

We have a preference for presenting from this product or other dynamic reports and dashboards over transposing data into a slide deck.

Keep it frequent

We have a weekly pattern. This is appropriate because of the wide variety of data that we have, rather than because of the cadence of our data (where trends play out over months rather than weeks). This frequency keeps what’s happening with out data at the front of peoples’ attention though, and there are a wide variety of topics we can cover.

If you’re working with data and it doesn’t change that much I’d still recommend talking about it once a week.

Repeat and reuse

The forums are porous. We present the same material in multiple places. We use the forums to generate content that people can revisit and share.

Iterate

We learn by doing and regularly reflect on how things are progressing and make changes accordingly — both to our practices and to our data products.

Here are the four practices I recommend trying if you’re not doing them already. This isn’t an exhaustive list and it will develop further I’m sure.

1. The top team conversation

We have a rolling programme of short weekly data updates to our Executive and Directors team. They happen at the beginning of the week as part of an existing ‘start the week’ meeting.

When we started this James (who is part of the Executive team) gave these updates but increasingly we’ve brought in other voices. It’s a collective effort to achieve a weekly update and we have input from the Data Science team, our counterparts in the Impact team, and others particularly from Operations.

It is a conversation because this top team get to provide feedback and set priorities for questions to answer. This has been supported by a fairly regular retrospective.

The same material gets shared with all staff from the National Citizens Advice organisation on Workplace and we will be sharing more widely with the Network of 250+ local Citizens Advice across England and Wales too.

In order to keep to the weekly pattern we need a decent but flexible forward plan, and we try to keep a month ahead of ourselves on that. There can be significant lead time for the some of the work required to answer the questions asked. Seemingly simple things can be complex and vice versa.

This practice has driven some of the most forward-thinking and fresh data work that I’ve been involved in since I started this role in late 2019. We know things that we didn’t know 6 months ago, which is itself a measure of improvement.

This practice also involves the most collective effort and preparation. That feels appropriate. This is the level of the organisation that can be supported through data to make the most significant decisions.

What are the benefits?

  • Builds a collective understanding
  • Drives improvement in our evidence base
  • An opportunity to prioritise based on the most important questions to answer
  • Should lead to more informed decision making

Examples from Citizens Advice

In recent weeks we’ve covered these topics:

  • High level client outcome and activity numbers from across our service for the past year.
  • New data that tells us about the impact of our online advice content.
  • New data that tells us about the variety of different telephone service models used by the Network of local Citizens Advice.
  • New analysis on depth of issues our clients experience and the strong relationships between different issues (for example housing and debt).

2. Data at the start of every meeting

Well, not every meeting. Let’s imagine you’ve got a regular team meeting, or an ‘all hands’ session. The practice here is to do a tight 5 minute update on data at the start of the meeting.

As an example, I do this at the weekly meeting for the leadership team I’m part of. 5 minutes translates to 3 or 4 talking points about our data. Committing to this regular practice means that I have to be engaged with the data that we’re working with — I have to look for patterns and trends to highlight. I can also bring in insights from the other forums.

I write up those 3 or 4 talking points and share the document with the team. This is a further commitment, but it’s worth it because it can be shared with the whole group. They can refer back to it and consider the points in their own time. Also it means that nobody in the group is left out if they aren’t at the meeting. Finally these documents are open, they can be shared more widely if my peers think there’s value in doing so.

What are the benefits?

  • Provides context and helps to break out of siloed thinking
  • Builds a shared understanding
  • Builds expertise in talking about data from a variety of sources and how it interrelates
  • Keeps you curious

Examples from Citizens Advice

Here’s an example Google Doc with 3 real data talking points I’ve covered recently.

3. The regular open forum

This is our most established practice. We began it soon after the start of the first pandemic lockdown in 2020. Tom (chief analyst) wrote about it. It is a fortnightly session that lasts around 45 minutes. It is open to all staff from the National organisation. We get around 30 people on the call each time, from a variety of teams and backgrounds.

We use the Service Dashboard, presenting this to the group and having the data specialists who are responsible for each category of data talking about the latest trends. For example Mankeet (senior data analyst) covers website trends.

We take questions from the group. One of the most valuable aspects of this session is that colleagues from Operations or Policy often provide valuable insight and context for what we’re seeing in the data. It’s very much a conversation.

Of the four practices this is the one that gives many people the opportunity to understand and describe the narrative of what’s happening across our service as trends play out over months and years. There’s an element of oral history to it, which could be seen as a weakness because some of the explanations for patterns that we’ve seen aren’t documented. However, we record the sessions and post them in a dedicated Workplace group so people who can’t attend can participate in their own time. And we see the narrative that gets developed reflected consistently in other work that we do, which is a strength.

What are the benefits?

  • Builds a collective understanding
  • A rich exploration of the data given the expertise involved
  • The narrative stays current and is reflected in other forums
  • Provides early sight of trends and issues that can be highlighted or escalated elsewhere

Examples from Citizens Advice

The Service Dashboard is updated weekly. This forum has established regular content. We look at client trends (numbers and demographics), advice topic trends, website trends (topics, top pages, volumes, search terms), and telephone and webchat trends (volumes). We can compare back to a variety of different time periods but we find comparing year on year to be most valuable because of strong seasonality in our data.

4. The deeper dive

We run a roughly weekly 30 minute session with an agenda that covers a wide variety of data topics. I say roughly weekly because it’s 4 weeks on and 1 week off with the slot being at a different time each week to encourage attendance.

The session is open to all National staff. There’s a fairly large invite list and we tell everybody what we’re going to be covering and share materials in advance. We get around 15 people at each session.

This practice provides an opportunity to go deeper on new analyses and insight, presented by the specialists who have done the work. It also provides an opportunity to talk about our data work ‘behind the scenes’, for example developing new services and standards. It has been really valuable for developing our data strategy work in an open and collaborative way. Finally we’ve had guests from other organisations telling us about their experiences — that’s particularly valuable when you get to hear about shared challenges and how people have approached them.

We record the sessions and post them in a Slack channel. Necessarily this forum generates a fair few slide decks. We share those too, and make sure that they contain links to other resources.

What are the benefits?

  • Showing what really goes in to the work to an audience who wouldn’t otherwise understand
  • Doing justice to data specialists’ effort by having time to go into greater detail
  • Bringing in fresh perspectives for shared problems
  • Developing in the open, particularly strategic work

Examples from Citizens Advice

In recent weeks we’ve covered these topics:

  • Data strategy principles framework — how we’re getting owners for these principles from across the organisation
  • A new ‘service’ approach to data, building initial versions of services that we can iterate. Examples include a service for data about our volunteers and a service for data about the Network of local Citizens Advice.
  • Collaboration between Data Science and Product to decommission a legacy system, and establish a new primary source of data for reuse by multiple systems as a result.
  • A new way to visualise client volume data, showing it across our entire service at a high level for the first time.

One day I’d like to put together a ‘playbook’ for data specialist work but it’s a daunting task. I can break it down into smaller pieces though. This post is a first attempt at that.

Please get in touch if you’ve got any thoughts — you can find me on Twitter and occasionally on LinkedIn.

Thank you for reading.


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Data conversations: some practical examples by Dan Barrett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.