“Just look at what a different place you’re in now compared to last year.”

This comment last week made me pause and reflect. It came up in response to me working through some concerns right now, and it made me realise that perhaps I was missing the wood for the trees.

This time last year, I was feeling lost and depressed but I also recognised those feelings and was trying to navigate to a better place. Unfortunately, like everyone else, I was living through the pandemic, which made achieving changes difficult. By September though, I was in a different team at work, I had multiple projects underway in the house, and I launched this blog with the aim of looking for ikigai – the happiness of always being busy and having a sense of purpose. Since then, I’ve worked with amazing people on incredibly interesting projects, learned a huge amount, and made good progress with the house.

Taking that moment to look at the whole year, the entire wood, it’s been a pretty good year for me, even with a pandemic.

July 2021 has also marked a transition for me, so it’s a good time to stop and reflect on the context I work in and the changes happening in society as well as what I’ve achieved. I suspect a lot of people will be in a similar position thinking about the impact of ‘Freedom Day’.

My most recent transition has been stepping from roles driving work around diversity and inclusion to being part of a team driving digital adoption. For me, this isn’t a redirection, but an evolution and growth.

For the past four years, I have had the opportunity to work with a lot of people to make inclusion conversations more central. Lockdown has been a great equaliser in creating opportunities to give platforms to new voices, and the murder of George Floyd gave weight to the importance of hearing them. Critically, going digital with employee resource group events has allowed people to forge connections that were previously limited by geography. But there’s a lot left to do.

A year on from the initial spate of reactionary events around BLM, we’ve just witnessed the Euro 2020 final. In longstanding tradition, England struggled on penalties, but this year the missed penalties happened to be taken by black players. The racist attacks on the players that followed were both heart breaking and predictable, but there was also a heartening response from across society to condemn the behaviour. There is a long way to go, but the ask for people to speak up as allies and take action has been heard – my ardent football fan Gran was telling me how she’d told someone off when they started to draw a link between race and scoring.

To me, getting digital evolution of ways of working right is going to make or break the continuing momentum of the inclusion agenda. Computers have the power to be more objective, but it depends on whether the bias of those programming them is managed. I saw a number of posts reflecting on the failure of screening algorithms from social media companies to detect the abuse aimed at the England players. Having made my decision to move from inclusion to digital back in April, this only confirmed to me that the two need to be entwined.

I’m currently diving into training on data wrangling and trying to join the dots in a way that will draw on my learning from the past few years. I’m also excited about the new and varied network with whom I’ll be collaborating, and I know I’ll continue to learn more from exchanges with other people. If you’re reading this and similarly interested in how we evolve our digital ways of working, please get in touch!

And if you, like me, might be feeling a bit unsure of which next step to take in the face of so much acceleration, I can only recommend giving yourself a window to look backward and reflect on what you’ve already achieved. You may find you’re similarly reassured over your decisions and direction.

As always, thank you for reading.