Who she?
Becky Thorn Sietsma
What do I bring?
20+ years of experience supporting people build technology to tackle complex social challenges, in:
UK public sector
local government and communities
international humanitarian innovation
Guiding principles
In working with people, I value these principles in this order:
Respect - listen and learn, understand context, re-make psychological safety every day
Connect - form, support and respect human relationships as foundational to creating systems, technology and partnerships - Conway’s Law; also, our connection to nature, even in tech, is something I’m starting to explore
Reflect - analyse, design, prototype, collaborate, be humble, assess possibilities enough, doing to learn
Direct - make decisions and get work done - experimentally when possible, scale up when ready, go wide when demand and sustainability can balance
I have come to follow these principles in this order after seeing and reading of the damage done to communities, workers and organisations from tackling them in the reverse order.
These principles are succinctly explained in Relationally Responsive Standpoint by Shillingsworth, Yunkaporta (2020). It was also the culture we embodied at Thoughtworks to understand the problem fully first before launching into solutions, people and relationships were valued and continue to this day, reflection through retrospectives was a weekly ritual and getting stuff done - we certainly did. I bring this holistic pattern into my work today.
What I do
Facilitator
Purely holding space without intervention or involvement in steering the outcomes beyond steering the process to get there.
You might need this if you have enough opinions and experience in the team but you need someone independent to balance those voices - strong and quiet - and enable leaders to participate in content rather than facilitating people.
Example of past work:
Facilitated 2 week collaboration workshop across 6 depts of a local council to breakdown barriers and move their agendas - “we’ve come so far! that’s been a year of meetings in one week“, Head of Transformation, Families team
Mentor/Coach
Team or leadership mentoring / coaching - there’s a difference but I can flex to your needs and preferences. This may be just seeing you/your team through a difficult time.
Examples of recent work:
Team: Mentored an AI team leader from an inside look perspective of team challenges towards a broader perspective of achievement externally (even securing her a talking spot with international peers).
Leadership: Curated a personalised 3 week coaching and training course for a Head of Engineering towards a greater clarity of his role - and where it fitted within his career.
Consultant
As a consultant, I combine the roles of Facilitator, Coach and also give advice and steer - judging what is needed given where you need to get to - following your guidance but also my wisdom as an experienced consultant.
Examples of recent work:
AI: Delivery of Service assessment for AI health diagnostic tool - bringing together a team of Tech Lead, UX/Product and myself on team structure and ways of working to provide a structure evaluation of readiness to scale - suitable for team improvement and funder attraction.
Team Topologies: 6 week training programme for 30+ IT leadership at a financial services company - learning to identify team interaction patterns, ownership, building their own tech principles, working through real and near-real case studies (via Conflux)