Aspiring DM

If you’ve read my very first blog post, you’ll remember Carlos, the friend who told me I’d be good at delivery management and kept pushing until I (kinda sort-of) believed it enough to do something about it. Well, he’s been in the background the whole time and he keeps popping up at exactly the right moment.

It was he who suggested I get assessed for ADHD. It was him, again, who first pointed me toward delivery management. And it was him, yet again, who invited me to join ADHD Pathfinding UK as a volunteer Delivery Manager.

What is ADHD Pathfinding UK?

ADHD Pathfinding UK was a volunteer-led initiative with a clear and ambitious goal: to simplify, humanise and join up ADHD support across the UK. The vision was clear, inclusive, accessible, and digital-first but not exclusively digital, covering everything from first contact through to ongoing care.

Anyone who has navigated the ADHD support system in this country will understand immediately why this matters. It is fragmented, inconsistent, and often exhausting to navigate at the very moment when you are least equipped to do so. ADHD Pathfinding set out to do something about that.

Carlos had the contacts, the time and the passion and so started the initiative, setting the vision, acting as spokesperson, joining the dots, and bringing the right people in. Which is, apparently, how I ended up involved.

The Team

For a volunteer organisation, the team was impressively cross-disciplinary. Around eight core people in total: a content designer, a comms liaison, a user research lead, someone covering content and comms, a service design and policy lead, light admin support, governance, Carlos, and eventually me.

The kind of team, in other words, that you’d expect to find inside a well-resourced public sector project. Except everyone was giving their time freely, fitting it around jobs and lives and everything else.

That matters for what came later. But more on that in a moment.

Finding my feet

I didn’t come on board immediately; it wouldn’t be honest to pretend otherwise.

Truthfully, I was terrified of getting involved. Here I was a relative newbie with no real-world experience joining a group with decades of combined knowledge and experience. People who’d spent careers in public sector digital. The imposter syndrome was significant. I eventually plucked up courage to get involved after it had been established for a while. At first, I observed from the sidelines. Watching how the team communicated, how decisions were made, where the gaps were. And then, gradually, naturally, I started to fill them. Running the daily stand-ups. Helping to organise the Trello board. Creating polls to support team coordination and surface blockers. Nothing dramatic, just showing up as much as possible (for a volunteer role) and doing what needed doing.

Which, now that I think about it, is probably a decent working definition of delivery management.

I joined ADHD Pathfinding while I was still going through titration. Still trying to work out who I was on the other side of a diagnosis I’d only recently received. Still full of questions I didn’t yet have answers to, still don’t.

But, what made it manageable, was the team. Everyone was generous, welcoming, and completely willing to share their knowledge. I was trusted to work as I saw fit. I was never made to feel like I didn’t belong, even when I wasn’t entirely sure that I did. There was no such thing as a stupid question. It was rather humbling being part of this amazing group. Everyone understood. There was no need to feel flustered or frustrated with my quirks, forgetting words, complete brain freeze halfway through a sentence, overthinking simple things etc. We all had them and it was wonderful to see.

And then there was the fact of it, volunteering for an ADHD organisation while navigating my own ADHD. There’s something quietly profound about that, which I’m still processing. Carlos knew about my diagnosis. He invited me anyway. It meant a lot, still does, giving me exposure to the rest of the team.

Coaching

One of the members of the Pathfinding team was Mr C.  a senior Delivery Manager in the civil service, with a wealth of experience and the kind of calm, considered presence that makes you want to think more carefully before you speak.

He kindly gave me several valuable coaching sessions during this period, for which I am truly grateful.

We’d talk through a problem or a situation, and rather than directing me toward a solution, he’d ask questions that helped me arrive there. Knowing what to do is one thing. Understanding why you’re doing it is something else entirely. The latter stays with you and is precisely the way I like to learn and understand things.

It’s a coaching approach that says something about what good delivery management actually looks like.

What I took away

ADHD Pathfinding wound down earlier this year. Sustaining a volunteer organisation is genuinely hard, everyone has lives outside of it, commitment fluctuates, and momentum is difficult to maintain without the structures that paid work provides. There’s also something quietly ironic about an ADHD support initiative facing exactly the kinds of challenges that ADHD makes harder: consistency, follow-through, sustained engagement over time. They, we, did well to keep it going and have the amazing output that it did.

But what I took away from those five months I was involved has been lasting.

Practical skills I hadn’t had the chance to develop before: running stand-ups, facilitating collaboration across disciplines, using Trello and Miro, learning how to draw information out of a team rather than just asking for it. Real, hands-on delivery experience that I could point to and say, I did that.

And beyond the practical: a network of people I wouldn’t otherwise have met, including Mr C., who pointed me toward something I hadn’t heard of before.

The message said ‘Get tickets to this’ with a link to DeliverCon, so I did.

But that’s the next post.

A personal note to Carlos

I’ve known you for thirty years. You’ve been a great mate for all of them.

Three or four years ago you told me I’d be ideal as a Delivery Manager. You kept telling me. You pointed me toward the assessment that changed how I understand myself. You brought me into ADHD Pathfinding and trusted me with a real role at a time when I had very little trust in myself.

And I didn’t give any of it the weight it deserved. Not properly.

It’s only recently that I understood why. I saw my friend telling me these things. I didn’t see the lead technical architect for Gov.uk telling me these things. And those are very different things to hear. I’m sorry it took me this long to realise the difference, and to understand the true sincerity behind everything you did.

My lack of self belief held me back far more than I ever admitted, to you or to myself. That’s on me, not you. You did everything right.

Thank you for not giving up on me. I’m making up for lost time.