Wye Valley trail 12 miles

Just 25 minutes drive from Bristol lies the trail running haven of the Wye Valley.  The langorous river Wye winds it way south through woods and gorges to Chepstow where this adventure begins.

  • Distance: 12.15 miles
  • Terrain: Hilly and muddy if it’s been raining
  • Navigation: Tricky at points, take a map
  • Elevation gain: 2,100 feet. Two main climbs at the beginning and half way point.
  • Peace and quiet rating: Lovely

This 12 mile route is hilly, muddy and worth the effort for the many amazing and historical views across the Wye and Severn valleys. The route heads upstream (and uphill) from Chepstow on the west side of the river on the Wye Valley path. This path takes you through woodlands with hidden viewpoints and caves to the highpoint at the Eagle’s Nest viewpoint. From here it descends towards Tintern and it’s crumbling abbey, where we cross on the old iron bridge to the eastern bank of the Wye. From here we head southwards and homewards. It’s a tough climb up from Tintern to join the main Offa’s Dyke path which brings us past the Devil’s Pulpit, a famous viewpoint overlooking the abbey. The Offa’s Dyke route then flattens out and then continues largely downhill back into Chepstow for some well deserved coffee and cake.

The route in detail

Begin in Chepstow castle car park which is free on Sundays. Follow the path along the left side of the castle which heads steeply uphill.  When the path meets a road turn right and carry on uphill for about 1/2 mile where you turn right into a sports centre. Crossing the car park, lean to the left and the path disappears into the woods, you are now on the Wye Valley path proper, which we follow all the way to Tintern. This path is largely obvious all the way through the ups and downs of the woods but you do have to keep your wits about you. You will definitely need a map to follow it the first time you do this route.

Make sure you stop and enjoy the views at the various viewpoints. The path forks after about 2.5 miles, take the right path and you will get to the Giant’s cave after about 50 yards or so. After a breather, head through the Giant’s cave and follow the path upwards where it eventually crosses the A446 main road. This can be a busy road so take care. There is an obvious path on the other side which emerges on a clearing with a large rock face above you. Take a left and follow this path up to the right of a car park and up to the highest point on the run. There is a viewpoint called the Eagle’s Nest about mile 4.5, which is slightly off to the right from the main path – it’s easy to miss.

From here the next few miles are flat or downhill so you can relax for a while.  Carry on the path, which follows the contours until you run out of hillside about mile 4.8. Here the path drops rapidly. There is a route here on the map but I always end up scrambling down the rocks through the trees, watch your footing. Slightly further on the path emerges into a field which you cross heading slightly leftwards to a gate on the opposite side. The path takes a left and you eventually join a quite technical path/riverbed which brings you down into Tintern. If it’s been raining there will be less path and more riverbed, it’s full of ankle twisting size stones – do take special care.

Eventually you’ll emerge at Tintern. Having taken in the fine abbey, follow the main road upstream where after a few cafes you can take a right and cross an old iron industrial bridge to join the eastern bank.  You are now literally half way, and the second half while still challenging is more forgiving than the first. On the east side of the Wye, follow the path southwards along an old railway line path. After just a few hundred yards turn a left through some wooden posts and head uphill again. It’s a long and steep climb up out of the valley. There are various paths, just keep following the signs for Offa’s Dyke and the Devil’s Pulpit. Once you get here take a well deserved break and enjoy the amazing views over Tintern Abbey. You’ll be pleased to hear that your climbing is more or less over and it’s relatively flat or downhill for the remainder.

Rather hilly. Tintern is exactly half way.

Follow the Offa’s Dyke path through the woods. While well sign posted, you’ll still need to keep your wits about you. It’s a nice section and after the big hills and technical sections, this is relatively flat and a chance to stretch your legs a bit.  The path eventually emerges onto a road at about 9 miles.

From here the Offa’s Dyke path is a slightly twisty section back into Chepstow with sections unfortunately on the B2248 road.  Take special care as there are not always pavements and the road has many turns. At least it’s downhill. At 9.6 miles the path turns off the road and across some fields. Keep to the right of the hedge that heads away from you, and you’ll enter a wooded section. At 10 miles you come back to the road and head left almost straight away down a small side road past some houses. After skirting a field, the path takes a sharp right turn and brings you back up to the road again. Here take a right turn and just a few yards along the path is visible on the other side of the road.

This section gives some amazing and slightly terrifying cliff views down and back across the river. Look out for Woodcraft quarry which perched up high on the cliffs is the most precarious quarry you’ll ever see. Carry on until the path hits the road again. Maybe thirty yards down the road the path turns right and that’s your last time on the tarmac of the blessed B2248.

At mile 11 head across the field towards a gate in front of an large walled garden. Turn right and then left around the walled garden to emerge into more fields. Keep right across that field, past an impressive walled tower and then from here follow your nose down hill back into Chepstow. You’ll emerge at an iron bridge which brings you across and back to the castle.

I can recommend the cafe in the tourist centre which sells great coffee and cakes.

If you want to make the route longer, you could cross the Wye further north at the bridge at Brockweir and join back onto the Offa’s Dyke path there. If you want to shorten it then you’d have to do an out and back, as there is no bridge further south than Tintern.

You can find the GPX and route on my Strava here: https://www.strava.com/activities/2870783290

The story of our Home Teams

Around 18 months ago we implemented some fairly significant changes at Great State, or e3 as it was known then. The change which I led was a transition away from a discipline based teams groups to multi-disciplined teams.

Largely our user experience guys sat together, the QA team sat together and so on. Projects flowed from one team to another and for many years this had been OK, but it was starting to creak as the company grew and projects became more complex. The main challenges we were starting to encounter were:

  • Decision making, organising and implementing change was getting increasingly difficult as we grew in numbers. There is a reason schools don’t tend to have classes of 70 people.
  • The range of sophistication of clients and projects we were encountering was widening. A one-size fits all delivery approach was starting to start constraining us.  We needed flexibility.  I described it at the time as rather than being in one big boat where everyone has to row together in the same direction, we’d all get into smaller boats which could go in different directions at different speeds and stop at different destinations.
  • Staff could find themselves working on almost any client or project, as a result this meant they were feeling less and less invested in the outcome. Projects were at risk of becoming batons, passed from person to person and client and sector knowledge was getting spread increasingly thinly.
  • There were sometimes tensions between the disciplines. “I’m struggling to deliver my work on time because the X team made it overly-complicated” was an opinion that was becoming more frequent. With the project work becoming more complex, collaboration between the disciplines was getting vital. Having people who thought of themselves first by their disciplines was working against this.

So in November 17 which collated various ideas including the Spotify model and I wrote a short paper with proposed new structures and working practices. With a few tweaks round the edges, we moved forward and in early 2018 we implemented the changes, with the most significant being the move away from discipline structures to ‘Home Teams’ and ‘Chapters’. We made the physical move over the Christmas holiday and when everyone returned in January, they were in their Home teams. It was a simple as that. We held our breadth. Nothing broke or fell off.

The Home teams were initially known as Colour Teams and are made of different disciplines sitting and working together to deliver great work for a group of about 4 clients. I chose colours (Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vane) to avoid any implied hierarchy – although with hindsight Red, Orange and Green has a certain traffic light feel to it. I’m not sure what happened to Yellow.

We now have 4 Home Teams of varying size, but a ‘typical team’ comprises maybe 15 people with one or more person from each Chapter. Chapters are disciplined based with chapters for Strategy, UX, Creative and Design, Development specialisms, Quality Assurance, Client Service and the Delivery Chapter which I lead. We also have Project teams which form for large scale or longer projects and can be made up of staff seconded from the Home Teams. I tweaked the naming to Home Teams to help communicate that a person could be in a Project Team, but still retain their longer term relationship with their Home Team.

So how has it worked out so far against the original challenges we were encountering?

Challenges around decision making and implementing change have improved significantly.  Evaluating and adopting ideas can be done by each team rather than the whole company at once. Each Home Team has a weekly team development session to consider ways of working and sharing knowledge. Giving teams increased control over their direction has been instrumental in helping empower people and in moving towards collective responsibility. We’ve found this doesn’t happen entirely on it’s own and still requires catalysts.

The challenge of a one size project approach has also improved. The teams are starting to diverge with one team which has more technical work and the people and the approach to the work reflecting that.  In terms of methodology the greatest differences tend to be between the Home teams and Project teams, with larger projects seeing greater benefits from agile.

The relationships between disciplines have definitely improved. The Chapter divisions are much less dominant now and the different disciplines are much more sympathetic to one another.  I haven’t heard anyone saying that “the X guys have made this far more complicated” for a long time now.

The greater consistency around projects and clients for people has meant people feel more invested in the work and the outcomes. It’s not perfect, the commercial realities mean we can’t align everybody’s work perfectly – it’s not sensible to have a developer in Orange team sitting idle while we need additional developers in Blue team. But we’re getting better at managing that and making handovers and ongoing oversight a priority.  Also movement between teams is not always a negative, we want greater consistency but not to the point of staleness.  Importantly we’ve also become more comfortable with accepting the limitations.

There are however some challenges we’ve encountered, the most significant being that Chapter knowledge and expertise is now more dispersed. The developers used to sit together and share knowledge, trouble shoot and help one another. That is more difficult when those people are spread around the building. There are various tactics and steps we’ve taken to help counter this.

Different Chapters have differing levels of variety and change.  Strategy, creative and design in particular seem to have the most need for exposure to different clients.  We’re now purposefully moving people around to prevent staleness or to give them wider exposure to work and technologies. We have some skillsets where we have only a single subject matter expert and they are spread thinly across the Home Teams. They tend to be classed unfortunately as ‘floaters’.

There have also been some other side benefits which I think come largely from the volume of information and connections being more human sized. Pretty much everything in Home Teams is a more manageable size from number of people, number of projects, number of Delivery Managers, etc.

The strength of relationships between people have changed. Rather than having similarly strong relationships with 80 people, I think people now have very strong relationships with around 20 people and weaker relationships with the remainder. Overall I think that is more sustainable as we grow and again there are tactics to help compensate for this.

Communication has become even more important and significantly different. Before the change there was a clear hierarchy through the Disciplines. Now it less clear and we’re still experimenting with when to communicate information through Home Teams versus Chapters versus the whole company at once. Interestingly, routine operational meetings have increased in number and I think this is largely because they’ve increased in effectiveness and are achieving much more.

The biggest learning I think for all of us has been that Home Teams are not a panacea. Resources still need to be prioritised, there are still bottle necks, last minute things happen and people still forget to do things.

Home teams do not remove these challenges, they have improved most but given us new things to deal with.  But overall I’m convinced they have been a positive step. Perhaps the proof came when we decided to scale our London office. Within the space of one short meeting the senior team decided to create another Home team. They are our newest team, they are the Blue Team and it will be fascinating to see how they develop.

Improve your team’s performance by ignoring your company vision

One of the early themes in Coaching for Performance by Sir John Whitmore is the importance of awareness, particularly for how well an organisation is performing and its maturity. Whitmore has 4 performance categories and illustrates the connection between them using a performance curve. Awareness of where your team or organisation is positioned on this curve is important if you want to understand how to improve the performance of that group of people. Any movement to the right improves performance and yields ‘bottom-line results’. Horay, just move to the right!

Image from performanceconsultants.com

Of course, no organisation fits entirely within these categories, it’s more likely that parts of your organisation will exhibit different characteristics, and these may change over time. When trying to consider where your organisation or your team is on the curve, you should be looking for the prevailing mindset.

The four classifications are:

  1. Impulsive – We’re making up this stuff as we go along. This is somewhere with a delicate whiff of chaos blowing through the air-conditioning. In fact, the air-conditioning probably broke down and hasn’t been fixed yet. Such organisations have few systems or structures, they’re pretty haphazard and it’s every person for themselves.
  2. Dependent – We follow the rules handed out down from the oh so wise leaders. The focus is on stability and following the rules and not standing out too much. Such organisations are risk averse and people focus on completing the tasks they’re given.
  3. Independent – We’re high performers and we can make a difference. Here it’s largely about individual achievement and goals they may well get a performance bonus.
  4. Interdependent – We are more successful together. Teams believe that high performance can only be achieved by the group. There is a lot of trust, care and collaboration. I think people probably have high levels of emotional intelligence or awareness and consideration for others to flourish at this interdependent level.

Notice that as performance increases, interference decreases. Interference here can be internal (e.g. an individual who lacks confidence or motivation) or external (e.g. command and control rulings coming down from above).

One particular aspect of these classifications which interested me was the importance of meaning and purpose. At the lower performance end, the purpose is keep your head down and survive.  In order to move towards the interdependent stage, interference decreases and we’re looking for greater self-management.

So, in order to inform their decision-making, a clear vision and purpose become increasingly important for people. It’s hard for a group to unite behind a vision if there isn’t one, and without a unifying purpose there is only so far up the curve we can expect to progress.

In my experience, most employees struggle with their organisation’s vision statement. Maybe it’s a British thing. These statements tend to be outward focused with little relevance to the people working within the organisation. I doubt employees of General Electric feel much connection to their company vision “to invent the next industrial era, to build, move, power and cure the world.” That might help sales and marketing, but no employee is going to consider how they’re ‘curing the world’ in their day to day emails about getting some more project resource.

But all is not lost. We can still give our team’s a sense of purpose and help them along that performance curve even with an unhelpful or without a company vision. Teams can still succeed if they are aware (there’s that word again) of what their vision is.

While GE employees might not feel much connection to their company vision statement, perhaps the people working in their microwave division (before it was sold to a Chinese company in 2016) might have got behind their divisional vision statement of “Working together to create trivection ovens we’d buy for our own mothers“. I made that up.

 

So if you want to help your team along that performance curve, you might want to put aside the company vision and think about the purpose or vision for your specific team. Or better still, ask the team to come together and work out what they think is their purpose and vision.

 

What is coaching and should I care?

I’ve recently become interested in coaching, not from a running sense but from a personal development and performance perspective. It’s a term that I’ve been hearing with increasing frequency in the industry and a term that I think is used quite loosely. So, I decided to learn more.

My research started with a book called ‘Coaching for Performance’ by Sir John Whitmore. It has glowing reviews on Amazon which are completely justified. I may be conflating this particular book with my enthusiasm for the topic, but certainly reading Coaching for Performance has felt like having the lights turned on. I urge you to purchase it and start reading today.

Whitmore begins by citing a Harvard educationalist named Timothy Gallwey who around 1974 wrote books for sport entitled ‘The Inner Game of… Tennis/Skiing/Golf’. Gallwey stated that “the opponent within one’s own head is more formidable than the one the other side of the net”. Gallwey believed that “if a coach can remove the internal obstacles to performance then an unexpected natural ability to learn and perform will occur, without much technical input from the coach.”

Or as Whitmore states “Coaching is unlocking people’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn, rather than teaching them.”

This chimed so loudly with me that my ears are still ringing. I experienced this unlocking of potential in my final year at university when it dawned on me that my lecturers were not going to get me through my exams and that it was up to me and only me.  I pulled my finger out my and knuckled down for 10 months. I found that learning and performance begets learning and performance and things snowballed. I went from 3 years of getting C grades to a first-class honours degree within 12 months. That might sound self-congratulatory but that is what happened.

I then gained more experience and interest through several years of teaching English to children and adults abroad. Within a coupe of months I went from zero knowledge to running multiple classes with differing age groups and levels in classrooms in Poland. It was a terrifyingly steep learning curve powered up largely by my own enthusiasm.

Since working in digital I’ve experienced and witnessed many leadership styles, or lack thereof and also learning and development approaches, training and courses. Unless training courses are for something specific and practical such as “shooting with the Z1 camera”, I have generally found them to be interesting to a point, but of limited benefit in the longer term.  Even with great trainers and good coursework, the learning and enthusiasm tend to tail off quite quickly once you get back to the day job.

Which brings me to coaching. In the same way that in 1995 I realised that only I could get me through my final year exams, coaching moves the responsibility to learn and develop from the manager and gives it to the person being coached.

Using careful questioning, the coach helps the coachee delve deeply into a problem and consider possible solutions or courses of action. If the coachee comes up with these potential solutions themselves then they are developing their problem-solving skills, they are more likely to take ownership of solutions, and importantly they become less dependent on their manager.

It is this last aspect that I find especially fascinating. Picture a world where rather than being paid to provide the expertise and solutions, managers are paid to help their team develop their expertise and their own solutions. 

If that sounds interesting, then ‘Coaching for Performance’ by Sir John Whitmore is an excellent place to start learning.