These notes are a tool I use for reflecting, remembering (to counter my SDAM), networking within my profession, and public accountability. Read more here.
Work, work, work Films, films, films
Working for the BFI in October is all about the London Film Festival.
So half of my October was a whirlwind of film galas and smart dress code drinks receptions I have get to attend as part of home team hosting duties.
I’ve learned my limits after four years, and had my elder son’s 18th birthday and uni visits to work around, so I restrained myself to just 9 films, 1 talk and 1 XR thingummy.
Which lends itself well to that most popular of formats, the top eleven list:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rose of Nevada
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ NOWISWHENWEARE (XR)
⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Mastermind
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Die My Love
⭐⭐⭐ Is This Thing On?
⭐⭐⭐ Rental Family
⭐⭐⭐ Ballad of a Small Player
⭐⭐⭐ Rian Johnson: Art of the Whodunnit (talk)
⭐⭐ Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
⭐⭐ Hamnet
⭐⭐ 100 Nights of Hero
Rose of Nevada was uncanny and made me yearn for 1993. It was lovely to lie down in Rambert under dancing fairy lights. Josh O’Connor is good in everything. J-Law goes for broke in the Lynne Ramsey. So weird there’s a film about John Bishop. I’m in the minority on Hamnet, but not alone.
Catch-up priorities are Frankenstein, Pillion, Sirat, Christy, Roofman, Twinless and Tuner.
Celebs-wise, I chatted briefly to Laura Whitmore before realising why she looked and sounded so hot familiar. Stood briefly (bizarrely) near Michael McIntyre. Saw numerous A-listers introduce their films, personal highlights being J-Law and Spielberg .
We’ve been building LFF’s profile with bigger films, a bigger venue and starrier red carpets these past years, and it’s gaining recognition as the unofficial starter gun for awards season.
Exclusive LFF screen talks are now available (with more to come) on BFI Player.
Actual work
It took me a while to get into the LFF spirit and warm up to ‘working the room’ at drinks this year, because actual work has been A LOT all autumn and I was pretty depleted.
(LFF is work but you know what I mean).
A couple of my Exec teamies are leaving, which has triggered a strategic reshuffle of top team briefs. For my brief, it brings a helpful refocusing on driving transformational change across the organisation and having more levers to do it.
In practice that means the cinema technicians move back to the cinemas bit of the org chart, ownership of SVOD audience growth gets clarified, and (from next year) responsibility for the portfolio/pipeline planning and delivery framework moves to me. It’s a shift in how “digital transformation” is understood, where “digital” is the mode for all transformation. Much better.
This exec remit reboot is one of the things I’ve been preoccupied by and unable to say much about here over recent months. But my emerging plans to respond to it have been thrown for a loop in recent weeks by the reality of next year’s resource constraints. It’s that “champagne dreams, lemonade money” paradox that feels dispiriting, sometimes catastrophic, working in the culture sector.
After a few low, tired weeks when things felt a bit pointless and impossible, I’ve ended the month feeling hopeful – embracing (instead of bemoaning) resource constraints to rethink what we are for and can do well now, while continuing to make the case for rebalancing the org’s budgeting longer term to reflect the digital world we all inhabit.
Wardley mapping, Team Topologies and Team Taxonomies are guiding my thinking, as is the wise counsel of colleagues now I’m able to talk about things more openly.
Another ongoing thing has continued to be tough and continues to be not for sharing. This article resonates: The work is (often) people (via Matt Jukes).
Other stuff… I did the all-staff email intro on World Mental Health Day and amused myself with a reference to the new Alan Partridge series. I reviewed all my teams’ Q3 OKRs – they’re noticeably sharper thanks to time spent with Peter K. We had a quarterly corporate check-in. There was board stuff to do too, this time for the BFI Trust as we come to the end of their grant investments in BFI Player (board meeting done) and IT improvements (paper written and dispatched for their next meeting).
During LFF I had meetups with Stuart Buchanan (Sydney Opera House) and Ash Mann (superconnector consultant lovely man). After LFF I caught up with Dave Briggs who is doing really useful work with his Skills Stats thing and simplified service standard for localgov.
I took a few days off at half term to replenish. Came back to the MOST soul-nourishing day of seeing my teams thriving and doing great work: a brilliant internal blog post about some game-changing service design work with archive colleagues, a pitch perfect rewrite of a board paper, a show and tell on our cinemas product iteration and learning, and promising recruitment in progress of our cyber programme manager.
It’s not all work, work, work
New ink! My left forearm now has a Black Rabbit of Inlé from Watership Down,which Jimi cleverly drew jumping over thistles to complement my heptapod logogram from Arrival, which means “there is no linear time“.
So this is now my forearm of infinity and mortality, referencing film moments that capture the joy and sadness of death being part of life, and life and time continuing after our own. 🎵 How can the light that burned so brightly suddenly burn so pale? Bright eyes 🎶 😭
Speaking of life continuing, we took son 1 to Manchester and Warwick to see the unis, and he sat the hard-as-nails TMUA exam required by Imperial, Cambridge and Warwick.
Speaking of life discontinuing, I got brutally murdered in a short horror film son 2 had to make for homework.
Low key considering joining the Green Party.
🔎 Found, interesting 🧐
The Answer and The Plan: Problems, answers, planning, and the illusion of control (“all a plan is – all it can ever possibly be – is a present-moment statement of intent”)
The discipline of focus, what makes a digital strategy work. (The BFI strategy I co-wrote falls foul of some of these mistakes imho. Dave and I did a better job of Croydon’s).
Find and reuse digital service elements and Good Things Foundation’s free e-learning on the basics of AI (both via Briggsy)
Aliveness and where to find it (via Ash Mann, via Rachel Coldicutt). I should do more stuff in quadrant four.
The missing bar, why we need X-shaped people in a digital world
Prioritization Starts With Strategic Prioritization. The benefit drivers grid is useful.
7 Questions Every Data Team Should Ask the Business
Transforming public services for a modern Wales. This is perfectly expressed by Ann, Dai and Jo – relevant to anywhere (mentally transpose ‘Welsh gov’ for your own domain)
Most of What We Call a ‘Service’ Isn’t One
Let’s get fiscal: translating content impact for business leaders. Let me hear your content talk, your content talk.🎵
Britcard takes: Ben Welby and Rachel Coldicutt
Deceptive design patterns hall of shame (via Jeremy) to add to previous ones I have linked to here.
Excellent podcast/vid on Team Topology with Marty Cagan via (BFI Player lead PM) Laz.
Listening, watching, playing, reading
In addition to those 11 x LFF things…
📺 TV
- Ink Master seasons 8 and 6. Continuing to binge these in a strange order. I’m not in control of the remote.
- How Are You? It’s Me Alan (Partridge). Occasionally hilarious but (like Oasthouse) lacks a driving story structure either for Alan or any of the secondary characters.
- The Celebrity Traitors. Such perfect telly.
- Taskmaster. Also excellent. Ania and Sanjeev are my faves.
- The 1% Club. Surprisingly good shiny floor quiz.
🍿 New films at the cinema
- Frankenstein at Brixton Ritzy. Worth seeeing but I think I slightly prefer Branagh’s.
🎬 Film rewatches with the kids at home
- Blade Runner 2049. Better than I remembered, visually stunning, and I don’t just mean Ana (but I do also mean Ana – while objecting to the objectification obvs).
- Alien 3. Pretty terrible but Ralph Brown adds an element of fun. “If I facehugged you, you’d think a brain tumour was a birthday present”.
- The Sixth Sense. Hadn’t watched since 1999 when I guessed the twist in the first 15 mins (as soon as Bruce goes to the restaurant) and hated it. The end is good though.
- The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. A classic for a reason, so intense.
🎬 BFI love
(I make a point of dogfooding our services and visibly supporting them)
- Holy Cow on BFI Player
- The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball preview event at BFI Southbank
🎧 Music
- HAAi, Humanise. Sumptuous, had this on repeat.
- Ninajirachi, I Love My Computer. Excellent (via Stuart Buchanan)
- Coach Party, Caramel. Hit and miss.
- Lily Allen, West End Girl. Just wow
- Sky H1, Azure. Lovely.
🕹️ Games
- Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Finding the puzzles a little too puzzling.
- Puzzle Bobble Everybubble. I can give up anytime I want.
- Puzzle Arranger. Meh but liking it enough to push to the finish.
📓 Books
- Finished Garth Merenghi’s Incarcerat.
- Started Seveneves by Neal Stephenson.
- Occasionally dipping into The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni.
Distractions
- Spoof Costa advert [TikTok]
- Reform councillors arguing on Zoom
- Louvre heist lift-maker’s cheeky advert
Thanks for reading this, it means a lot.
