These notes are a tool I use for reflecting, remembering (to counter my SDAM), networking within my profession, and public accountability. Read more here.
Hello. Today’s fortnightly note was typed on the Eurostar while on a quick (and marvelous!) Belgian jaunt with boy 2. More on that later.
Work, work, work
We blogged again. Here’s our user research supremo Olivia on the use of iterative possibility sprints to redesign BFI’s cinema programme guide service outside-in.
It earned the organisation a nice shout out for open working which is what I go to school for, so that made my day.
Paul did an interview with Screen about BFI Player (yet to be published) and we stepped up our comms about what’s streaming soon here and here.
Other hot BFI news (if you care, maybe you don’t!) includes a David Lynch season next January, and good news for the screen industry in the government’s sector plan.
Speaking of Lynch, I seized the opportunity of Kyle MacLachlan’s recent on-stage Q&A to send a clear instruction that we wanted it (and all such videos, having missed the boat with Tom Cruise) to be published exclusively on BFI Player before posting on YouTube – and hey presto here it is.
Point being: people love our little non-profit streamer when they discover it, so we should leverage all opportunities to show it to folks who are discovering the BFI for the first time; and make it the best at-home version of BFI’s offer we can.
I think a lot of the challenges of getting things to change where ownership spans teams and old habits die hard can be solved with a bit of Bungay-style mission command. Everybody’s always doing their best but there’s noise in the system, incomplete information, and the gaps between plans, action and results are real. So that’s what I did, basically. (More prosaically, I sent an email. Not all heroes etc.)
We hit a road bump on getting our cross-org cyber resource pulling in a single direction with omniscient tracking. Evidently (to my dismay) not everybody got given the memo on matrixed working. Fixable, but unfortunate. It’s also clear we’ll need to ask for more resource which will probably go down like a cup of cold sick, but the alternative is a tanker of raw sewage. I’ll work on a more positive analogy.
Thoughts are taking shape on how to land some real talk on what it will take to properly catch up and keep up with all our digital and tech. I had a great chat with mentor-governor Laura on this. Among other things, she described our current roadmap of bringing stuff to a decent level as” table stakes” and advised using SWAGs over perfect evidence to convey the key issues sooner.
Another highlight was an ITAM/SAM demo. One of the fundamentals we didn’t have was knowledge of the software in use across the org. Enter Shafiq, then enter Xensam (developed by an ex-Snow splinter group). Having procured it and rolled it out, Shafiq just gave a group of my team leads a brilliant demo (and fancy samosas to encourage attendance). Suffice to say we have some work to do to tame the shadow IT beast, and lots of opportunities to cut costs in others’ budgets.
We had a turn-of-the-quarter OKRs rattle through in my leadership team, to foster a degree of awareness of each others’ progress, priorities and overlaps. It’s a challenge to get the balance right between brevity and meaningful discussion. Didn’t nail it but the session had some merit, I think.
We’re all feeling our goal-setting practice needs a tune-up. Way too many OKRs, often describing tasks instead of outcomes. Some of the team are doing a session with Peter Kappus next week to help reset our approach.
Hedonic adaptation
I’ve written before about the Jevons paradox – the economic reality that tech-enabled efficiencies increase rather than decrease activity. Email didn’t create more leisure time and neither will AI.
This week I saw a thing that paired it with the concept of hedonic adaptation (or the hedonic treadmill). Progress doesn’t remove the desire for more progress, rather human happiness just rebaselines itself and says “thank u, next”.
Which is also why delightful innovations just become new basic needs over time in the Kano model. We quickly take novel things for granted.
And that’s why digital is about meeting raised expectations (but perhaps also why we’re absolutely fucked as a planet and species, and should all become Buddhists asap).
Not all work work work
Mission command (and Bungay’s brilliant book) is based on Prussian military tactics and I got to see plenty of that in action at the 210th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, nr Brussels. Every 10 years all of Europe’s Napoleonic LARPers descend on the historic battlefield to stage a recreation, and this was the biggest one yet. Joel’s big into the period so this was heaven on earth for him. Did 22K steps, got sunburn, and one of us will remember it forever.
Boy 1 did his thing at the BAFTA YGD showcase this weekend, and we’ve taken him to not one not two but three uni open days in the past 2 weeks.
It’s a lot! Life is busy as hell right now but thank god for Love Island on the sofa which demands nothing and is giving everything – it’s arguably the best season ever.
I misheard my wife and thought she said a particular film was “based on a mug” (look, she has a Burnley accent and was in another room and the kitchen extractor was on) but it made me wish there WAS a film based on a mug. Best ideas so far are World’s Best Dad (which has franchise potential), the Sports Direct big mug, and mining the Toby I.P. like it’s Barbie. Pitch me your mug-based films!
I’m excited about Villeneuve, Denis Villeneuve directing the next Bond.
🔎 Found, interesting 🤔
Some really good stuff here from clever brains:
Finding the Next Right Moves through a fog of complexity (leading to the cynefin framework and this wiki, which looks fascinating)
The Web, Storytelling, and a new form of Corporate Social Responsibility
Agile organisational design in practice — week 41 in which Dave Thomas shares the draft governance model for Defra’s delivery group.Bespoke to their context but transferable concepts within.
Emma Keith’s write-up of a session by Ash Mann and Chris “absolute” Unitt (unpacking Ash’s digital failure study) reports profoundly resonant points. Like spending more time up front establishing mutual readiness for digital transformation. And a beautifully simple classification of types of digital work.
Digital and mission-driven government: digital, burdens and networks + opportunity + growth
Good admin and everything you don’t have to automate
Stephen Follows: cinema data insights
Listening, reading, playing, watching, cooking
🍰 This easy lemon bundt cake was not easy, but is the best cake I’ve ever made and that’s not saying something.
📺 You say potato, we watched American Murder: Gabby Petito and it was good but ugh van life vloggers and fucksakes toxic men killing women.
🎬 I had a really good time at 28 Years Later. It’s very Danny Boyle and I loved lots about it, in particular the punky, Ridley Walker-esque Droogs at the end – and the 🍆 (28 inches later lol) – but Alex Garland is a terrible writer in many ways.
🎧 Descartes and Little Fix by Sprints. Thunder and Footnotes by Dom & Roland
🎬 Trap is so bad it’s great.
📺 Caught most of The 1975 and Raye’s glasto sets in my hotel room, and the start of Charli XCX which was banging. Will watch the best of the rest on iPlayer next week (Doechii and The Prodigy are top priorities!)
📺 Love Island 2025. We can chat if you’re watching.
🕹️ Mario Kart World and Fast Fusion off and on.
Distractions
- 8 free thinky games to play on your lunchbreak (but your equivalent of Shafiq and Xensam will know you did!)
- 45 life lessons from Sharon o’Dea
- The GOV.UK brand refresh which is barely worth having an opinion about
🧊 Stay cool, see you in mid-July.
