These notes are a tool I use for reflecting, remembering (to counter my SDAM), networking within my profession, and public accountability. Read more here.
It’s been a while so this one’s long but wait DON’T GO! It has headings, you can skip and cherry-pick easily.
New specs, new me
Perhaps only of interest to myself: I now need glasses all the time. I’m into it tbh. Bonus bling and gravitas. Plus the world looks amazing – had no idea how fuzzy it had got.
68th London Film Festival
LFF 2024 was great fun and had me pinching myself (again) this is my actual job. I saw 11 films and 1 XR thing, which I’ve ranked below.
I did some official hosting of VIP guests and used my +1 ticket allocation wisely to catch up with Alex and Dave, and hang out with Martha.
🎬 Anora – I adored this and can’t wait to see it again. Oscar for Mikey!
🎬 We Live in Time – got fully swept up in this. Florence is incredible.
🎬 Grand Theft Hamlet – hilarious, moving and inventive.
🎬 Elton John: Never Too Late – profoundly moving and learnt a few things.
🎬 The Apprentice – excellent likeness of 80s Trump and 80s NYC.
🎬 Hard Truths – a solid addition to Mike Leigh’s remarkable body of work.
🎬 Conclave – er, Sleepaway Camp with popes?
🎬 Blitz – uneven but with redeeming aspects.
🎬 Queer – a sweaty odyssey. Craig is good, but Burroughs bores me.
🎬 Piece By Piece – great Lego animation, more puff piece than biopic/doc.
🥽 Impulse: Playing With Reality – impressive visuals but scant interaction.
🎬 Nightbitch – heavy on the v/o and too basic for my tastes.
It’s all subjective ofc – other people rated the same films differently, and that’s part of the joy of it. The festival team did an incredible job (these were a fraction of the 250+ films) and this year’s edition broke all records. My directorate worked their butts off to support it too (as they do every year). Stuff like:
- Onboarding and supporting the seasonal workforce with their IT needs
- Receiving and checking every film, assembling clips, projection and stage tech for shows across 6 houses
- Building the festival website and ensuring smooth ticket sales
- Streaming LFF shorts and past festival faves on BFI Player
The screen and sound in Royal Festival Hall (intrinsically not built to be a cinema) was the best it’s ever been too, thanks to Dom and the team’s iterated adaptations year after year.
Luminous
Mere days before LFF we also had our biennial (that means every other year, right?) star-studded fundraising dinner, BFI Luminous.
To be honest, I wasn’t feeling tip-top and couldn’t – on this occasion – muster the mental strength to overcome my social anxiety and imposter syndrome so I declined being seated at a table with film talent and high wealth folks.
But I suited up and joined for the drinks reception, where I chatted to the new CEO of Into Film, a journo from Screen, and IMDb CEO Col Needham who recently agreed to become a digital advisor to the BFI. Off the back of this chat he’s coming in for a half-day in November to get closer to our work and share his wisdom. So generous of him, and we can’t wait!
(I also nodded and smiled at Boy George, Celia Imrie and Richard E Grant but none of them seemed to recognise me).
Losing my circular London venue virginity
Confessions:
- Luminous was my first ever visit to the Roundhouse in Camden. (But as it happens I’m going back in a couple of weeks for Adam Ant).
- The CogX AI Summit earlier this month was my first ever visit to the Royal Albert Hall. Terrible conference space, incredible venue – must see something proper there.
On belief, optimism and compelling visions
The universe kept serving up spookily resonant things while I’m regrouping to reboot my mandate for upholding service and tech standards, and embedding digital-first culture:
- Trump’s 3 rules (learned/stolen from Roy Cohn) are pure evil but – hear me out – there was stuff in The Apprentice that I took inspiration from, about creating your own reality by talking about a thing you want to happen as if it’s already happening and unstoppable.
- “”Able and willing to build belief and momentum” is the capability no one tells you they need, but everyone needs.” says Eliot Fineberg. “For a short period, Digital became a byword for it. Digital Transformation captured it but lacked humility. Technology ignores it. Service Design almost gets there, but not quite”
- I got to that thread from this blog post, which says:
“You need a stupidly clear north star. Some things need to be true about that north star. It needs to be:
- about some aspects of your intended user experience that the platforms enable
- a work of fiction, because it defines a future state
- pretty shiny so that it appeals to a wide range of people
- quite risky, because otherwise it’s not ambitious enough
[…] We need to do some wild future-shaping and sketching and playing. Shiny things can catalyse change, create shared incentives across teams, and enable funding.”
- The Stockdale Paradox is a psychological concept that describes the balance of faith and realism needed to navigate challenging times: an unwavering belief that you will prevail in the end, while confronting the brutal facts of your present reality.
- Audree Fletcher shared this talk she gave on radical optimism. It’s full of briliant stuff. “We have to believe it’s possible”, she says. Amen.
- Laz has introduced PR/FAQs to our product practice, and I like them. A tool to describe a potential future and get others on board with it, while refining your thinking.
- “Kayfabe” (I learned while watching Mr McMahon on Netflix) is the name in wrestling for the tacit agreement between wrestlers and fans to believe in the spectacle.
- Laz also told me about LNO prioritisation. Spend most time and effort on tasks that have give you most leverage, and actively try to do a crap job of overhead tasks.
Three other new (to me) concepts
Grandfathering is a handy term for when an old rule continues to apply to existing situations while a new rule applies to future cases.
“Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue […] you have to let it happen by not caring about it” – Victor Frankl
“Weighing the pig”. From this thread on LinkedIn. You don’t fatten a pig by constant re-weighing – aka don’t focus on measuring outputs to the detriment of inputs.
BFI Player deep dive
My big task this month was ‘holding the pen’ on a deep dive Board report into BFI Player.
It was tough doc to structure and populate, given the complexity of the work across interlinked growth drivers of product, content and marketing; and the need to explain a rebuilt financial forecast model that differs from our initial projections (and re-weighs the pig) in several nuanced ways.
But, through much collaboration it turned out fantastically well – a comprehensive 19-page narrative about what we’ve delivered, learned and changed in the first 18 months since investing in growing it for cultural and commercial benefit.
There’s much about running (a) a subscription business and (b) a streaming service that’s totally different from stuff I’ve done in my career to date. I’m loving that and learning loads, but none of it would be possible without the energy and expertise of the brilliant people we have in various teams – especially Paul Lewis. Shout out as well to James Rocarols who is very much the Bernie Taupin of the piece, our fantastic (expanded) product dev and ops teams, Hen and Pete on editorial, and Stephen in marketing.
🎃 The paper gets discussed on Halloween with our finance committee, and then a reprise with the whole board in November. Should be good (our governors are fantastic).
Family and friends
Joy’s debut feature was on at two more festivals: Dinard, and Celluloid Screens. Here she is, being dead cool and interesting about it..
My dad has been unwell with pneumonia, and a broken rib, but is on the mend thank goodness.
Dylan turned 17, and is thriving. The other night (for fun!) he wrote a Python script for his calculator to make it do extra statistical functions for Further Maths. Joel is a constant delight, and full of the joys of autumn.
I went to the Serial Killer Exhibition in Leake Street and, tbh, regretted it.
I had soul-enriching catch ups with former work besties Lindsey and Ross.
I very much enjoyed this comment from Dave, in response to this silliness.
🔎 Found, interesting 🧐
- A new search engine for GOV.UK
- Your strategy probably sucks
- Blueprints for collaborative success
- The role of transactive memory systems in great teams
- Making the case for service design and (cos everyone knows about BAs) service designers vs business analysts
- Giles’s internet inspirations
- Talking about design and AI
- Government is not an app
- Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF) for local government
- A day in the life of a delivery manager
- Why we’ve published Parliament’s first content policy
- New course on product management in the public sector
- IDEO course on human centred service design
- “UX is a joke, and it’s inexcusable”
- What we mean when we say Be Bold
Weeknote shout-outs:
- Sarah Drummond has joined the chat
- Richard McLean mentioned me and his notes are fab so here’s a reciprocal
- John, a CDO in Ohio called my recent blog post a ‘tour de force’ (while pointing out its Britishisms!) and I’m pleased to discover his site
- here’s one from the ever-brilliant Catherine Howe
All the digital centre of government stuff
ICYMI I wrote about my wishes for the government’s new digital centre. There’s been a flurry of further blogging since, so here’s a bit of a roundup.
- Digital centre of government: first reflections by (panel member) Jeni Tennison
- A vision for public digital work by James Plunkett
- Five quick things for the digital future by Mark O’Neil
- 16 points from Janet Hughes
- Thoughts from Steve Messer and vision sketches from 2019/20
- What can the centre hold? by Tom Morgan
- My thruppence by Sarah Drummond
- Relational digital futures by Anna Dent
- A new thinktank? by Gavin Freeguard
- LocalGovDrupal’s part in the digital centre by Will Callaghan
- Why the digital centre mustn’t forget about content by Anna Hepburn
- 4 ideas for the digital centre of government by dxw
- Are the stars finally aligning? Video by Richard Pope and Dave Mann
What I love about this is all the hope right now. The optimism and belief that we shall prevail, despite the brutal reality that – as James Plunkett puts it – “it’s not been a great decade for the internet, has it?” Rich’s Platformland is a call to arms for properly sharing the benefits of digital with the public, this go around.
Meanwhile, big announcements keep on coming:
- There was this NHS single patient record commitment triggering brilliant wisdom here from Public Digital and here from Hadley on why it’s hard and how to do it (hint: not by announcements in speeches).
- A new Office for Digital Identities and Attributes has launched within DSIT and along with it a blog, already filled with a slew of interesting stuff.
Listening, watching, playing, reading
As well as my LFF list above:
🎬 The Rubber Keyed Wonder. A nerdy doc about the ZX Spectrum. I loved mine.
🎬 Two belters on BFI Player: Baltimore and The Teachers’ Lounge
🎬 I thought it would be fun to show my teen sons Armageddon and Deep Impact on consecutive nights. It wasn’t. But here’s Ben Affleck being hilarious on the DVD commentary.
🎬 Also showed them Misery, which they (correctly) loved.
🎬 And Pulp Fiction, which they liked. Its style is undeniable but I found it hard to sit through Jack Rabbit Slims, the pocket watch story and Winston Wolf again, not to mention the racism. It was the last time I ever will.
🎬 Also streamed: Wicked Little Letters, Crank, The Wrath of Man, The Three Michaels
📺 Pop Academy: KATSEYE. Perfect telly. We grade it “Heels A”.
📺 Finished the final season of Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job! A twisted, hilarious finale. Short comedy episodes, free on 4 – this is your last reminder, it’s fab.
📺 Plus: Mr McMahon, Chimp Crazy, Mr & Mrs Smith, Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare. And tried and abandoned The Franchise, and Rivals.
🕹️ Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom might now be my favourite Zelda ever. Zelda meets Pikmin.
🎲 Hooked on 7 Wonders, so many ways to play.
📓 I’m slowly enjoying The Thing Itself (Adam Roberts) and Platformland (Richard Pope).
🎧 Blank Check. Fascinating, funny film podcast recommended by Col Needham.
🎧 Clark: Love Lock Floot and Donk Jewel
🎧 I caught some bangers on 6 Music Ravers’ Hour: Step Up by Ackermann, Blossom by KRTM, Slang Overload by Isaka and TRYCE, Zero G by E Wata, Enayet and K Wata.
Distractions
- Ominous positivity
- “Hey, BFI. What are some great films about AI?”
- Stop using anti-arthouse film language – lol
- Arrival lego idea – please add your support!
- Daylight computer – swoon
- LinkedIn daily puzzles – consider me hooked, and challenged
That’s all, you may go.
