These notes are a tool I use for reflecting, remembering (to counter my SDAM), networking within my profession, and public accountability. Read more here.
Hey! I haven’t weeknoted in a while. My routine’s been in tatters with two teens at home and an unusually porous perimeter between work and life over the summer. I took some single days off here and there, but work took them back with interest at weekends and in the dead of night, like a loanshark of thought and attention.
Lots to report, and I’m going to flit between work and home stuff disorientingly because that’s what it’s been like.
I’m oop north on a 10-day break right now though, and writing this during chill moments. I was so ready for a proper rest, and I’m having a nice time.
Stick around or skip ahead for the useful links, they’re useful!
📺 Having a blissful, memory-making* time at the mo rewatching Succession to show the kids, who are loving it. It’s unquestionably my fave TV show of all time and we just finished S2 – the barnstorming ep on the superyacht. (*memories for them, not me alas. Past experiences are inaccessible for me, bar a few facts about them happening, if I’m lucky).
📺 We’re also loving Inkmaster (tattoo contest) and Project Runway S21 (fashion design contest). Inkmaster’s given me the itch, I’m planning a 4th tattoo (a colourful toy robot).
📦 We released a private beta of the new BFI cinemas website. Culmination of 18 months of work to this point and it’s shaping up to be properly transformational, in context of where we’re at as an org. The team is now doing thoughtful research with invited users so we can iterate it (and keep working on box office system integration) before rolling it out wider in coming months. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, these blog posts will fill you in.
🔐 Made some headway divvying up the cyber budget, assigning things to the right places because some of what we called ‘cyber investment’ was actually filling gaps in foundational IT. We’re bringing 2 vacancies to market soon, for a Cyber Security Architect and Cyber Security Programme Delivery Manager. For the latter we want someone great at agile who also gets the cyber domain. Know anyone?
🚗 Drove to Bristol for a look around, as a possible pick for son 1’s UCAS form. Some bits of Brizzle are super cool (and IDLES were in town hosting their block party). Other bits are teeming with junkies. And statues of Wallace and Gromit. We did the free museums, crossed the river on a ferry, and…
🎬 Caught a showing of The Naked Gun, which was patchy but had some great gags, and Pam is fab in it.
🚗 Then down Tiverton to see my folks and sister. Then back to London and work.
💭 The work things leaking into my sleepy time and weekends have been a bracing mix of complex long-term strategic thinking, and tricky immediate people problems. The specifics aren’t for sharing in either case, so you’ll have to settle for this vague blogging. It’s been a lot to ponder, and I’m still pondering… but not this week.
💬 I had an excellent chat with the excellent Emily Webber, which helped.
☕ I finally met Kati Price, who heads up digital at the V&A. Loads of common ground and a really good chat, comparing notes on our teams, and the state of digital in the culture sector.
🤙 I also had a call with Natalie Peck, who I’ve been aware of for years and is a superbrain to talk to about the things currently on my mind. Public sector digital folks are such a fab community.
💔 Which is why it’s incredibly sad to learn that Raph Heaf is no longer with us. She was a good egg, gone much too soon.
🍿 Back at BFI towers, excitement and activity is building for the London Film Festival in October. We’ve made plans for hosting exclusive filmmaker talks on BFI Player and using LFF to launch a Player marketing campaign for autumn/winter.
📃 In bureaucracy news: there was paperwork to be done to mark the end of the grant we got from the BFI Trust to get a (barely) big enough BFI Player team to meet users’ needs. (Money is hard to come by in charity ALB land, and comes with strings).
🎬 Bring Her Back in the local Everyman. I absolutely loved this belter of a horror, 10/10 and a current contender for my film of the year (along with The Ballad of Wallis Island).
🎬 Weapons on the other hand was vapid twaddle – with a script more typed than written – and I’m furious that anyone thinks otherwise. Don’t talk to me about it unless you agree.
🦷 Dentist. ✂️ Kids haircuts. 👓 Opticians for son 1 (a whole household of four-eyeses now). 🔼 MOT and service set me back £800 cos of brake issues.
⛱️ Popped down to Brighton to show son 2 antique weaponry in the Lanes, and to see…
🎩 Derren Brown’s new show Only Human. It built to a brilliant big finish after an OK first half. Heck of a thing to pull off though, and I’m a loyal fan.
🤖 I’ve been using Gen-AI a lot more, for personal stuff (recipes and facts) and BFI work (drafting and summarising) and things in-between (rubberducking about leadership and digital strategy). But I can literally feel my brain being rewired another notch lazier and stupider as chat becomes more of a habit, like Googling did before. And there’s real danger in its sycophancy. Here’s a good small use case, though: I was struggling to find a book on our shelves so I used Gemini live and my phone camera. It found it in seconds.
📢 Did the written intro to the company-wide weekly email (we rota it among the Exec) and a spoken intro at my own all-hands show and tell.
🎢 Then a day off to go to Thorpe Park. I’ve been dying to ride Hyperia (the UK’s newest, tallest, fastest coaster) since it opened, and I rode it 3 times. Here I am, “finding my fearless” on my first go at 10am. It’s insane, I love it. In my top 5 UK coasters with Stealth, Icon, The Swarm and Oblivion.
👯 I heard myself saying “back-to-back face-to-face one-to-ones” about a day of in-person meetings, which is a ridiculous collection of words isn’t it?
🩸 Joy and I went to Frightfest. It gave us an opportunity to wear our new t-shirts with obscure references to musical artists in M Night Shyamalan films we love to hate. Mid-Sized Sedan for me (the daft rapper name in Old) and Lady Raven for her (the popstar in Trap, played by M Night’s daughter).
🎬 At FF we watched A Serbian Documentary and In a Cold Vein. The doc was excellent and enlightening, about A Serbian Film (which I’ve seen, in my SDAM-related quest for extremity – given I can unsee, I crave the stuff others might avoid). It’s worth seeing if you have the stomach for it, and the doc does a good job of countering its detractors.
🎬 At home I watched Audrey on BFI Player, a cracking Aussie dark comedy; Full Metal Jacket which is way less good than I remembered it being, and Dangerous Animals which is a fun shark movie where (guess what) humans are the real monster.
🚗 Back on the road to Lancashire for this 10 day break I’m on. We saw St George’s and Union Jack flags draped from every motorway bridge on the way up, part of the deeply worrying national uprising of the right that’s happening now.
🎧 Alan Partridge From the Oasthouse season 4 in the car. It’s good but I wish it was better.
🕹️ Time Flies, and Puzzle Bobble Everybobble.
🎧 The Omerta by Raekwon and Nas, and new Burial tracks Imaginary Festival/Comafields.
🏞️ Walks around the Lakes 🎢 Blackpool Pleasure Beach 💆♂️ a spa day for Joy’s birthday 🐑 and chilling in a country cottage. A bloke yelled “Brexit Means Brexit” as The Big One crested the top of the lift hill – more evidence of the darkness brewing in the country. Being British is so weird.
📓 Finished We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer. Started House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski and Garth Marenghi’s Incarcerat. Also got Filterworld on the go. Too much tbh.
That’s us all caught up.
Links of usefulness
- Avoiding the hidden costs of leadership debt – amen to this
- The illusion of alignment – this is so good
- Dealing with Stakeholders coming with Solutions, not Problems – one way to fix alignment
- Clarity by Subtraction – another fix for alignment & leadership debt
- Patrick Lencioni’s concept of the “first team” – a leader’s highest priority should be their peer group, for good organisational health. (I’ve bought The Advantage to read sometime).
- Anna Shipman gave a great talk which also mentions the first team principle.
- Beyond Hierarchies: The Real Org Chart – eek, a little too real!
- Beyond Hierarchy: How FACT is Rethinking Organisational Structure – a bold org design (and noting this pretty cool tool they used to draw teams as circles instead of a tree).
- Beyond the Promise: organisational archetypes
- Ways of working for test and learn + How to ‘Test and Learn’ in service design + PD’s excellent new Test and Learn book (PDF)
- I LOVE the advice “make people good” in this post on how to respond rather than react
- An old but gold slide deck on traditional vs lean portfolio management
- Rob Miller’s stance on AI
- Your company needs to focus on fewer projects, here’s how
- So wait… what is working in the open?
- Joanna Rothman’s Five Practical Tips for Any Team to Reduce Risks, Increase Agility, and Deliver Value and How to Tell the Difference Between Rank Order and Prioritisation
- Sceptics United – real talk about tech hype from Hugh Wallace
- The 4 things I try to keep front of mind when using AI assistants
- Lynn Roberts on how transformation gets mistaken as empire building – ouch, too familiar
- Responsible Tech Summer Reading List
- Project Cybersyn strikes me as a metaphor for magical thinking about a utopia of data dashboards to run your organisation. Designing the ‘control room’ is the easy bit, getting the data trustworthy is hard.
- And anyway “data doesn’t change minds and facts don’t settle fights” says Erika Hall, here
Distractions
- Things I miss about corporate: business cases [TikTok]
- Historical tech tree
- Clues by Sam (daily puzzle game)
- How to surf the web in 2025
Hope you found something interesting, amusing or useful in all that.
It’s my birthday next week and autumn is in the air – how marvelous.
Cheerio!
