These semi-regular notes are a tool I use for reflecting, remembering (to counter my SDAM), networking within my profession, and public accountability. Read more here.
I like when there’s stuff going on. World Cup. Burnham coup. Love Island (sorry). Record heatwaves. Things happening. I don’t mean all the terrible stuff, just the neutral-tinted haps of shared national experience.
Here’s hoping both England and Burnham attack bravely with maximum energy as soon as they get the ball, and adjust well to the higher altitude.
The BFI’s a brilliant place to be for stuff happening too, constantly creating shared cultural moments around themes like Marilyn, films on trains and (coming soon!) puppets. Or new British bangers like Rose of Nevada, and the best 21st century sci-fi so far. Not to mention all the simultaneous, vital stuff of film and TV preservation and conservation, research and education, advising government and providing support to the film industry…
It’s terrific but it’s a lot. A few more hydration breaks and some stoppage time wouldn’t go amiss. Behind the scenes the work’s never been more relentless than it is right now.
“It’s the same everywhere” said a colleague and, while that’s true (with all orgs riding the same economic shockwaves and what have you), the hidden extra labour of digital feels like it’s reaching a crisis point – for me personally, for my teams, and for teams like mine in culture bodies and wider public sector.
Ash showed me a preview of his near-final research report on this topic, which is timely and horribly true. Lou’s new Bad Services book is hella relevant too.
In short, the collective effort it takes to fix and maintain services that work – using today’s materials to meet today’s user expectations – isn’t nearly visible and well-understood enough. Progress is often in spite of, not because of, how organisations make plans and operate. Plus the gulf between (increasingly AI-pilled) wishes and the actual messy geological layers accreted over decades of once-and-done design and technology projects is dizzyingly vertiginous.
But you can only do what you can do, with what you’ve got, from where you are, and try not to feel all the bumps in the road.
Paul “BFI Player” Lewis snuck in at #49 on this list of top VOD professionals. Much deserved recognition for him and the nation’s culturally-driven, hand-picked home cinema club.
Our cinema programme Beta is live, step one of a game-changing redesign for a service that’s been complained about for years. Have a play and give us feedback. More info here.
It launched hot on the heels of a new archive viewing service and new shop (which we chose to rebuild after a cyber attack on the old one).
So that’s all good, innit. Things bearing fruit. Changing by doing.
Less visibly, we’re progressing a butt load of internal stuff – “doing the hard work to make things simple” across cyber, IT, DDaT governance, major systems re-tenders, and acting upon the org itself to do the 90% of work that Lou talks about here:
This weekend I’m binge-reading as much of Lou’s new book as I can. So far so good.
…And playing The Adventures of Elliot on Switch 2 which is gloriously reminiscent of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
…and pointedly not working on BFI stuff having done that two weekends on the trot and hit a wall of deep fatigue on Friday.
DCMS appointed new BFI Governors, including, to my utter delight, Tanya Cordrey. We met for breakfast this week and I’m so excited to have her counsel on tap. She’s already given me a head full of helpful provocations for the BFI’s digital work, including for how AI might help with my resource gaps based on Motorway’s experience.
DCMS have also set up a new ALB digital and tech leaders’ group which is most welcome and had a good first meeting. It shows promise for enabling useful collaboration and sharing.
I’ve been immersed in a McKinsey world of late: working with a pro bono team there to refine some ideas for the BFI, attending a brilliant “Bring a Mate in Media” drinks event, and meanwhile the fiction book I’ve got on the go is Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt, about two Oxford and McKinsey alumni who form a green energy startup.
I have to say, I’m loving it. High calibre people are my jam. Watching (and reading about) them at work is fascinating. Keeping pace with them is invigorating. Chatting to a bunch of their equally high calibre mates doing a variety of cool roles in cool orgs was inspiring. I’m aware this all reeks of privilege – but it’s a world I’m usually outside of so I’m making the most of my temporary insider status to observe and learn from it.
I’m also increasingly observing how interested I am in non-traditional organisation design models for better outcomes, and radical organisation transformation.
I love this site Emily Webber often links to, and through that also holacracy. Recently, I came across stuff about flat structures at Valve. Then I read this Times piece about Bending Spoons who sound like right brutal bastards but there’s something compelling about ‘’doing the impossible” and stripping things down to their core value and pure essential teams. I’d kinda love to see how they do it, up close, icky and remorseless as it may be.
“Doing the impossible”, challenging assumptions, laser-focusing on real needs and optimising team shapes to align effort to outcomes was what was great – and I got good at – at GDS. I do feel that muscle is underused since I’ve tried to transpose my learning to local gov and an arts ALB.
…Bringing us back to Ash’s hidden labour report and Lou’s Bad Services book: our jobs as digital leaders entail so much explaining and translating and path-clearing, to even begin to do the job itself.
Anyway, I reckon I might do an org design course. To augment my go-to Spotify and team topologies mental models with other ideas and approaches. And maybe I’m becoming more up for a consulting role at some point in my mid/late fifties. But not yet.
I wrote a note to self a few weeks ago that says “MAKE MORE SLIDES”.
I used to make more slides. At BFI I mostly write docs. I didn’t notice the shift and I don’t know why.
Russell’s post prompted the thought and the McKinsey team’s output is all slides (which they call “pages” – and “voice over” rather than present), backed by analysis in spreadsheets. No wordy docs.
I have not, in spite of this intention, made any more slides.
Son 1 won the BAFTA Young Games Designer competition for his game Kompis and the Wells of Fontis, which you can download and play (on PC) here. He had amazing comments from the judges, who said there’s real excitement about him. I’m well proud, and similarly excited for him as he heads off to uni this autumn and (increasingly likely it seems) a potential career in games.
I pre-ordered GTA6. Might help distract me from missing son 1 come November.
I got tickets for all of us for The Odyssey at the IMAX. Gotta be more interesting than Oppenheimer, right?
A whole lotta links
Tom is updating his definition of digital. I dunno, this feels previous to me. I’m still catching folks up to the internet-era paradigm shift (as above!) and would like to keep the focus on that.
Can’t help but suspect it was partly a hook for the new PD book. Which I will absolutely read (after Lou’s) cos Adam wrote it so it will be 👌.
Meanwhile, this coming evolution of the service standard sounds good.
The data manual looks incredibly useful to come back to when I have time/need.
Every link in Ash Mann’s wonderful newsletter is always worth your time.
Especially, this time, service design is not UX design at greater scale.
Lots of gold in Building Better Digital Service Teams, Initiatives, and Results via Matt Jukes.
Everyone seems to have linked to forms don’t love you back by Rachel C.
Good stuff from (BFI digital advisor and PD big dog) Dave R on false certainty.
Bravo Content Design London who have done some digging into and calling out the crapness of comms-driven government websites.
Only variety beats variety contains good stuff on adaptive org design and ops models.
At the risk of overwhelming you, see Essential books for product builders—part 2 and 50 Articles That Shaped My Thinking. Summer reading list fodder, maybe.
What we talk about when we talk about ‘tone of voice’ – in particular this quote
How to deliver digital transformation in public services: Seven lessons from past programmes – Institute for Government report via Rob Cawston.
Delivering and improving public services under pressure provoked some useful thoughts too.
(Sigh) AI
AI Eats the World Ben Evans mega slide deck. Always interesting, if hard to follow.
The AI dividend by IDEO
Starbucks’ AI failure wasn’t really about AI
A genuinely useful AI glossary
Cultural highlights
LOVED: 🎬 Backrooms. 📺 This 1995 doc about Brockwell Lido. 🎧 Promises by Floating Points et al 🎧 }{ by LCN 🎧 Plexus LP (and everything else) by Trois-Quarts Taxi System.
LOVING: 🕹️ The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales. 🕹️ Balatro. 📓 Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt. 📺 The Traitors US S4 (top tier telly!)
LIKED: 📺 Michael Jackson: The Verdict. 🎧 Harmony by Brutalismus 3000. 🎧 U by Underscores.
LIKING: 📺 The World Cup. 📺 Love Island.
DISLIKED: 🎬 Gone Girl (more preposterous than I remembered) 📺 Rik Mayall: Magnificent B’Stard (bit boring tbh). 🎧 Confessions on a Dancefloor II (underwhelmed me during my gym session this morning, sorry Madge).
Distractions
- Is AI profitable? (nope)
- 100 jumps (browser game)
- Stackdown (mahjong word puzzle)
- Lifts in film (why?)
- Burnham’s fave albums (he’s mad for it!)
Thanks for your time and attention, it’s a scarce commodity these days so I appreciate you spending some of yours with me :)
