Blue screen blues
“The horror, the horror” – George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike yesterday.
Not content with eating the world, software just ate itself and made history by causing the biggest global outage ever seen.
Someone better fetch Alanis because there’s irony upon irony here: that one of the very things designed and trusted to prevent cyber attacks effectively just caused one; that it did so as a result of following security wisdom to apply updates early and often; and that consequently (I’m guessing) nobody’s going to be able to claim the costs of this on their cyber insurance.
I don’t intend for these weeknotes to keep opening with my reaction to headline news. But holy fucking shit! A lot of tech teams just had a very bad day, not least the CrowdStrike devs who pushed this update. Can you imagine the meetings about it?! Their release process sounds WILD.
There’s much hand-wringing to be done about phased releases, supply chain dependencies, maturity of resilience plans, excess eggs in too few baskets and single points of failure in ubiquitous technology.
But enough about that, you’re all desperate to hear about my week.
My week
Mercifully my teams weren’t affected by the above other than anxious checking (we dodged a bullet – or perhaps we were spared by God).
Martha started as my new leadership coordinator. So far, so great. I’m making her a priority: the more time I give, the more she can help (my mum’s advice to that effect, as a former PA to CEOs, often rings in my ears). Plus explaining stuff is helping me clarify it for myself.
Also met new starter Kelly. A perfect fit as delivery manager for BFI Player.
Four established members of the team presented our recent progress at the BFI’s all-staff showcase, and it was joyous. Tangible. Clear. Exciting. Got the people going.
Other themes across the week were: strategic planning, cyber security stuff, and recruitment.
Ended the week with a chat with a former GDSer, now at a top consulting firm, about Croydon. Sounds like there might be an appetite forming there for the kind of transformation ideas my team and I pitched 3 years ago (when crisis-mode drowned us out).
Two fun fallacies
Ben dropped these allegorical bangers in our Exec Board meeting:
- The Abeline Paradox – wherein a family all agree to go on a long road trip, only to later reveal none of them really wanted to. Has multiple lessons on groupthink, miscommunication, no-debate agreement, leadership and decision-making. See also the spiral of silence.
- “Soup of the Day” – credited to BFI alumna Isabel Davis – wherein attention gets diverted away from the point and stuck on the process. Like a waiter answering “what’s the soup of the day?” with “it’s a concept where the chef picks a different flavour of soup to serve each day” as opposed to “tomato”. See also yak-shaving and bikeshedding.
I have to hold my hand up to doing both, by the way.
Blogroll
I did it! I added a blogroll. Found it surprisingly emotional, thinking about all these lovely people and the community we’ve made. It’s also therefore long.
Life stuff
Dylan won “Film Studies Student of the Year” at his school awards night.
Joy and I had a perfect impromptu date night at the Faber Fox.
Tix are now on sale for the UK premiere of Joy’s debut feature film 7 Keys – book here.
Discovered a second BFI colleague who used to go raving at the Marcus Garvey Centre in Nottingham on the same nights I did in the late 90s.
Links I found interesting
My good friend Ross calling for an uptick in open roadmaps.
Via Jem Finn, this repository of user-centricity.
Great thoughts from Dai on the CrowdStrike debacle.
Via Ian Ames, a prescient and relevant piece on de-risking software releases in the aerospace industry.
Via the Public Digital newsletter: “What have we already tried?” is the most powerful product question you can ask and Escaping the Vicious Cycle of Plan & Execute (interesting, don’t think I’d heard of GIST before).
Media consumption
🎬 Possession in NFT2 as part of the BFI’s Discomfort Movies season. I’d streamed it once before inattentively, and liked it a lot more in the cinema. But still prefer The Untamed.
🎬 Heli, personally recommended to me by none other than Director of BFI Player, Paul Lewis, based on my dark tastes. It’s brutal.
🎬 Finally got around to “best concert film of all time” Stop Making Sense. Sure, it’s very, very good. But come on. It’s no Lovesexy tour or Sign o’ the Times is it?
📺 Suspect, wot Joy adapted with Eagle Eye and Channel 4.
🎬 Sharknado for the second time, which it didn’t deserve, but cos Joy had just listened to…
🎧 How Did This Get Made: Sharknado. I’ve now also listened. HDTGM is always fun.
📓 I’m halfway through Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden’s OKR book Who Does What By How Much. Needless to say, I agree the fuck out of it.
🎧 Re-listened to Broken and Fixed by Nine Inch Nails for first time in decades and they stand up. Also Orb Live 93 which I have never stopped adoring, and KLF Chill Out. This is all sparked by Dylan’s voracious exploration of music and us recommending stuff (then wanting to revisit it ourselves). Raising kids is great for this.
🎧 New tunes: Loved You So by High Contrast (made with this organ he found for £20) and Don’t by Honeyglaze which I caught randomly on 6 Music in the car and LOVED.
Distractions
- Toilet seat position calculator (an AI demo from DTW)
- Everyone will have a voice [Threads]
- Sausage roll cash machine [TikTok]
- Microsoft outage cf school snow day [X]
- THIS:
See you next time for more words, links and stuff.
