The way I write these notes is not dissimilar to The Weave. Sometimes it all comes together, to the amazement of English professors everywhere. Other times it’s random stuff and unsubstantiated boasts about how great and right I am. Which will it be this week?
Life has its Epsom Downs
(…is what I always wanna say whenever I see a train to that destination).
I spent much of this week feeling dejected about the struggle to get buy-in and traction in certain quarters for mine and my teams’ role in driving service transformation (as opposed to our being a support function), and furious about a bit of accidental crapness that felt horribly undermining. But I ended the week feeling emboldened, energised and excited.
I owe that turnaround to two things:
First, a great coffee chat with Lynn Roberts, to whom I was introduced by new kid on the BFI Exec, David Hamilton (and who is now the second Lynne Roberts in my network and counting).
This Lynn Roberts was full of inspiring chat about being the change, the scarcity of board-level digital roles like mine, and the need for more CEOs across the sector with (our) backgrounds in service transformation. She tipped me off to the existence of the Charity Change Collective which also led me to Tilt’s charity agile leaders club and agile mastermind group, giving me a rich seam of like-minded folks to tap into for my network, away from my usual Whitehall and localgov crowd.
Second, I spent a cathartic hour with consultants who are facilitating an upcoming leadership session with us, where I got to share my personal observations and diagnoses of where we need to do better and what’s holding us back. Words like “wow” and “that was awesome” let me know what I was saying struck a chord. Maybe the universe gave me a bad week at the office so I could harness it for this moment of clarity.
Anyway, the combined effect of those two encounters was to turn my dejection into renewed confidence in (Weave alert!) how great and right I am, and a determination to wield the power of my rare station a little more boldly.
Achiever-cum-helper
I listened to some of this Louis Theroux podcast interview with Nick Cave and they talk about Enneagram tests. So I did this one for the LOLs, and came out as a 2w3 (type 2 wing 3), aka an achiever with a side-order of helper, with a self-preservation instinctual variant.
Like Louis, I was hoping for a cooler result. My next highest score was a 1w4: reformer with individualist, which might be closer to how I (and my astonished English professor friends) see myself.
Not that I put much stock in these things, but it was fun and quick to do – and (Weave time!) perhaps tells me something about where to vary my style or tailor my message to resonate with other types.
Cliffhangers
The answers to last week’s posers:.
- Did my lawn seeds germinate? Coochie-coo who’s a cute little baby lawn! Yes you are! Yes you are!
- Did sanding and painting fix the mysterious stinky door? No! If anything it’s worse. But thanks to the power of blogging, Polly Thompson read of my whiffy plight and recommended Zinsser B.I.N. so I’m gonna try that next.
What else I got up to
Who inducts the inductors?
My week started by giving The Talk to the BFI’s assembled new starters – welcoming them and explaining the org and its strategy. It went OK, my second time. Two and a half years in, I still feel on slightly shaky ground talking about the BFI as a whole. Need more inducting myself! (Weave alert!) there’s irony here: I’m frustrated by colleagues not fully getting my function, but there’s doubtless still a lot I have to learn about theirs.
Catching up is hard to do
I wasn’t much cop for the first half of the week, with daily commutes and holiday brain fog. If I did Audree-style reflection it would be this: I need clear day(s) and WFH time when returning from a break, or I quickly feel desperate.
Still, I got it together to hit some deadlines for a board report and risk review, and chaired a decent cybersec meeting. That kind of thing.
A professional news gathering service
I went to the LFF 2024 press launch (wearing my Nightcrawler t-shirt to blend in) and it was great to be there and see the big reveal. This will be my third LFF as an insider. I’ve shortlisted 15 films this time ahead of next week’s scramble for tickets, but might cut some (learning from overdoing it last year).
Pension pain
I spent a lot of the week chasing Croydon Council pensions team to hit the deadline for that HMRC investigation. The whole thing was their fault for missing a payment in 2020 and has cost me £500 in accountant fees to sort out. I will be asking them to pay that, too.
Ow, my BCG!
I had a follow-up chat with Boston Consulting Group to help them in their work with Croydon Council, where there’s now more appetite for the deep service transformation I was pitching to deaf ears in 2021. Which is a bit like being punched in a wound but also heartening. I mostly told them about how GDS approached user-centred content governance to aid online self-service.
A Cronx tech for the people meetup?
Ben got in touch saying he and Steve are planning a new meetup of Croydon-dwelling folks doing tech for public good. I think I’m down for that, and can help loop in people from my time leading Croydon Digital meetups. Watch this space and holler at me/Ben/Steve if you’re interested.
🔎 Found, interesting 🧐
Working in the open is good for you – via Dave (via Roger).
The five monkeys experiment fable, a metaphor for fearfully doing things the way they’ve always been done. A new one on me, via a BFI colleague.
Top stuff by Beth Mindham: how we’re evolving and reshaping delivery management at Greenwich to meet the needs of local gov.
Building the next generation of digital public services – a taster of Richard’s new book, in Computer Weekly. My copy just arrived.
How do we drive AI adoption? By the always smart James P.
I can clone your voice with impunity, warns Dan.
DevOps day looks good with fun, creative talk titles.
Dave’s got a shiny new website called localise.
Shout out to Emma for keeping up with weeknotes! And via Emma, relevant to my theme: Teamwork at the top.
British social attitudes data shows a sharp decline in national pride, but not in our arts. I’m proud to be working to share that joy more widely.
Cultural consumption
I nourished my own soul with:
📸 LAIKA Frame x Frame stop-motion exhibit. Magical, Instagram-friendly, well worth seeing.
🎬 Red Rocket and The Florida Project. Plugging my Sean Baker gaps ahead of Anora at LFF.
🎬 Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice in the local Everyman. A disappointing mess with few redeeming features.
🎬 Bullet Boy on BFI Player. Simplistic, but undeniably hard-hitting.
🎧 This year’s Mercury Award felt everso flat with no sponsor, no performances, no Lauren Laverne (here’s hoping for her full recovery) and an unbelievably awks acceptance speech by English Teacher. Not a patch on last year which had that joyous win by Ezra Collective and got me hooked on Jockstrap’s Concrete Over Water for months afterwards. My pick this year was Beth Gibbons, her LP is wonderful. Still, I’ve been listening to the shortlist and so far quite like I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying by English Teacher, Who Am I by BERWYN and Forbidden Feelingz by Nia Archives.
🎧 Started Lost At Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries. This is old (2012) but great. Episode 1 is hilarious about the cultish spirituality of Noel Edmonds and sequestered Deal or No Deal contestants.
📺 Veep and Friends cont.
🕹️ BG3 cont.
📓 The Devil in the White City cont.
Infinite scroll
- Wanna buy this nuclear bunker for £15K?
- LOL at the horrible horse meme sparked by We Live in Time (showing at LFF)
- The “character” Jeremy Kyle [tiktok]
Insert closing words here that weave the whole thing together. Maybe that will do actually.
Yep. Enough. Bye!
