Digital Inclusion in the age of AI

These days, working in tech means spending lots of time thinking about how to implement and exploit the capabilities of AI. This technology is changing the world with new options and capabilities and this train has a lot of track left before we reach the edge of this bubble and it falls off the rails. Personally, I see this current era like the dotcom bubble. Exactly like the internet, we have a technology that will fundamentally change the world and usher in a new paradigm for modern life (ugh) but is also being over-hyped and over-invested and eventually reality will catch up.

However, I want to be clear that I'm not an AI denier or a full-blown Luddite. What we have now is a truly wonderful set of tools and we're barely starting to scratch the surface of the capabilities ahead of us. Remember when the pinnacle of the internet was dancing banana gifs? Now it powers global ... well, everything. AI has the same potential, hype bubbles be damned.

And here we reach the point of this post. Alongside thinking about how to bootstrap data migrations and create AI-ready technology suites despite legacy and technology debt I've been pondering something much more important - digital inclusion in the face of AI.

Society is not good at dealing with sweeping change. If we follow the business drivers alone, we rapidly reach the point where it is too expensive to support people. Superfast broadband changed the face of the internet, but if you live somewhere slightly rural you probably don't have access to this. It's expensive to lay those cables if there are only three households using it so bad luck. Sites like Amazon or banking apps have no requirement to support all users, so they have a cost / benefit ratio that targets modern browsers and modern hardware. If you're running older hardware and cannot upgrade then it is not financially viable to maintain the service for you.

This is not a post about bashing capitalism, but I want to make it clear that people are always left behind when technology pushes society forward. People are cut off from what others consider normal, and eventually there is just no way to bridge that gap. This is where government steps in. There is legislation covering the national rollout of broadband. Has this solved the problem? No. But it has forced progress in the right direction. Working on online government services, digital inclusion was (and is) vital. There are huge benefits to digitising government services, but it is simply not acceptable to leave anyone behind. This is one reason there is always a paper fallback for any online government service.

Other organisations face the same problem. Charities such as Macmillan are not required to make their services available to all, but clearly it is in support of the mission to make sure they do - and again, tremendous work is done in this area.

There are many strands to digital inclusion, but put very simply they come down to identifying barriers created by skills, access or money and how those barriers can be removed.

Ok, time to think about AI. First, we shall consider cost. You can do some stuff for free, but if you want to properly use a tool you will likely want a subscription. A ChatGPT subscription is £20 per month. If you want to add a Microsoft / Google productivity subscription that's another £20 per month (Google Gemini). For the moment that is probably enough, unless you want to play with video or something else specialist. But we have already reached £40 per month or £480 per year. Apparently the average UK salary at the time of writing is £37,430pa gross (source: Forbes). So our £480 is over 1.5% of net income per year. That is a huge chunk of income when considering it is up against essentials like rent and food.

Now, we can say that AI tools are a luxury and arguably for the moment that is true. But this is a technology that can supercharge productivity. Someone familiar with AI tools can research more thoroughly, write better, generate ideas and templates ... and this is all very simple prompt work. And equally importantly, they can produce results so much faster. If this is applied to a job search, use of AI to enhance writing can be a massive uptick in the quality of an application which obviously makes the applicant more likely to get the role.

We have something that will rapidly become an essential skill and capability. How does one learn it? You need some technical skill and you need time. These are not in easy supply for most people and even then, often people need someone to get them started. Point at the correct URL, say "type in there". I've seen it with relatives - it wasn't until WhatsApp got the Meta AI button they engaged at all and they still needed encouragement to push the button when it appeared. Building skills in the alien world of tech is far harder than those of us on the inside realise.

Years ago, access to the internet was a nice to have. Then broadband was a nice bonus on top of your dial-up connection. Now (in the UK at least) your access to high speed internet is enshrined in law. However, it is too late - too many people have already been left behind and it is another have / have not divide in society. AI will create another but more profound divide. Rather than have / have not we will see a can / can not gap and that will directly align with salaries.

Written out, this progression is pretty obvious to me, and I am sure I am not the only one. The first question is - do we care? I have spent my career in public and third sector work and for me, the answer is a clear yes. AI is an exciting and genuinely transformative technology, but if we want it to be a force for good we must ensure it doesn't just benefit the wealthy and technically literate. We need to be thinking about digital inclusion now - as a core concern, not as a side project.

For myself, I am going to keep giving back to this industry where I can. Where I work with services and policy-makers, I will continue to uphold these ideals. More locally, I recently became a STEM Ambassador, which gives me the chance to connect with developing minds (yikes) - and the people who teach them. I am running some AI workshops this summer, helping people get started one "type here" at a time.

These are not grand gestures. But inclusion starts small - with a nudge, a link, a bit of time. This stuff is surprisingly low-barrier once you know where to look.

So, ending on a challenge. If you are already on the inside, think about who isn't - and how you might help them in. The divide is growing. Let's not wait until it's too wide to cross.

Looking back and remembering

I intended to start this year with a post about what might be coming in 2025, filled with enthusiasm and excitement. Instead, with the passing of a friend, I want to write a few words about remembering the important people in our working lives and what makes them important.

Over my career I've met a lot of people - some have been great at what they do. The people I remember are the ones who are more than competent, they are decent, authentic and overall nice individuals. "Nice" can sometimes be a little derogatory - a substitute for anything more positive to say. But, for me, the people who properly exemplify "nice" show off the traits we claim we value the highest. They encourage and provide positivity. They create non-judgemental space, while offering constructive feedback. They support without coddling. They make time for people and help build up those around them, usually managing to do so without making themselves the centre of attention. They usually do this somewhat unconsciously - it is their natural way to help, build and encourage. Nice people have a positive impact on their world.

Truly nice people are rare, but they are out there and should be valued. Even more so, we should value the people who remember those who have passed out their immediate sphere (say, changed job or moved away) and keep those connections going. A friend of mine refers to these folk as "glue people" - people who bring others together, often with as simple a thought process as "you're a decent person who has a problem, I remember person X who could probably solve it - you should talk". In this world of networking and personal brand, these glue people are surprisingly rare and those who do it authentically and honestly (ie not attempting to become some kind of power broker) are even rarer. They help hold extended groups together and create new connections through truthful endorsement and recommendations and lots of people owe personal and professional change and development to them - often without even realising it. We are collectively poorer when we lose them.

I don't like naming individuals on this blog, especially when I know they can't ever respond or correct or ask me to take it down, so I'm not going to do this today but I know we have lost someone decent, authentic and nice and I know they have made a huge difference to my life, and the lives of others. We may not fully recognise it. Frankly, this person probably didn't realise it either and that is both wonderful and intensely sad.

Life is short and frail. I'm starting this year thinking about who I want to be, and what I'd like people to remember me for.

AI in the charity and healthcare sectors and not leaving people behind

A couple of weeks ago I attended the CIO Digital Enterprise forum and spoke on AI in healthcare and the charity sector. Everyone knows AI is absolutely everywhere, and is the solution to every problem in the known universe and while we are clearly in the upper parts of a crazy hype cycle, unlike recent tech revolutions this one might actually deliver some of its promise to change the game. In this world, it is very important we consider all of society and do not leave people behind, and this was the topic of my fireside chat with Timandra Harkness who did a wonderful job interviewing me (I was rather nervous!). I thought I'd recap some of what I said here, although I'm not going to bother writing much about efficiency. Everyone knows that at this stage.

Charities and the public sector need to think about customers differently to a business. Where a company like Amazon can focus down to the most profitable users and decide, after analysis of the return on investment, to simply ignore anyone who doesn't own a modern smartphone or a high speed internet connection this isn't really an option for us. Our mission is to reach everyone, so we need to avoid making decisions that cut out or degrade service to subsets of the population.

Fundamentally, charities exist on trust both for income and service delivery. Income is predominantly donations from people who want to support the cause, and fairly obviously people will not donate to an organisation they do not trust to be good stewards of their money. Similarly, people will only reach out for a service to an organisation they trust. This naturally leads to a more risk-averse approach to anything that can damage that trust.

At Macmillan, we are trying to reach people who are going through one of the worst experiences of their lives, when they are most vulnerable. This is a tremendous privilege and responsibility and we have to take this very seriously, understand where people are coming from and meet them at their place of need. We work with people from all manner of backgrounds. Some are highly educated in the medical field. Some are in cultures where speaking of any illness, let alone cancer, is taboo. Some will reach out to a doctor when feeling unwell. Some mistrust doctors and the wider establishment and will talk to a local community or spiritual leader instead. All these different groups and many more besides deserve access to the best healthcare available when they need it and for many of these people we'll have perhaps one chance to engage with them and build a connection before we're written off as "not for them".

Looking at technology, this means we have to be very very careful when putting in anything that can be a barrier to engagement and this does not sit well with many of the end-user deployments of AI at the moment. Although the potential is far wider, the discussions around AI usually end up being about cost saving - doing more with less. When talking about user interaction, an obvious option is the chat bot, either web chat or an automated phone responder. These tend to communicate in a very particular way which works for simple information retrieval but lacks warmth and certainly isn't all things to all people. I know I've been turned off from services by being presented with chat bots (in fact, I wrote a post about this some years ago) and I work in this field and haven't been looking for potentially terrifying medical advice. Chat bots are getting better all the time, but at the moment they certainly do not replace the personal connection one gets from a well trained call responder.

That said, call responders are expensive and their capacity scales linearly so need to be deployed carefully. Behind the scenes, there is lots of use for data (and therefore potentially AI) driven optimisation of their time, ensuring good stewardship of donations by making sure phone lines are staffed without being over-staffed. As real-time translation improves, this will also make a huge difference to us. There are a lot of languages spoken in the UK and we cannot possibly maintain a workforce which allows people to speak to us in whatever language they choose. However if and when we can have ongoing translations between our users and our call centre staff we can communicate in their preferred language, again reaching them in their place of need.

In a similar way, use of AI in semantic site searching is an opportunity to allow people to communicate with us how they choose. In earlier days of the internet, everyone knew someone who was "good at finding things with Google" - this means they could phrase their searches in a way the search engine understood. Any good site tries to make finding content easier through good information architecture and a decent search function, and this can be significantly enhanced with AI. Again, closing the gap with users rather than expecting them to come to us.

Of course, AI-driven chat bots do have a place working out of hours. As long as it is very clear when speaking to a machine rather than a person, and there is clear signposting to when a human is available, it provides a "better than nothing" opportunity for when the phone lines are closed.

This theme also comes through when considering personalisation. In theory, personalisation lets us provide content suitable for you and your needs, which is a great way of helping you find what you want. However, promoting some content inherently means we're demoting other content. Is this the right tradeoff? Ideally, yes and I'm sure we can tune the site to behave better for a high percentage of visitors. But we're trying to reach everyone and now we're doing maths trading some people off. If we can provide good personalisation for 99% of our visitors, that means in a period of time where we're seeing 100,000 visitors we're actively hiding the content 1000 people need. In all likelihood, those people with "unusual" needs are going to correlate with the people about whom we have less data and guess which of the above groups that represents...

This is the fundamental danger of data-drive organisations and service design. The underlying data must be understood, including the weaknesses. We know there are many MANY holes in research data across healthcare. You may well have equal access to medical care, but the medical care itself was almost certainly not developed equally and its effectiveness will vary accordingly. There is a lot of work going on to correct this problem (although not enough!) but in the meantime we need to be very alert to not compounding the problem.

This is a useful segue to the last thing I want to put down. We were talking about the future where AI takes us. I had a couple of things to say, but the one I want to replicate here is around the change I hope we will see across the sector. Currently, charities cooperate with other organisations, but each is fairly stand alone. Given the rich, but incomplete (see above) data we are collecting and our resources being tiny when compared with big tech firms, I hope we see "big data" collaboration across charity groups to help spread the costs and fill in data gaps. We need to deliberately find and occupy our places in a wider ecosystem, so we can work together, share and signpost to each other more as a single organism rather than overlapping entities. What that specifically looks like remains to be seen, but this has to be the future and I'm hoping to be a part of it.

And let's close with a picture of me pretending to be smart...

Photo credit to CIO Digital Enterprise forum

Celebrating the important people - part 1

Everyone can look back at their life and identify people who have had a huge influence on them, for better or worse. In my professional life I have been fortunate to meet a lot of great people, but there are four people who (in different but very positive ways) have had a profound effect on my career and development and are the ones to whom I give credit for my current position. I've been thinking about different ways to tell this story - partly because I'm deeply thankful to and for these individuals, and partly because I think it's important for anyone who works with others to realise the effect they can have on those around them.

Two of my four people are women, and so I'm going to celebrate these two and post today on International Women's Day (March 8th 2024 for future readers). I'm not going to name names because at least one of them will just be embarrassed by public praise and thanks, however if they do read this and give me permission I'll update / follow up later. If you read this and know who I'm talking about, please don't out anyone in the comments. For the moment I'm going to call them Amy and Bree.

Amy

I started my time in tech on an IT support desk, servicing whichever members of the university community walked up and asked questions. Amy offered me this role after she caught me behind the counter fixing a computer, helping out a friend who already had a job there. The interview lasted as long as "is that going to work?" "yes..." "want some shifts?". This was my first proper professional opportunity (previous jobs being typical student roles and work experience) and fundamentally set the course of my career in the Tech space - before this, my Dad and I were discussing some kind of management accountancy role. Amy opened a door here, but this was just the start.

Working on the helpdesk could have been a routine role doing shifts and bringing in enough to live on. Instead, Amy encouraged me to take on support for the university's student machines in our library and manage repair and maintenance myself. This was really quite significant for someone in their first role at the age of 21. In addition to the technical problem solving, Amy gave me experience with broader organisational problem solving and working with suppliers (some of whom were really awkward). When I spotted problems with our processes, Amy gave me the space to make improvements. Looking back, Amy gave me a huge amount of trust and freedom - especially considering my age and lack of experience. But this let me grow in professional confidence and laid the first foundations for me to think about work beyond Just The Day Job - a skill which has proved utterly invaluable throughout my career. At the time, I had no idea this wasn't the norm but looking back, Amy broke the "tech for tech's sake" thought trap in me before I even fell into it. Without ever using the phrases, she made me focus on the user needs and the broader systems at play.

All this was incredibly valuable, but what happened next was a step beyond. After just over a year in this role, I had to approach Amy and say I needed to move on. I was enjoying my time working on the helpdesk but the lease on my house was running out, flatmates were moving away and this wasn't a role I could keep doing for much longer. I was preparing to move home to my parents and strike out from there.

Amy had other ideas. Next thing I knew, I was in a meeting with a couple of very senior people in Computing Services and she was telling them "this is someone you need to keep". She didn't so much open a door here as kick it open and demand attention and this led directly to my first developer job. While the helpdesk experience was incredible learning, it was this action that locked me into a career in Tech and it was 100% down to her decision and willingness to stick her neck out for me. This one action literally led to my current situation, sitting here as a senior tech leader with a wealth of highly technical experience behind me.

Looking back, Amy was incredible to me even if I was too young and foolish to realise it at the time. She embedded particular ways of thinking that are still of value daily today and literally set my future field for me. She believed in me, helped me build my confidence and gave me space to learn and experiment. I hope I pass this on to those around me.

Bree

Many years later, I had been working through a very difficult time at work. The year had resulted in serious burnout and a complete destruction of my professional confidence. I reached a point I could not continue, and left my role with no role to go to. I needed time to rest and recover, then figure out what I wanted to do next because I did not feel confident to do the kind of role I'd been occupying. 

I got an email which led to a conversation which all boiled down to "Hi, it's Bree. I hear you're leaving Blah? Any plans? We might be hiring! Would you be interested in helping me work through a major org change?"

I have no words to communicate how important it was to have this kind of conversation at this at this stage in my life. In short order, I was back in the maelstrom of change and leadership but with some essential differences. This time, I felt respected by the organisation and it felt like people actually wanted me to be there. This is entirely down to Bree and her decision to reach out and I cannot express how thankful I am to her.

Honestly, I came into this space damaged and it took me a long time to start to relax into the role. Bree gave me support and space to heal while I ramped up. She restored my professional confidence and gave me a forward trajectory at a time when I was seriously considering turning my back on this profession. Bree showed me a possible future for my career and encouraged (and shoved) me towards it.

Not that she gave me an easy ride! Bree pushed and challenged, expanding my boundaries and horizons. She demanded excellence, but a new thing for me was also having to work to define what excellence meant before then having to (attempt to) achieve it. Bree kept this challenge in a very positive setting, which made the difficulties an interesting problem rather than a trial by fire. It is very hard to constantly push for better without damaging morale, but Bree's leadership told a clear and inclusive story: "we can do better - let's get there together". Many responded well to this, and we saw a strong culture developing from this simple but inspirational message.

Bree taught me so much about operating at senior leadership levels - how to set a culture, how to polish communication, how to put myself into the wider conversation, how to articulate value, not to mention how to run a broad department while keeping a hand on the details. She helped me learn and refine key skills, but more importantly she helped me develop the ways of thinking which drive them. These are strong foundations from which to develop and evolve and this is an incredibly valuable gift.

These days I have a very minor public profile. This blog post will appear via LinkedIn - I've mentioned before how posting there was a big step for me and taking that step was again thanks to Bree encouraging me to develop my platform in this way. Before, I had some thoughts for how the industry could improve and thanks to her, these are more than random muses and I am thinking in terms of what I can actually do to change and influence things.

Bree has had a huge influence on my career by helping me think differently and challenging me to stretch myself and grow. She also gave me the support to heal through encouragement and belief when I needed it the most, not to mention opening doors into different worlds. Most importantly, Bree made me believe in myself as a senior leader at a time when I absolutely did not. It's hard to imagine a greater gift.

To loop back to the top, I wanted to post this on International Women's Day to recognise and celebrate the impact of these two women on my life. They have profoundly affected my career and if you've got this far I also want to challenge you to try to be on someone's list one day. We can all do this - take the time to invest in people, develop them and have a little faith. It sounds easy boiled down, but it takes thought and effort. These two did it, and I spend most days trying to live up to this standard.

Exercise in the new year

It's the start of a new year and I've made a few resolutions around fitness. Many are the same as the ones I made last year, which gives you an idea of how well these things tend to go for me.

I regularly see both a PT and a soft tissue therapist. Both are excellent (if you are in the Bath area and want a recommendation, give me a shout). My problem is that while it's very good for me, I don't really like the gym. I find picking up the thing then putting it down again entirely pointless and I don't really get much from the weight getting bigger. I've been trying to explore my thinking here with these two fine folk and I think we've finally brought together some disparate thoughts into something helpful.

First, I see the gym in general as a support activity rather than a means to an end. Rather than finding the activity and any progress compelling in themselves, I only get enjoyment when I see other activities getting easier / faster / better as a result. When I was younger, I did a lot of martial arts training - that was my exercise endpoint and I took pleasure getting better. Gym and other raw cardio training helped with the martial arts, so I enjoyed it. I have been out of martial arts training for some time, and I've been trying to use the gym as a substitute. This doesn't work for me, and I need to find an alternative.

Fortunately, I have just the thing. I have been a keen badminton player since I was a teenager and during my adult life I've been in and out of playing depending on time (ie work) and availability of people to play against. I've just started playing again and it is a lot of fun, while also being a great focus as a reason to get fitter.

Second, talking to these professionals has helped me realise there a third kind of fitness. Previously I've thought about fitness as important for health - which is obviously the most important thing, but really boring when abstract - and to power other sport as above. However, there is also the fitness that powers our ability to do basic "athletic" things like twisting and jumping.

Like many, I work a desk job and my current employment is remote. If I don't make the effort, I can easily clock in about 200 steps in the course of a day - sedentary doesn't really cover it. Continental plates move more than I actually need to, which is why I force myself to walk a few miles every day after work. Being like this is not that unusual in the modern world and many people of my age really struggle to walk any distance or jump a stream or physically twist. Our bodies atrophy and generally forget how to do these things. I realise I find this frustrating, and retraining simple jumps and twists and so on is something that I enjoy - and I get a lot out of seeing my progress. Some shifting around my training schedule has changed the focus and this has really helped with my engagement, which means I push harder and get a lot more out of it. Of course, training snowballs - when it starts going well it builds on itself. Getting started is often the hardest.

I'm sure many reading this will finding it blindingly obvious, but I have never really understood my own positive triggers when it comes to exercise and maybe recording my thinking here will help someone in my position. As I've said many times before, half of writing this blog is a way for me to arrange my thoughts so I understand myself and any readers are here for the ride...

Plus, it means I get to write about playing badminton again (and winning :-) ).

Professional new year resolutions

It's my favourite time of the year - the null zone between Christmas and New Year where nobody is doing anything, the weather is awful and hiding away is socially acceptable. I can sit with a laptop, learning about things I never find time to touch during the year and slowly become one with a chair. All without any guilt that I should be doing something else.

Every year I write new year resolutions and then do an end of year summary however this always focuses on my personal life. This year has been VERY work-heavy so I thought I'd also write some extra new year resolutions for my professional life and why I think they are important. It's the holidays so don't expect anything enormously insightful - there is a huge list of things I should be doing, and this is more about where I should refocus myself for the new year. Here we go.

More engagement

Anyone who has read Future Engage Deliver knows that you can have a vision (Future) and set everything up for output (Deliver), but if you don't bring people along (Engage) your success is going to be limited at best. This ranges from simple visibility through to detailed talking about strategy to everyone, both in the team and wider. When physically in the office some of this happens just by not hiding behind a closed door, but when working remote those corridor conversations don't happen - there is the need for more deliberate mapping of communications and touchpoints.

My area is now essentially a remote working group and that creates a need for more deliberate communication. We're also in a time of change - a very exciting time, but change is always unsettling. This is going to make engagement even more important.

I don't think I'm too bad at engagement - but only when I prioritise it. There has been a LOT going on, and good engagement takes time and energy - two things that have been especially in short supply in Q4 2023. So for 2024 I'm going to look to make two changes. First, make sure my engagement is of a higher quality. Second, and more important at the moment, I'm going to prioritise engagement which means finding or making more time for it.

Give back more

The Tech industry can be a pretty bleak place at times, and the only way that will improve is by all of us doing what we can to make it better. Over the years I've tutored, coached, mentored and set up groups. These days I'm still mentoring people across several different organisations - particularly people who are leading software engineers, and software people who want to progress into senior management. I also sit on the London Data Board, I've done some consulting with groups looking to restructure (both paid and pro bono) and I've spoken at conferences about technical leadership.

I get a lot out of these kind of things and I am going to assume it's helpful! I'd like to find ways to do more. If you'd like a chat do reach out. Otherwise, I need to explore some ideas around this - ways to share / cooperate / mentor and so on. I'm not very clear what I can do beyond more mentoring (I'll post about that in the new year) but I'd like to find something.

Do less

Both of the above will take time and while we insist on saying "make time" this is actually impossible. Time is a fixed resource and needs to be spent effectively. What I want to do in 2024 is to make sure the time I have is spent on quality activities. For 2024, that is going to mean two things. First, a renewed focus on delivery - getting things out the door rather than spinning wheels and sustaining. This will also help with the good feels - everyone likes achieving things. 

Second, I'm going to ensure the various meetings and governance processes I attend are providing proper value. As mentioned earlier, we are in a time of change and that can easily mean overlapping or redundant org processes. This only costs us time and energy, so finding and stopping them helps not just me but everyone. I'm going to push back hard where it seems appropriate to do so to protect my time.

Work / life balance

Actually, there IS a way to "make time" - work more hours. That has been my default in 2023 and to everyone's surprise it has proven unsustainable. In 2024, I need to balance work and life better. This doesn't just mean looking at working hours - I need to put things in my off-time and have the energy to do them. I know there are problems when I'm not doing anything in my free time because I'm too tired so this is a move to protect my mental health.

So that's it. In 2024 I'm going to work on how I engage with people, I'm going to find ways to give more back to the industry, I'm going to focus my time at work and I'm going to improve my work / life balance. Any guesses how I'm going to get on? Happy new year!

Some thoughts about the future of the Tech industry

Last week I was given the opportunity to sit on a panel of technical leaders and talk about the future of technology. I had a few notes about about how we're going to need to change our thinking about building capability and I thought I may as well capture and flesh out a touch the results of my crystal ball gazing here.

I spoke briefly about three areas:

• The people we hire
• The expectations of our users, and our expectations of them
• Where I think we’re going to need to invest and build capability

The people

Fairly obviously, Technology is getting more important to daily operations. But it's getting harder to hire people all the time. As we all keep hunting for talent, those who aren't offering the top end salaries will increasingly have to look nationally or even globally to recruit. I don't think moving the organisation to another city is a sustainable approach - at best, it will simply move the problem. Instead, I think we will increasingly see a more distributed workforce, and therefore more remote working. As staff turnover is identified as a major organisational cost, we’ll also see more emphasis staff retention - succession, training, individual growth and so on.

Whoever nails building a strong remote working culture and environment which encourages loyalty and celebrates and develops the individual is going to do very well. I think the secret to this is going to be building very strong communities of practice, and if I’m right we’ll see more “Head of Community” style work and roles growing up. 

I also think we’ll see more Tech decisions based not on the best technical or product solution for the org, but the best fit for the skills we can grow or hire. This would suggest a lean towards the big names (the Microsofts, Googles and Amazons) who are heavily investing in training the Tech industry through free access to courses, sponsoring hackathons, and so on.

I believe this will be more acute as Automation is used to deliver more while avoiding the continual growth of IT departments. We will need to retain the skillsets to maintain that automation layer or we'll be seeing yet another wave of technical debt.

Expectations from and on users changing

In times of yore, users used to have to know something about operating a computer to install and use software. These days, users on a smart device can just touch an icon and get everything they need. This is a victory for accessibility and digital inclusion but it also means the gap between “technical” and “non-technical” user is widening. Our helpdesks and other support points will need to work with an increasingly broad ranges of questions, especially as tech like AI gains traction, and expectations for what it can do are all over the place. 

We’ve also been seeing for years the expectations from users increasing as they use more SaaS products at home and demand the same sort of tools at work. To satisfy these needs, the cost of development is going to go up and cover a wider range of skillsets - and of course this links back to the earlier points about skill availability. Out of the box services are also going to be affected - vanilla deployment is going to be less palatable in the office, requiring more work for a good result especially with the current state of many internal systems user interfaces with respect to accessibility and usability. 

This is particularly true regarding what have often been considered secondary requirements - accessibility and environmental sustainability for example. Users are (quite rightly!) far more vocal about accessibility needs, and we need to not just respond but get ahead of their requirements.

Other places we’re going to need to build capability

Technology is obviously an increasingly essential part of everything. I mentioned the effect on helpdesks above. We're also already seeing increasing amounts of security threats and the wider reaching impact of a successful attack. This will take us into an ever more expensive arms race in the Security field, which will mean building Security capability. This is going to need to be approached very carefully as it will be very expensive - everything I’ve said about skills shortages are far more acute in the world of InfoSec. Part of the Security picture is a renewed emphasis on good, basic engineering practice (such as patching) - but again, this places a challenge on building skills in our organisations.

We’re also generating and handling more data all the time, so inevitably we’ll see more human error leading to data loss. In fact, for any organisation a major security incident or data breach is only a matter of time now. If we are assuming that it is going to happen, there is a need for much more robust organisational responses to these scenarios which means building appropriate incident response and Business Continuity capabilities. Of course, just responding isn't enough so there will also need to be stronger data ownership throughout our organisations, with more people with data owner and controller roles. Organisations will need to fully grip their end to end processes and user journeys in ways that perhaps hasn’t been happening before.

Obviously there is a lot more that can be said about everything here!

Looking to the future

One of the symptoms of seniority that I still struggle to process is this idea that people want to hear what I have to say and understand how they can (professionally at least) be me. It's a weird feeling, both humbling and frightening, and has only grown in the last few months. I'm being asked to speak at conferences, and in a few weeks I'm on a panel discussing the future of the Tech industry. Why? Surely there is someone better for this?

Honestly, this is a question I've been asking myself since my time in the Civil Service, where I found myself in a meeting discussing how to spend five million pounds of public money. I should write a post about getting over myself and getting on with it. This, however, is not that post.

I moved away from development into management so I could make a difference to the industry. How do people get into Tech? How do people move to more senior technical roles? Showing the importance of senior leadership with technical backgrounds, and helping people get the right experience to be credible candidates. These are core to my motivation and it seems I have the beginning of a platform. This is a responsibility I want to take seriously. What can I offer to the wider industry?

I've got a few ideas and since there seems to be a few people reading this blog from LinkedIn, I suppose I can offer them up. First and foremost, I'm thinking of creating a set of interviews with people in my position telling their story, talking about how they got to where they are today. I don't kid myself that I'm some kind of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, but then neither are the overwhelming majority of people. I am, however, fairly successful in the industry. I'm in a position that someone getting into Tech can reasonably aspire to attain. Not inspirational perhaps, but practical. There are lots of people like me, and the stories don't get told often enough so I like the idea of creating some kind of resource showing the different paths people can take. At the moment I'm thinking a podcast, but format to be decided. If you're reading this and think it's an interesting or useful idea, please do reach out.

In addition, I sit on the London Data Board, and I'm happy to offer some time to support other initiatives if they come up. Again, do reach out - especially if they are something to do with nature or animals. On top of this, I already do some mentoring, and I've got a whole post about that coming up soon.

I opened saying that people asking about my career and how to "be me" is weird. Actually, on reflection, it's a weirder feeling that I'm in a position to be feeling a sense of responsibility to the industry and asking any of the above questions. It's a great privilege to be working somewhere where I can spend some time looking outwards and hopefully make a difference. That's my intention anyway - so I've written it down in public so I can hold myself to account.

Making a decision

I've been thinking a lot about governance recently. In general, I like consensus - it's important that expert voices are heard and action is taken on the back of expertise. I dislike dictating how things are done for the same reason. Generally, I find people thrive when given the space to take ownership of problems and work through them.

However. This can create a few problems. The first is mediocrity - if everyone is compromising to form consensus then it is far too easy for nothing to actually be good. In the worst case, the important part of a proposal is compromised away and any outcome becomes a waste of time. This assumes there IS an outcome, which leads to the second problem - how is a decision actually reached? How do I stop people talking forever?

This latter problem is the one that concerns me more at the moment. I see different versions of non-decisions all over the place, from email threads which ambiguously leave "someone" to do the next thing to conversations which always need another person to engage before maybe everyone agrees. At worst, this never concludes but even at best it is sloooooow.

For me, this leads directly to the question "what is a decision?". When is something approved? When is it agreed? Or when it is simply some positive noises coming out of a discussion? It's important to draw this out for everyone involved. Individuals do not like being misquoted ("no, I didn't actually agree to this"), project managers deserve to know where they stand with sign-off so they can move on ("is that a decision?"), and I need to add some formality so I don't have to mediate these positions.

I'm leaning into some hypotheticals here - while I see some of the above at work, decisions are certainly being made, and people are thriving in their empowerment. However, and being selfish for a moment, it is actually my needs that are being neglected. As my role changes (and reflecting on my musings from my time covering as CIO) I find myself with less and less time to mediate circular conversations. So while things generally work, I need to move this from "generally" to "always" and "with less effort from me".

It's time to make some changes. As noted above, I've previously been happy to give people space to feel things out and learn from them. I don't want to lose that - it's an important part of empowerment and learning. However that is the discussion part - I need to add some stronger gateway decisions to the way we work. On reflection, I think I need to be better at separating discussion from decision and creating a formal record. There is too much going on at the moment to be imprecise about the state of decisions, so I need more opportunity to eyeball people and tell them to speak up or forever hold their peace.

The trick through all this will be retaining agile working patterns - I don't want to create some kind of decision auditing circus, but as we mature we both want to and need to be able to hold each other to account properly. This means having something to be held to - robust decision records where people can make their decisions known formally.

Initial muse for the moment - I've been exhausted this month. More on this later I feel.

Built to last

I spent the week in Pembrokeshire, exploring the coast and visiting various old and ancient places of interest. There was a bishop's palace (around 200 years old), a reconstructed Iron Age village built on the site of the original settlement (2500 years old) and a Stone Age floating stone dolmen (5000 years old). These are all astonishing examples of technology from the past. Did you know there is no smoke hole in an Iron Age roundhouse because it created a smoke ceiling that was useful for smoking meats and then the tar deposited as the smoke worked through the thatch helped insulate and keep insects from nesting in the roof? The design of the house was such that with a correctly sized fire, the smoke ceiling stayed well out of the way of the inhabitants. This created a beautiful ecosystem using all parts of the fire and this was 2500 years ago.

On the other hand, we can't build an HR system that works properly.

One way I like to expand my thinking about the tech industry is by learning from other walks of life. Tech is a very young industry and while some of our challenges are unique, many have come up time and again and we really should learn from others before attempting to reinvent the wheel. Usually I look at modern industry like manufacturing, supply chain logistics, beer brewing, food packaging, game development, forging and so on but sometimes we can gain inspiration (or at least be humbled) by looking much further back.

So let's look at Pentre Ifan, the neolithic dolmen.

The top stone was originally a larger rock which was split by craftsmen and now weighs around 16 tonnes. It is balanced on the tips of three other stones, high enough for a fairly tall person to walk under without stooping. In person, the effect is actually quite eerie - it looks like a strong wind will knock it over. What we see here is very simple, yet elegant design and a very high commitment to engineering excellence in order to execute it properly. It was believed to have been winched up a little at a time using ropes and pulleys, with supporting boulders put in place each step. So iterative construction with solid testing at each stage (with failed tests resulting in a 16 tonne boulder falling on the workforce...). They had to create supporting structures (the smaller boulders), which were later discarded when no longer required.

They put in the work to make this last (last 5000 years, as it happens). It even has a small environmental footprint since the materials are locally sourced. So is this pinnacle of sustainable development?

Well, not exactly. That means building for the future - creating something simple and well documented so we can maintain and make use of it going forward.

Thing is, we can't maintain or extend this dolmen (ignoring the protected status for a moment, and the sheer horror of using a 5000 year old monument to build "something else"). For this to be useful, we need to know what it is for. Is it a doorway to a tomb? Some kind of temple or altar? The real problem is around knowledge transfer. Where is the original documentation telling us the core purpose with notes about how it was built? The fact it predates writing in Britain by around 3000 years is no excuse!

Plus, while the design is elegant it is not intuitive. If it were, we'd be able to work out what it does and how to use it. More UX work required here, I feel. Whatever it was, it has outlived it's original purpose and has clearly missed its (admittedly impressive) maintenance cycle, which would have had it replaced by a modern equivalent a few thousand years ago.

This post needs to end. Somewhere in all the above silliness are some solid points, honest.

Pentre Ifan itself is incredible.

Can we actually do sustainable working?

Ok, time for another rambling post about mental health.

Over August I took a week away from work, and I came back feeling so much better. I was away from Bath for a few days, and the change of pace and change of environment was incredibly refreshing. I felt ready to face some of the challenges that only a week before were making me want to hide, and for the first time in ages I didn't feel a sense of gnawing dread at having to face work again.

This is all great, and we all know about the healing power of a break from work - and why it is so important that the break is a proper, clean separation and not just answering emails in a less convenient way. A break always make me feel better, helping me recharge my batteries and replenishing energy to face the next days. However, this time, the change was dramatic enough to remark on it, which doesn't seem right. We talk a lot about sustainable working being an important part of a caring workplace culture but a properly sustainable working life should not really require holidays to recharge. Holidays should be a positive extra, enabling new experiences and life learning, not just a break between work-marathons to collapse and pull oneself together.

I've had seen this fatigue growing in me over the preceding months, and I can see it trying to grow again now I'm back. I am paid to work a certain number of hours a day, and (accepting that my role will require some flex in this) I should be able to enjoy the other hours in the day. However, if I am getting to the end of the day knackered and just looking to crawl onto a sofa and close my eyes that is not giving me any sense of life outside of work (and if it gets worse, it can knock on to bad behaviours like takeaway food replacing cooking, etc). This, for me, is where "sustainable" really kicks in.

Of course work is going to be stressful at times - that is pretty much a given. Also, I am certainly not currently in a strong mental state. I am very definitely still recovering from burnout and this has made me more vulnerable to mental exhaustion and less able to shrug off personal slights that wouldn't have phased me in better days. However, these things are amplifying existing problems, not creating new ones. Things that have been draining me for the last few months would also have done so previously, just less so. 

So what can be done? While I believe in trying to create a sustainable work environment, I also believe that many places of work are more about talk than delivery, and are unwilling to get under the hood of the problems. Often this is because it is the leaders who are talking about better working conditions, while creating the unsustainable environment. Where I am now, the leaders do indeed talk about sustainable working and energy ladders aaaand I'm one of the more senior leaders in my department. Damn. Better do something of that "modelling behaviour" thing.

There are infinite variations on a sustainable working environment, but they must address two core points. First, the number of hours worked. People working long days and weekends are not working sustainably and the obvious question is why is this needed? Are they under pressure from the organisation? I know I do not deliberately push anyone to working antisocial patterns (quite the opposite, actually) but do I create an environment where they have to?

This is a more difficult question. I know I work long hours at times (with no good consequences - see all the above) which sets a bad precedent. I know I need to model the behaviours I want to see from those for whom I have responsibility. I also know they have far too much to do, as do I - I don't work long hours for fun. So the problem is volume of work against capacity? At least partly - and for this we need to aggressively take an axe to the department "to do" list. We've already pledged to do this, and the hardest part will be gathering the information required to enable the conversation properly. This is, of course, more work...

The second point is the activity during those working hours. My current boss likes to talk about energy ladders and energy drains (disappointingly, not energy snakes). To put it another way - things that make us interested / excited / give us an energy boost vs things that sap our will to live. There will always be things to do on both sides, but the balance is very important. For me, I'm realising that my balance has been horribly off for quite some time. I'm also finding that things I've previously found ok are more draining at the moment.

So I need to cut back on the things that make me miserable, whilst maximising the happy. Fortunately, my job is supposed to be all about strategy and future horizon scanning. I enjoy this. Unfortunately, we've been mired in tactical decisions and putting in the foundations to enable The Future. I usually don't mind this, but at the moment a typical working day is emails, then unbroken meetings for 6 hours, then more emails asking why I haven't answered the first emails. No matter how interesting the meetings (and some are great ... some) I find remote meetings exhausting and full days of the things are lethal. I can feel this affecting me. So I've decided to make some changes. I've blocked out a lot of my diary to get things done. Now people are complaining they can't get hold of me, but it's better than complaining I haven't done something.

So will this help? Can I make my own working life sustainable, let alone help anyone else? That remains to be seen, but I am sure that pushing away from "survivable" is the right thing to do.

Kind helpfulness

A short muse ... what does kind helpfulness look like? I've been pondering this question as I've been thinking about how to help people develop. When someone is struggling, there is a natural tendency to help shoulder the burden. Sometimes that is the right thing to do, but is often a tactical solution and in the context of work is that helping the individual or myself? It's the shortest route to making the problem go away, and has the highest likelihood of getting the result I want. But there is the cost of the individual losing a learning opportunity, or worse feeling disempowered.

I started consciously thinking about this some time ago when playing some Dark Souls 3 coop with a friend. The Dark Souls games are famously difficult, and are pretty much defined by learning and overcoming challenge. However, someone dropped into our game and ran around killing enemies, pointing out secrets, and generally paving the way to a very easy experience where we were tourists in our own game. He was certainly helpful, but he completely robbed us of challenge, accomplishment and learning our own way through the game.

This comes up all the time in leadership. Someone asks for help with something complex like recruitment, so I step in and then they don't learn for next time. There is a learned helplessness in teaching someone to reach out for the solution instead of working through it and for technologists there is a longer term rot from not letting individuals own (and solve) non-technical problems, as this is where we struggle to get experience in the day to day job which then blocks moving into more senior roles. Very much "teach a man to fish" territory, although of course it needs balancing with not leaving people helpless and floundering.

That said, maybe we should lean into the Ron Swanson method for mentoring? "Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man and fishing is not that hard".

Of course not directly, but there is a point in there about being kind along with helpful. Kind helpfulness assists someone overcoming a challenge, but doesn't remove the challenge entirely. And the kind helpful leader makes sure where possible there is space for this process to happen - it takes time and safety for people to learn, after all.

Short post this month. It has been a difficult one.

 

Fun with email

I have a love / hate relationship with the cliche "work smarter, not harder". On the one hand, as a technologist it forms the core of so much of how I approach problems. "I don't like this weekly task" leads to "how do I standardise this to think less?" then "now it's standard, can I automate it?". Then, much later "how does this script work again?" but I'm going to ignore this last step.

On the other hand, when it's said out loud it tends to be by people who are responsible for pushing too much work on to the individual, then sidestepping said responsibility when it comes time to actually help them out. Often with a side-dose of being too stupid to actually provide the "smarts" to lighten the load.

With this in mind, I want to think a little about collective efficiency, and how we can all help each other out when it comes to email.

When I was a starry-eyed, enthusiastic developer at the bottom of the social totem pole, I learned to hate the "I have a reckon" emails. Typically, someone would dash off a half-thought about some kind of feature development in about 2 minutes and send them over. I would then have to spend half an hour working out what they actually wanted then another couple of hours writing some kind of considered response (usually attempting to shut down this idea). That's the afternoon gone, immediately. Thanks, important person.

Now I'm In Leadership I try very hard to avoid this kind of email. I try to create an environment wherein I can answer my own questions, without bothering people who have better things to do than answer my questions. If I DO need to ask someone something, then I do my best to ask a clear, answerable question to help the victim / recipient spend as little time as possible on me.

So - linking to the original point about working smarter. Everyone knows that at work you aren't working alone, you are part of a team. It is not you that needs to be efficient - it is the ecosystem. If you're highly productive, but you're wasting your colleagues' time, energy or will to live then you are causing a problem for the collective. This is true from large actions (eg how one manages a project) through to the tiny (eg sending terrible email).

But this is more than simply unnecessary email. When one sends an email, the context is all in the head of the author. If the recipient has to spend time actually working out this context, that is time thinking which is going to be far longer than time spent writing. Even worse, if it is forwarding a conversation thread so the recipient also has to read a multi-step conversation between two people with little to no context. Oh, and of course the thread contains 30 page attachment too. Because why not at this point.

So, the original email is "what do you think?" - 20 seconds work on the part of the sender. The recipient can take half an hour or more getting through the information to come to the answer "err ... about what?". Now, consider that the recipient is actually five people. That time multiplies up very quickly.

Imagine instead that the original sender spent a bit more time summarising the content and asking a clear question. Maybe a whole hour? That's a long time to spend on an email, but this is one hour with five two minute responses for a total of 70 minutes from the wider "work ecosystem". In the original example, it's 120 minutes from the ecosystem as well as five rather irritated recipients. This is without mentioning that tying you up for the time you are writing a better initial email prevents you causing damage anywhere else...

So that's email. Now let's talk about booking meetings without causing diary conflicts...

(From Oracle Calendar - screenshot from back in 2011 - apparently I have been irritable for a long time)

"Gosh, that is an inane post" I hear some people crying. Yes and no. While the email example and numbers are clearly fabricated, this is a real problem. I've written before about writing well being a highly important skill and this is a variation of my usual comments, going beyond "clearer communication" into efficiency. As leaders, it's important to consider how much damage our actions can cause without any intent or us even realising. Our role is to empower our people to be the best they can be, and being considerate of their time and helping them be on the front foot is an important part of this.

I believe someone once wrote "do the hard work to make things simple"!

Learning at the right time

A few years ago I wrote about practical life lessons learned from playing Dungeons & Dragons. Many roleplaying systems handle the advancement of character skills with a level system. Over time your character gains experience and when you reach a set threshold you gain a "level", which is a collection of abilities and skills. Your choice of character class defines the set of abilities you gain.

So far, so simple. Many years ago, I was playing in a game in which we were forced to enact a dangerous escape in a spaceship. My character was the most competent pilot in the group, which meant he had enough knowledge for the ship to not immediately drop out of the sky. A few very lucky dice rolls, and a suicidal ramming of another ship later and we limped out of the gravity well, escaping to hyperspace in what was left of the ship. Much fun was had, and I gained a level - which I used to improve my piloting skills. Immediately AFTER I needed them.

That scenario never came up again, of course.

In my experience, this is very common in roleplaying games - spend the time learning skills for a scenario that has already occurred. It's also something I see all too often in work. People learning about change management immediately after a change, for instance, or about HR processes immediately after struggling through a difficult piece of casework. In technical delivery, learning how to use a frontend framework properly after releasing an accessibility nightmare onto the public or how to monitor your service on $cloudProvider after implementing their new and shiny features and deploying using it.

I've done this myself many times. So why is it so hard to look forward and learn skills ahead of time? The broad-brush problems should be very predictable. Technical strategy should show which skills are going to be needed in the next six months and longer. Moving into a management role makes change management and some kind of HR process work pretty much guaranteed. For me, there are a couple of problems at play.

Firstly, management work can be far too reactive. More than that - being reactive is actually very seductive as it feels far more productive. It isn't; but the feeling of being needed because you're putting out fires is highly addictive, especially shortly after coming from a discipline with a strong way of defining productivity such as development. I spent most of my early days after moving into leadership trying to force myself onto the front foot so I could actually think ahead instead of running around fixing problems and if I'm honest I didn't really want to make this change.

Secondly, even when there is a chance to look forward we often don't actually have a chance to act on what we see. I know that dedicating hours to studying various aspects of management and reading supporting books will help me, but I certainly don't have the time to do it without making serious compromises in what I have to deliver or just consuming my non-working time. Neither of these solutions are acceptable. Part of this is about having any spare time during the working day, and to study there is a need for some quiet reflective time which is particularly difficult when everyone is trying to reach you for whatever Opinion is needed at that time. But also, I need to give myself permission to study and acknowledge that this is part of the job.

What should we expect from leadership? There are times of difficulties and change, but in general I think it's reasonable for people to expect some form of considered development from their place of work. In these enlightened times, we've moved past "bring them in and use them up" as a management style (insert correct cynicism here) and certainly in a knowledge-based job like development, constantly building skills is essential for an individual's future, as well as of benefit to the organisation. Not to mention retention and in-house skill development is far more cost effective than hiring and firing in this sector. This leads straight to an obvious point - we should be building organisations which value learning, and that means making time and expertise available. For those of us who talk about taking on apprentices and other "learning" roles (which done wrong can destroy someone's career as it starts) the point is that much stronger.

So what is the key thing to learn here? Well, it's important to look forward rather than backwards when deciding what to study. Beyond that, it's a well-rehearsed refrain at this point. Scanning the horizon is fundamental to a successful leadership role. Acting on what one sees there is essential. Both of these require time and carving out time is hard. However there is an extra thought here - giving oneself permission to find and spend time on learning is an important step, and being able to do so is part of the organisation's culture. This is important for anyone, but especially in a position of leadership where one can have a strong voice setting that culture and enabling others to grow.

Recovering a sense of wonder

For the last few years I've started the year with a post about how January is bad and I want to reboot the year. This year is going to be different. While I could certainly be having a better time (as could many) I'm facing 2020 round 3 with a sense of cautious optimism.

I spent a lot of time over the Christmas period reflecting on what has changed for me over the last few years and one thing that I think I've lost is my sense of wonder. That childlike sense of feeling the magic in the world, revelling in something small but infinitely complex, and enjoying the feeling that I can explore something and there will always be more to learn.

I say lost - I think I prefer to think "misplaced".

This isn't the kind of thing that I can analyse and come up with a formula for change. It is not something that will come from deliberate action. That said, while there isn't a "solution" here, some deliberate steps can lead in the right direction.

On reflection, what I'm really missing is what comes before - that level of contentment and general feeling of peace when I'm open to the world and new experiences. There are several active things I can work towards, but at the heart of it for me really is personal space. Odd to reflect on after nearly two years of being pretty much entirely alone. That space is better called "free time" - those moments when I don't have some pressure on me to do something. Pressure from real work, volunteer work, paperwork, need to write a blog post, put up pictures, etc. In those free moments I can pick something up (literally or metaphorically), look at it, turn it over and actually experience it. I can engage with something in more than a facile way before rushing off to the next thing, and I can take the opportunity to see the beauty and wonder in it.

So this year, I'm going to invest time carefully. I'm going to try to only do things I actually want to do, minimise the things I have to do and avoid being pushed into doing things I don't want to do. I want to keep my time precious, so I can put more space around the things I enjoy - and by that I mean take the time to enjoy things properly. I'd also like to actually finish some things. While I don't want to be ruled by todo lists, I do actually get something from completing a task and putting a line through it. There are some things on my "want to do" list that have been there waaaay too long and it would be nice to make some progress in the areas I've identified as things I actually want to do.

More than anything, I need to relearn how to Enjoy the Thing. Through that I think I'll start the see the beauty in the world again and that is the route back to wonder I feel.

I am bad at resting

So it turns out I'm really bad at resting. It has been about a month and a half since I left the Civil Service and went out into the cold, unforgiving world with nary a plan to my name except to relax, calm down and find out who I am when I am not consumed by work. Except, of course, I did have a plan and a long list of contacts to talk with along the way.

My standard day is to get up (much earlier these days - a very positive sign!) and spend the morning on calls with friends in the industry and recruiters. Many of these are advice-and-discussion calls, which fulfil most criteria for being called Work, other than being paid. Then I make some lunch and spend the afternoon drinking coffee while reading something edifying (a book on depression here, a white paper on approaches to building a digital organisation there...) or writing some code before some cooking and the evening. It's actually very pleasant but is rather reminiscent of a gentle working day rather than a total break. While I am doing some LEGO and other minor crafts, I haven't dived into a totally new life or anything.

So to fix this, I did something different. I set up a company. To enable working. Sigh.

I often write posts for this blog by pondering my own behaviour from an external perspective and sometimes I end up wondering what on earth I am doing. On this occasion, and joking aside, I am finding this all raises an important question. What does "relaxed" actually mean for me? See, I can rationalise looking at work again so soon by writing about arising opportunity (and especially when they tie in neatly with my plans) but the fact is that I know my sense of self is overly defined by my work and I genuinely am not good at relaxing or unplugging. This is a bit of a problem since the answer to the question "who am I if I'm not working" appears to be "someone who is trying to work". Not healthy, and not a good idea.

I can, of course, make excuses. Some of the things I want to try are hard during COVID / while I live on the top floor / don't have a car / etc etc. While these may well be genuine excuses (it's hard to run a lathe in a 1 bed flat) they feel a bit tactical, which means I'm asking myself the wrong question - or rather dodging the right question. It's not about who am I without work - I always knew the answer to that would be a bit empty - it's about who do I WANT to be. 

The problem with questions like this (similarly "where do I want to be in five years, and if I do nothing will I be happy with how I've spent five years?") is that they are about making decisions then deploying effort to effect change. Coming into this period I had very little energy. I needed a rest, and that meant retreating to my comfort zone not trying to become some new enlightened being. However my comfort zone turns out to be rather like working and thus the problem cycle continues.

And I am still dodging the most important question - who do I want to be? And the answer is ... I don't know.

There are some components. When I close my eyes and imagine, I see someone who looks different. Someone who is secure in themselves. Someone will skills. Oddly, not the ones I already have - I don't know if this means I take myself for granted, or if (more likely I think) I don't really value my own skills. I do have a deep-rooted assumption that if I can do it, it can't be that hard (ideal attitude for consulting...) which may explain this picture.

So, this suggests a few courses of action. First, I need to recognise and respect my own abilities. When I close my eyes and see this person I want to be, I need to make sure I see the bits I've already done in that picture. I need to recognise that while I always want to learn new things and be a bit different, there is an awful lot I do not want to just discard. Next up, I need to look at the differences and decide where to act. As I wrote above, I do not have boundless energy at the moment so I need to be careful and precise about what I try and what I don't and along the way, I need to rediscover my love of learning and trying (there is another post in that, but that's another day).

So in the short term it's back to the gym for me. Then, I think what I really need is to rediscover a middle gear. A mode where I can be energetic and inquisitive, but without being full "on" so I can learn new things without it feeling like a chore, and practice new skills without a ongoing fear of failure. The "how" is something to ponder, but keeping flexible time has got to be a part of it.

Of course, with Christmas coming I've got something else to help me continue hiding from all this...

Can we design a department to promote mental wellbeing?

Important - this is a brain dump of thoughts and ideas, and I am in no way a doctor or any other kind of medical professional.

I wrote last month about feeling extremely rough. I downplayed my experiences for the sake of a more readable post, but eagle-eyed readers of that post will have noticed that they are symptoms of clinical depression. Over the last month I've added a few (sleeplessness being an exciting new dimension) and I've started reading a rather good book on the subject by Dr Tim Cantopher. In this, Dr Cantopher talks about the current (published 2012) medical understanding of clinical depression, how it is a physical illness and what that means, and various treatment and preventative approaches.

The model he describes is the limbic system, responsible for a whole variety of functions including emotions, acts as a kind of fuse and like any fuse it is designed to blow when put under undue stress. This can cause all manner of conditions, one of which is depression. The reason it blows is usually cumulative and the actual trigger may be quite innocuous but when one reaches that point, it's game over for a while and proper rest and recovery is needed to reset the fuse.

Now, my lived experiences resonate strongly with this description. The book goes into a load of different pathways to this point, many of which are quite heartbreaking. I'm not going into any details here as (highlighting again) I'm not an expert and I don't think anyone would thank me for attempting to rewrite someone else's book. But it did get me thinking, and that at long last brings us to the point of this post.

The foundations for depressive illness are often laid in childhood, but there are plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong in adult life. Things which can be significantly unhelpful include unreasonable expectations thrust upon us, little to know praise, learning helplessness from erratic responses from authority figures, general erosion of one's sense of self-worth and value... The list goes on but many of these look to me like things that come up in any good management training. 

So where does this thinking go? Clearly, management has a huge role to play in the welfare of their staff. This is hardly insightful. But this responsibility cannot be discharged via a checklist of task. Performance development plan? Check. Conversation about the future? Check. Asked how they are? Check. Useful things to do, but without the empathy that should be driving them they are worthless.

A good manager can, in the work context, with very little effort provide for the psychological welfare of their reports. Or at the very least, they can avoid the pitfalls. Stepping back, a positive workplace culture can create an environment where people can perform without being put under stress and have the safety to take a step back when they need to. This is all common knowledge and hard enough to get right. But can we go further? 

When designing an organisation structure and layout, one looks at the needs of the organisation and optimises accordingly, weighing against the inevitable compromises. If the important thing is the processing of payments, then that part of the org design is optimised and that improvement may come at the cost of, say, making recruitment slightly harder. To do this, one can look at the way information and tasks flow around the department and where the bottlenecks and other pain points are. Now, what would a department which is optimised for psychological welfare look like? Or even, an org which is designed with staff welfare as one of several priorities? If the department itself is designed to promote a positive experience, eliminating uncertainty and providing ingrained ways for the staff to be empowered (note, not just FEEL empowered), what difference would that make - especially when a strong culture and individual management practice is layered on top?

My answer for the moment is that I don't know, but I want to find out. Staff welfare and staff satisfaction are particularly hot topics at the moment and with everyone feeling the burn of the last eighteen months that is right and proper. The NHS and other experts have been concerned for a time that the next public health crisis will be around mental health as a result of COVID. It would be nice to not be part of the cause of that. It seems to me that there is a something to explore, which could vastly improve the work experience for the people senior leaders are supposed to represent, support and (in some ways) protect. If I get the chance, I would one day like to see what is possible here.

If you're interested in the book, it can be found on Amazon here.

After ... erm ... 65 weeks?

Another month has gone, and I have nothing to say. This is just a collection of thoughts to capture how I'm feeling for myself and on the off-chance someone else relates and finds it useful. And partly because I've written a monthly post since Jan 2016 and I'll be damned if this is where it ends.

The wheels finally came off this month. After 65 weeks of trying to stay positive, push ahead, work through the problems, yadda yada, I think I've reached the point where I just don't care any more. The sun has come out, but it has rapidly become so hot I don't want to go outside. I have no interest in the day to day. I haven't really even taken any photographs this month. Weirdly, I think I feel worse now things are starting to open up than when everything was locked away as I should be excited about X and Y, but I don't know what those things are. I don't actually want to go outside, or see people now that I'm able to do so and I'm in a loop of waiting for lockdown to end, but also questioning why and what is on the other side. I feel deeply hollow and without purpose and I'm showing a lot of symptoms of burnout (not to mention depression). But this whole process is about maintaining optimism, so I need to think about what I am going to do, instead of focusing on the holes in my life.

There are some positives. After a block of time off, I've started writing again - both code and tabletop games. Having the energy, ideas and general interest to put pen to paper is quite a thing these days. I haven't written much as yet, but I take some solace that I'm writing at all - it's a good sign that I'm starting to spiral in a better direction.

At work, I've got things in place to re-energise myself. I've found a small project that can easily be delivered and will have a significant impact, so if I can get that out the door the small sense of accomplishment should help. I also need to kick-start some learning so I've bought a couple of books about strategy to read, which I hope will get the brain working again.

Exercise is slowly coming together too. I can return to the badminton court and, while it will be horrendous the first few times, that competitive element will really help me run around and supplement the HiiT class (which is starting to become two classes). I can already feel some benefit from the increased exercise, both with fitness and improved recovery times, and hopefully this will now accelerate.

I'm also cooking a lot more. My diet has radically improved over the last six months, and I'm recovering my skill in the kitchen (which has atrophied for much longer than COVID, sadly). Now I need to tweak it again to make it healthier, while also maintaining the interest. I think I'm going to game my calorie intake with MyFitnessPal again and see what I can achieve in July. Maybe I'll write about this next month?

Is that enough? I am not sure. It doesn't seem like a fulfilling life, but on the other hand it is much better than nothing. There are gaps I really need to fill, but there are lots of big changes in the works and these really need to play out to reset the framework of what I'm doing before I start putting new things around it. This is part of the current problem - the being stuck in limbo.

Not sure any of this helps me, but having written it down I can at least identify one of the core problems - impatience. It's not that nothing is happening, everything is awful, oh woe. It is that the changes are taking time and I am much better at dealing with problems than waiting for them to resolve themselves. Recognising that definitely helps me face it.

So - objectives this month: 

• Improve diet and track calories again
• Take more photos
• Do something worth writing about

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This post is from a series of shorter posts, written roughly once a week while the country is on lockdown to capture my feelings and reactions as we go. They are all tagged with coronavirus.

Why I'm now on Spotify

Here's an important question. If you like music but don't listen to much radio how on earth do you find new music? Or even remember old music that isn't your favourite band?

I am old enough to remember (and really miss) swapping mix tapes with friends. There was also Pandora. Remember that? You'd give it a song and it would generate a playlist of music with the same characteristics as the seeding song - a fantastic way to find new music which was shut down presumably because someone had to pay some license fees somewhere.

I used to spend a lot of time in music shops and have a large CD collection. Remember when digital media came in circles? Anyway. For me, the best time for buying music was back when I was a student and a glorious music shop called Fopp opened in town. They had a sensible pricing policy (none of this £4.99 nonsense), a huge collection of decent music, and they actually played music you could buy in store. Seriously; the number of times I'd be in HMV and would like the music playing and nobody in-store could tell me what it was. In Fopp, it was being played by the staff themselves and the CD would be by the till - wouldn't even need to talk to anyone.

Happy days.

I was also working in a student radio station during this period and between the two I discovered and bought a lot of music. But then Fopp over-extended and imploded, and the adult world happened and it all went horribly wrong.

Like most, I've been listening to music via streaming services for some years but despite its obvious popularity I've managed to avoid having a Spotify account. I've had a Google Play account for ages, which also strips the ads from YouTube (a huge benefit to me) and because I got an Amazon Prime account I also got their music service bundled in. Between these two that really seemed like enough music to be going on with - they both have large collections, and while there is the occasional notable hole it kept me more than happy enough to avoid yet another streaming service.

However, since I've been working from home I've been able to listen to a lot more music (when I'm not in a damned meeting...) and I've notice that an alarming amount of the time, I'm just hitting "go" on my repeating playlist. So, despite having pretty much all of music from all time available to me I'm actually listening to about 15 songs on repeat because it means I don't have to think about finding something new.

That brings me back to the opening question - how do I find more music? Spotify has a "radio" feature which is remarkably like the fondly remembered Pandora service. You give it a seed song, start the "radio" and it plays a load of stuff that is kinda like it. It's a bit hit and miss (nowhere near as good as my memories of Pandora) but it's more than usable and it is also exposed through the Sonos interface if you know where to look. As far as I can see, neither of Google Play (or YouTube Music as it is now) nor Amazon Music has this feature, and certainly not through Sonos.

So at the cost of another monthly subscription, I've finally got a music discovery service. I think I have listened to more new music in the last two months than I have in the last five years so it is definitely working for me. Next up, I need to look at the Spotify playlist features and see if this can be used to resurrect the old world of mix tapes...

After 52 weeks - the perils of lockdown come home

This week, the 52nd week of pandemic restrictions, the isolation hit me hard. I took a trip to the supermarket, looking for supplies I can't buy at the shop at the end of my street. Shuffling around the long aisles I encountered many strange, moving forms. Forms that I believed only existed in two dimensions on my screen. But no - here they were, moving in the real world. How had this happened? These "people" were out there, making sounds like speech and I was confused. But not as confused as when I realised I couldn't find the talcum powder. I searched the shelves, yet nothing.

Seeing my difficulties, one of the "people" wearing the logo of the place (so "staff"? Kinda like an online chat bot, but walking and exhibiting intelligence and not completely useless) came over and asked if they could help. They stood at a pandemic-respectful distance and looked at me like they wanted something. A response, that was it. My brain lurched and jumped. How to communicate? What to do? Finally, my brain kicked to life after what seemed like an eternity of standing there.

I raised my hand; pointed at the shelf and just barked "talc". Then "talc?" Look of confusion from me.

"Talc".

Not my finest moment.

Anyway, he was cool. I eventually found the power of Words to Peoples and apologised for being inarticulate and then together we failed to find the talc. It was amusing, but on reflection also weird and troubling. I have spoken to maybe five people in person in about a year and actually holding a conversation in person is surprisingly difficult. We were both masked and distanced, so I wasn't concerned about COVID (beyond the ongoing background concern of course) and I've certainly talked a LOT to people over Zoom and equivalents, but in person is different.

It made me think about what returning to normal is actually going to be about. Not the common stuff about whether we work in offices again, or when the pubs will open, but the smaller everyday changes. I remember walking around shops in thick crowds. I remember people standing like lemons in the middle of the street because they didn't see the need to consider where the people were around them. I remember people - oh that's it, I'm remembering people. Over the last year, there have been far fewer folk out and about, and those that have have by and large been aware of their fellow humans and taken them into account. I really hope this is something we can keep moving forwards.

I'm curious what else is going to come up as I look around? I imagine the first time I get on a train again will be a weird experience.

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This post is from a series of shorter posts, written roughly once a week while the country is on lockdown to capture my feelings and reactions as we go. They are all tagged with coronavirus.