A break in the routine

When I started as Director of Engineering at Macmillan, one of my objectives was to build a department which functioned without me. I wanted to be able to pull myself out of the operational day to day, empowering others to own those problems, while I focused on overall direction and wider concerns. This was always an aim rather than a hard goal - similar to the sysadmin end game of a fully automated system, it's something I would like to chase and I think I can get close, but I don't believe I will ever truly achieve.

Over the last year and a bit I've set things up to work this way. I've created core areas of my division, and put someone in charge of each of those spaces. I've empowered them to make decisions and own their successes, and I've carefully worked with each of these leaders to identify and remove weaknesses. There is still a long way to go, but I think we've made a strong start.

Why write about this? Well, I took last week off as leave (booked some time ago) and at the end of the week:

The Boss: How are you doing?

Me: Starting to feel better! After about four days asleep, I finally started to feel human again.

The Boss: Want another week off?

Me: Is this some kind of trap?

It wasn't a trap, so after a quick conversation I decided against looking that gift horse in the mouth and spent half an hour with my assistant going through my diary. The first week off was all planned, so that hadn't been a problem but this second week was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Surely it was going to cause all kinds of problems if I wasn't around?

Nope.

Of the week, there was an hour which absolutely required me and needed rescheduling. Which means ... what? This is the question I've been pondering for a few days. On the one hand, my ground-in desire to be needed and adored took a massive hit. Being basically superfluous is not good for the ego. On the other hand, this is exactly what I've been building towards. The department can survive without me. It can make decisions, move forward, solve problems, etc etc...

We've got a way to go. The wheels most certainly will not stay on the wagon indefinitely and the more forward-planning functions haven't been tested in this short term. Plus, of course, people are covering  some bits of my role and I shouldn't underplay their help. There is still plenty of need for someone in my position to keep things steady and move things forward - I don't think they can make me redundant just yet. However, I'm pretty pleased with the results of this (accidental) test and what it means for changing my day to day when I'm back.

To be clear - I'm not wasting my time. The bits that didn't need rescheduling were parts of the job where I'm providing support or oversight, and direct support for individuals. All this should be done, but I can certainly ask some questions about what happens if I dial it back a bit. That means less oversight, but perhaps we're ready for that? Then I can focus more on the work I'd be doing myself which isn't getting done. However, the nature of the job is such that my work is (supposed to be) much more strategic which naturally has a longer burn. If it's delayed a week, that doesn't create the same kind of problem as operational work stopping. Fortunately, this also means focusing in on the part of the job I particularly enjoy.

So, in summary I am very deliberately in the process of making myself operationally irrelevant and it's time to reboot my focus list. Is this ... is this what success looks like?

Next CIO 2023

Well, this month I won an award.

Honestly I'm not sure how to write this post. I do not usually deal with praise well, and that is unlikely to change. However an industry award is something to celebrate so I'm going write something about being recognised, and I'm going to keep self-deprecating jokes to a minimum.

Next CIO is an industry award where a group of expect-to-be-CIOs-soon are recognised as the future of the industry and celebrated. They are brought together over the year for workshops and group learning, and hooked up with a mentor - someone who is already a successful CIO.

And I am one of these people. Which means I'm part of the future of our industry. Good grief.

What does this mean? Well, over the next year I'm looking forward to talking with and being mentored by the very generous Wayne Clements, and I'm going to be attending a series of workshops with my Next CIO cohort. I've also got access to a group of excellent people from across the world of Technology - there has to be something useful I can do with that set of contacts.

For the award event, we were asked for volunteers to talk for a couple of minutes about ourselves. I volunteered mostly because while I didn't want to do it, I wanted to make sure I was making the most of the opportunities. That is what this year is going to be about for me - taking opportunities and seeing what happens. In this case, what happened was a talk which got a few laughs (in the right places!) and some excellent conversations in the bar afterwards with people who were interested in what I had said. Only good things.

Looking forward, I'm going to do a few things. I'm going to start posting my blog posts on LinkedIn. Long-term readers will know I write this mostly as a tool for self-reflection. Putting them up on Twitter and Facebook was a big step and LinkedIn will be another (slightly terrifying) moment of development. So ... hello if you're reading from LinkedIn. There are lots of other posts here - you might be interested in the essay subset.

Coming back to the topic of my "about me" talk - I need to think again about how I give back. My particular interests are around how people get into the Tech industry and how they move around and up. Over the years I've coached and mentored, and I want to lean back into this. However, this doesn't scale terribly well - there are only so many hours in the day so there is only so much time I can give - so I want to look at other options. There are a lot of stories out there to be told, and while some people have inspirational tales of mega-success, I think there is a lot of value in the more attainable stories of people who do well without being the next Jeff Bezos or whoever. Can we get better access to those tales?

Anyway, these are thoughts for the future. For the immediate now, I'll end with some pictures from the event and me talking about how I should have been a forester.

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.

Slack notifications from Github Actions

A while back I wrote about moving my deployment scripts away from Codeship into Github Actions. This has continued to work, but as I noted it did leave me without notifications in Slack. Time to fix this.

There are a few ways of enabling notifications. The best way involves creating Slack apps with incoming webhooks, but this involves a lot of faff (especially on a free Slack instance). The ever-useful Phil Wilson found a much simpler alternative.

Enter the Github Slack app.

The setup is very easy:

• Add Github app to Slack
• Log in to Github app as whichever user should be receiving notifications
• Authorise it to talk to your Github account in Github

All three of these are documented in the above link.

Then it's a case of setting up the notifications you want within the Slack app channel. I used the following:

/github unsubscribe $account/$repo issues pulls commits
/github subscribe $account/$repo workflows:{event:"push"}

The first removed the overly noisy notifications from a whole bunch of Things on the account. The second enables notifications from workflows (ie Actions) - mine are triggered on "push" events. Docs for the workflow configuration can be found on the integration page.

And behold! Notifications!

When Github updates its SSH host key

I wrote recently about deploying to remote servers via Github Actions. I use this blog partially as a place to write bits of useful documentation and this is a quick note on how to fix those deploys when Github updates its SSH host key. It took me an evening of fiddling around while watching TV to get this right, so I don't want to have to think about it next time.

On the target server, remove the old github.com entries and add the new key into known_hosts:

ssh-keygen -R github.com
curl -L https://api.github.com/meta | jq -r '.ssh_keys | .[]' | sed -e 's/^/github.com /' >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts

And that should be enough to make it all work again.

These commands courtesy of the Github blog. Essentially, this post is distilling that one for future reference.

Hanging out with the cool kids

I have spent most of an incredibly busy March as a stand-in CIO while my boss was away. After three weeks of my first real taste of a C-level role and board member, I find myself grateful for the experience and thinking about all the things I've learned. Time for some reflections.

The job itself was obviously truncated - covering is an inherently tactical affair whereas a job like CIO is strategically focused. So I had an easy ride from that angle - large amounts did not need doing in the timeframe. What I DID do involved a lot of reporting and representation. Much more than my current role, I had to think about information flow across the department and that naturally led my mind straight to the way the processes were set up. Our department has been entirely overhauled over the last twelve or so months, and it was very interesting getting a different perspective on how this fits together and where we can work out kinks to prevent our own internal reporting industries wasting time re-collating information instead of letting it flow.

In fact, I find myself thinking about the process far more than the content. How do we get information from team to division to report to governance board while retaining its accuracy? Of course, the quality does matter - over the last few weeks I've fronted reports to the exec board, the spend group, the risk board and the directorate board to name just a few. There is no way I could have written all this myself, even with the information immediately to hand and that of course leads back to ensuring the processes are in place to create good submissions "automatically" with my input being editing and guiding the narrative of each submission.

Setting this up for success is utterly critical. I'm going to write a proper post on this sometime, but my feeling on my current job is that when one removes the fluff, I have two objectives - create clarity and make time to support / guide people. This was amplified again as CIO. I've already started updating the way we plan inside Engineering to more directly feed into some of the governance processes, removing some of the kinks mentioned above, and now The Boss is back I am going to spend more time working through this. I've been working on "create clarity" since day one, but I've got a different perspective to work from now.

So what else? Well, the flow described above creates more and more dependence on the people in the department. The more senior I get, the more I see this shift from doing to coordinating and this was a surprisingly large additional step. I thought I'd already shed all remnant of actually doing things myself, but apparently not. It re-highlights the importance of building a high-performing culture and all the questions therein - about trust, development, setting and maintaining standards, etc. These few weeks have also showed where I've been too tolerant - or perhaps more accurately where my tolerance will get me in trouble if I do a CIO role properly. In my current role, if something isn't quite done on time there is usually enough space for me to help them out or do bits myself. As the CIO, this is not possible. They have to perform and if I need to course-correct, I have to be able to explain and set them going with a minimum of my own input.

This creates additional pressure on me to always excel at communication. Always write clearly, speak clearly, show strong direction, etc. No ambiguity. It also requires more of others, and I found it interesting quite how acute I felt the need for clear and timely communication almost above getting the answers I actually wanted. One of the last things I wrote to the department was a gentle challenge to us all to think about how we can communicate better and cut down on noise.

It also emphasises something I've always told people who want to move into more senior roles. Know how to take ownership of a problem. The value to someone in a role like this of someone being able to remove a problem from your shoulders and make it all work without too much from you is phenomenal. Importantly, this is not just "offer support", it's do, own, lead. For me, it's the golden ticket to being noticed and given further opportunities. As it happens, it's also much better for the CV / interview.

Another aspect of the CIO job was the sheer volume of reading. I have to read a lot as a director, but the number of papers and (hhgggnnn) PowerPoint decks that need absorbing is ridiculous. I found myself reading them in the evening, when I could get a drink and be much more confident of a few quiet hours without any interruptions. This, of course, did wonders for my work-life balance. It highlighted three things to me. First, the importance of getting submissions in on time as the knock-on effect can be board members getting 130 pages of "excitement" to read for a meeting 48 hours away. This was ... not a highlight. Second, the importance of writing clearly and effectively and spelling correctly. Especially in Word, where mistakes are underlined. Get it right. Third, I'm going to have to develop my speed-reading skills.

However! There were some bits that were easier. While there was a huge amount to do, I found the immediacy of my normal job diminished. That is, there were many things I needed to look at but I could choose my approach much more and spend less time in meetings than I normally do. So while the volume was huge, I did find myself with a bit more time to breathe and consider. It was weird and I think this reflection is more that I need to change how I approach my day to day.

Also, it was very interesting seeing all the department machinery working away. There is a great quote from Yes Prime Minister (which I can't put my hand on right now, so you'll have to suffer my paraphrasing) where the PM is talking to his Private Secretary about the role and the PS is explaining that while there are many things the PM SHOULD do and any number of things the PM CAN do, there is actually very little the PM HAS to do. The CIO role felt like that - if I'd sat back and waved things onward I could have gotten away with doing very little for quite some time. So the old systems analyst part of my brain turns towards the problem of maximising that - which is the question "how do I build a department that doesn't need me". I actually mentioned this concept in the interview for my current job so it's nice to have it reinforced.

Not that everything was plain sailing of course. I had to intervene in a few projects to help them back on track. I had to front a few concerns and problems to the wider organisation, and internally. My favourite moment, however was in the dying moments. I told my colleagues I was logging off for the weekend, and thanked them for all their support. I had one last quick look at my email. Then the website blew up. P1 incident, all the sirens going.

Who said technology doesn't have a sense of humour...

Artificial Empathy and The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Effective Management

As a manager, you're responsible for leading and motivating a team of individuals with different personalities, strengths, and weaknesses. One key trait that can help you succeed in this role is emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence, or EQ, refers to the ability to understand and manage one's own emotions, as well as the emotions of others. It includes skills such as empathy, self-awareness, self-regulation, and social skills. Here are some ways that emotional intelligence can help you be a more effective manager:

1. Build better relationships with your team. By demonstrating empathy and understanding towards your team members, you can create a sense of trust and psychological safety. This can lead to better communication, collaboration, and ultimately, better performance.
2. Manage conflict more effectively. Conflict is a natural part of any workplace, but as a manager, it's your job to resolve it in a constructive manner. By using your emotional intelligence skills, you can identify the root causes of the conflict, communicate effectively, and find solutions that work for everyone involved.
3. Make better decisions. By being self-aware and understanding your own biases and emotions, you can make more rational and objective decisions. Additionally, by understanding the emotions and perspectives of others, you can make decisions that take into account the needs and concerns of your team.
4. Motivate and inspire your team. A manager with high emotional intelligence can inspire and motivate their team members by understanding their individual needs, providing feedback that is tailored to their strengths and weaknesses, and creating a positive and supportive work environment.

In short, emotional intelligence is a crucial skill for effective management. By understanding and managing your own emotions, as well as the emotions of others, you can build better relationships, manage conflict more effectively, make better decisions, and motivate and inspire your team.

---

The above was written by this month's guest writer - ChatGPT. For those who don't know, ChatGPT is a large language model - that is an artificial intelligence which has been trained on a huge body of literature to effectively generate its own content. On a whim, I asked it to generate me some blog post titles for posts about management and one that came up was "The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Effective Management". I asked it to write that post and the unedited results are above. Not bad, eh? Guess we're all out of a job pretty soon.

Well...

There are a few reasons the answer is "no" which other, more expert, writers have gone through before. In very simplified terms, this kind of artificial intelligence works by guessing the next word in the sentence using probability from analysing a vast body of existing literature (the "large" part of the language model). It generates text using a variety of language rules and learns some context from interactions in the conversation (eg in my example I said "please write the eighth suggestion" and it knew what I meant) and this all results in something that looks like it can respond intelligently to your questions.

So, again very simply put if you say to ChatGPT "Twinkle twinkle" it will respond with "little star" - not because it understands, but because the vast majority of times when someone says "twinkle twinkle it is followed with "little star". This also creates a problem with accuracy - ChatGPT has no idea what it's saying but that won't stop it saying it very confidently[1].

Anyway, there are a load of fascinating technical and ethical questions here but I want to look back at the post it created for me. This one is high-level but you can keep asking "how do I ..." and drill deeper and the answers are pretty good. However, to me they all feel like they lack some substance and are hollow checklists and that raises an important question to me. I'm less interested in "is an AI drawing closer to doing my job?" rather "what is the point of my job if it feels like a very clever predictive text system can do it?" 

And to note - I have deliberately been asking questions about emotional intelligence here. This should be what separates people from computers. Does management just lack substance?

Sadly, the answer is often yes. If a manager learns how to lead from a book and follows the steps then they will become ManagerGPT as above, and will indeed be an efficient but hollow step in a reporting chain. I've certainly met and worked with managers like this - people who seem to have learned about being human from a distance and don't seem to be able to reconcile the recommendations with their own actions. They sometimes do quite well, but they are rarely recognised as good leaders by those who have to follow them.

So what did ChatGPT miss? There are no anecdotes in there - it's a cold checklist of suggestions with no emotional warmth or grounding. It can't follow through - it's all well and good having the step "learn the names of your report's children" but it wont actually go out and do that. These are the kind of thing that separates "leadership" from "authentic leadership".

Most importantly, AI cannot give the gift of its time because it has basically infinite time available to it. This means even when it is developed so it can fake the above (and it will be) we as humans will not respond well because for compliments to land we need to know it's more than mathematically calculated, or for attention to matter we need to know there is some kind of cost to the giver. For me, this is why we laugh at that scene in Demolition Man where the man is getting a pep-talk from an ATM (before being beaten up by Wesley Snipes), but that same dialogue would be more poignant if spoken by actual people.

In short, writing about emotional intelligence and empathy and actually developing them are quite different things and for the moment this is where humans can still add value. And, obviously, we should be making sure we actually DO that thing. All humans - even managers.

If you want to have a go at getting ChatGPT to do your job for you, you can find it on the OpenAI website. I certainly haven't used it to generate papers for the board (although if I did I'd absolutely list it as a co-author).

[1] This example comes from Simon Willison's excellent post about Bing and is originally drawn from Talking About Large Language Models by Murray Shanahan.