This week I have learned:
- You get that inkling that a client is not going to continue with a piece of work. I’ve learned that the best strategy is to face it head-on and ask rather than pretend. Easier that way for everyone.
- For 20 years now, one way or another, I’ve been spinning up teams that will have a relatively short lifespan. Even so, the fifth stage of Tuckman (alternatively “adjourning” or “mourning”) is the bit I find hardest. Disbanding a team, even a small one, is hard when you’ve worked together to be more than the sum of your parts.
- I’m noticing an interesting phenomenon where organisations build services around users’ needs, but the users are inanimate objects. One pattern of this I’ve seen time and time again is building to the needs of Regulation. It was rife in the housing sector, it was everywhere with GDPR and DPA before it.
The problem with building to the needs of the regulation is that you probably lose sight of what the regulations were set out to do. Your goal becomes “compliance” and not higher level goals like “not killing people through stupidity”. - I’ve been reading Dan Davies The Unaccountability Machine this week, and it’s excellent. It also shaped that previous observation. Thanks to Charlie Rowat for that tip.
- I’m about to launch into some work with LLMs. It will be interesting to see the balance between experimentation and the hype of expectation.
Next week: Mountains!
The week in photos:
mmitII 