Weeknote 699: Week 2

This week I have learned:

in the past two weeks I’ve had 8 days at events of one sort or another. It’s been great, but I’m exhausted from being sociable, travelling, and a few disturbed nights of sleep in hotel rooms in various locations. Note to self: don’t schedule another fortnight like this if you can avoid it.
email has gone the way of the fax, right? For work we either focus on Teams or Slack. For not-work (or some work) we focus on WhatsApp or Signal or other messaging and social services. Email is a secondary channel these days, filled with automated messages that mostly I’m too lazy to unsubscribe from. Then occasionally something comes through that’s important, I miss it, and my website goes down. Duh.
<rant>
I’ve had it with the working from home/return to the office debate. The UK has had a productivity problem since 2008. Those challenges (not least, how do you even measure productivity these days?) are multi-faceted and complex. The world has moved on since 2008 – back then the Cloud was a novel and unadopted idea, video conferences were things that you went into a special suite to do, and multi-national businesses managed to get by with global teams communicating on BT Meet Me alone.

Meanwhile the UK economy has stagnated, the average worker earns no more in real terms than they did back then, prices have increased, and all the while the people at the top of the big organisations continue to rake in disproportionate wealth from, quite frankly, doing a shit job. The average FTSE100 CEO now earns 120 times the median national wage.

So excuse me if I don’t take their ideas about how everyone will be better off being back in the office when they don’t have to worry about the bus fare, child care, shopping, laundry, or caring for their elderly parents as they take their chauffeured car to their private jet.

Simplistic silver bullets to answer complex challenges is not the answer. The answer is not RTO. The answer is not GenAI. The answer is contextual and nuanced and challenging and beyond the grasp of people who are now so disconnected from the general reality.

Offices are great. Offices are shit. Context is everything. FTSE CEOs need to start acting like they are worth the money that they are paid.
</rant>
I got to road test my Manchester Tech Festival talk this week. It’s getting there.
I also got some colleagues to experience Lego Serious Play. There was some scepticism, but the experience seemed to overcome it.
It was a delight to spend an afternoon in Bournemouth with Matt and Mark and Julia and George and Kate and Sam and others in a psuedo Silicon Beach tribute.