Weeknotes #211

Admin on 15/08/2020

This week I did:

You can’t learn without launching 

The pilot of our Online Learning Hub went live this week. I love pilot go lives. I love how everyone seems to think it means job done and to me it means we can finally start learning. And I learned loads. I made sure I was part of first line support helping young people and volunteers solve any technical or usability issues that came up. 

User research can tell you what problems people are facing but the only way you can learn whether your product can solve their problem is to get them using it. Maybe this is the hill I’ll die on.

How rad is Wayne?

Wayne asked for recommendations for website builders, with the replies including what people use for their sites. I realised I’d never done a comparison of Wix, Squarespace, WordPress.com so I quickly created three websites to let people know just how rad Wayne is. I found Wix the easiest to learn and quickest to create a site with. SquareSpace wouldn’t let me publish without paying them. WordPress was probably the hardest to use (even though it was most familiar to me) (and Jonathan did Webflow). I did think about writing up the comparison so it could be a useful tool for whenever anyone else asks the question Wayne asked, but Irealised that I’ve never be able to keep it up to date as all those platforms are constantly changing.

Tech ethics 

I became very interested in charity tech ethics and quickly blew my mind with all the stuff I read, podcasts I listened to and chats I had with quite a few people on Twitter (more than I ever have, including Hera Hussain and Rachel Caldicot, who are kind of heroes of mine).

I started a doc with some questions about charity tech ethics which I’m hoping some of the people I spoke to on Twitter will contribute to (although I’m sure they weren’t expecting four pages of my rambling thoughts when they offered to help).

Something I noticed about how some people talk about tech ethics is that they really just mean that they don’t like the ethics of a big tech company like Amazon or Facebook. I don’t get the impression many people have got any further into tech ethics than the obvious dilemma of charities using big tech to work with people knowing that those companies are using those people’s data in ways the charity might not agree with, but the charities feeling like they have no choice as that’s the tech all of their beneficiaries use. I find the ethics around charities using decision-making technology, and tech ethics in general, fascinating so I’m keen to spend some time understanding it better and maybe write a blog post with some guidance for charities thinking about implementing decision-making technologies.

Digital business exam

I scored 80 on my exam (my highest score), which takes my average to 67.

And thought about some stuff:

Solutionising or outcomes

When doing discovery work, writing use cases and requirements I often hear the phrase, “Don’t solutionise at this stage”, which I agree with, but sometimes wonder if we get confused between what looks like a solution and what is actually an outcome we’re trying to achieve. I’ll look out for more examples and think about some more.

Newsletters

I’ve been thinking about improvements for email newsletters. Email is a great delivery mechanism, and if you’re using a newsletter app then consumption is pretty good. Where there is space for improvement is in collating and curating content. Currently each email newsletter is the work on a single athor. If there was a platform where authors could upload articles and subscribers could subscribe to topics, then the platform could send the subscribers email newsletters with articles from a range of authors but about the same topic. 

Phygital

hancock.lighting is an interesting concept, taking a physical world thing and making a digital version. I wonder what else in the real world could have a digital equivalent and how you’d make the connection between the two.

And read some tweets:

Writing about writing

A small collection of tweets about writing:

Superpowers

Shane Parrish tweeted: Superpowers you can have:

  • Ability to change yourself & your mind
  • Not taking things personally
  • Not needing to prove you’re right
  • Careful selection of all relationships
  • Staying calm
  • Being alone without being lonely
  • Being ok being uncomfortable
  • Thinking for oneself

And Dickie added:

  • Laser focus on one task at a time
  • Easily spotting bottlenecks and leverage points
  • Creating tight feedback loops

I find the kinds of things on lists like these interesting because they have no clear means of learning. They are wisdoms; knowledge + judgement, only gained through experience.

Expressing a strategy 

I tweeted: A strategy needs to express:

1. Where we are now and why we can’t stay here.

2. Where we want to get to and why it’s the right place for us to go.

3. How we’re going to get there and why this is the right way for us to do that.

I’ve since been thinking about a fourth question, something like “How will we know we’re heading in the right direction and what would cause us to change?”

I think it was probably my most successful tweet ever, not because of its contents but because James Gadsby Peet replied, which got it noticed by his followers, and so on as things do on social media.

Weeknotes #210

Admin on 07/08/2020

This week I did:

Principles for organising 

We were doing some product demos with some volunteers and I picked up on some confusion around how content is accessed in a number of scenarios. I realised that we hadn’t yet defined the principles around how we organise content and so it wasn’t surprising that we couldn’t explain it clearly. 

I spent some time writing about my thoughts on what principles we should use figured out how to split all the variations into six boxes divided by two situations in which content would be accessed and three ways in which it would be used. This gives us clear direction for decision-making.

I gave the solution an amusing nickname. And later when talking about it realised how it makes it easy to get adoption. Having a shorthand phrase for a long explanation means that once everyone understands the explanation the nickname is all we need in order to talk about it. 

Although in total it was probably about half a days work I feel like it demonstrates some of the good practice around getting our thinking straight, having clear guiding principles, and finding ways of communicating better. 

The language we use

I read some of our user research feedback and one of the key points was about making sure the language we use is right for the young people we work with. I think Lou Downes Good Services book is really good for helping thinking about this too. The language we use with young people starts with the language we use with ourselves and our colleagues, and I’m keen to do things like make headings in documents say ‘What problem are we solving?’ rather than ‘Problem statement’.

Why charities exist 

I wrote a bit about the identity crisis of the charity sector when it focuses on the narrative that charities exist to fill the gaps caused by government policy and that instead they should focus on what charities can uniquely do for society, which I think is to bring people together around a cause. 

Charities in an AI world 

I’ve been working on my essay about the weaponsiation of digital, and blogging some of my ideas along the way, including a quick one about what a future with AI might mean for charities. I also mentioned my idea about solutions in increasing orders of magnitude, so we should be implementing solutions on a 1 – 2 year time scale, investigating solutions for in 10 – 20 years, and imagining solutions for in 100 – 200 years time. 

More accessible today than yesterday

I watched a webinar with Jonathan Holden and Webflow about accessibility. It was really interesting and I learned a lot more about accessibility as a vision and aspiration that just a technical checklist. One of the interesting ideas was that all concepts for websites start out being accessible and the barriers that make site become less accessible are built with every decision that doesn’t consider all of the user’s needs. I did a lighthouse audit on my site, fixed a couple of things and reached 100 on the accessibility score. 

Thought about:

Where strategy goes wrong

If (and there are lots of other definitions) we say that strategy is ‘where we are now’, ‘where we want to get to’, and ‘how we’re going to get there’, then that creates a conundrum for those setting the strategy. In order to have the impetus to move towards the desired state of being they have to be able to express what isn’t working about the current state, otherwise why would there need to be any movement away from it. But expressing to people that what they do and how they do it is no longer desirable is a difficult thing to say and to hear. I think most strategies and leaders shy away from that. But without it there isn’t motivation to change, why would you if the message you’re getting is that you can carry on doing what you’ve been doing. That’s where strategy goes wrong.

The intersection of introversion and confidence 

Someone I was speaking to described themselves as a ‘confident introvert’, to mean that they feel comfortable talking to people, being assertive, etc. (the kinds of behaviours you might expect of an extrovert), but they need lots of time on their own to recharge afterwards. I guess I could refer to myself in a similar way. I don’t have any anxiety about talking to large groups (perhaps because the introvert in me doesn’t care what they think) but I prefer to spend more time alone than with people. Someone else I spoke to described me as ‘calm’, and I guess that comes from self-confidence in knowing how to deal with all kinds of difficult situations, and perhaps from spending lots of time on my being calm. Anyway, perhaps our use of extrovert/introvert as shorthand for lots of human behaviors, feelings, etc., isn’t always helpful. As is often the way with so much dualistic thinking.

Everybody stalls

I was watching two brothers in a little black car. One teaching the other to drive. They were practicing reversing, getting the biting point, checking the mirrors, feeding the steering wheel through his hands, all going fine… until he stalled. Everybody stalls. I’ve been driving longer than that learner driver has been alive and I still stall. A moment of inattention, too many other things to focus on, and the important part that keeps you moving is the thing that stops you.

For this young learner driver that stop started him crying. Through tears and sobs out came all the times his dad had shouted at him for getting things wrong, telling him he was stupid, a failure. Slowly those feelings were put away again. Not dealt with, not stopped, just put away. He started the car and pulled away with perfect clutch control. 

Every stop is a start. And everybody stalls.

Change your mind

I hear lots of talk about change. I listen out for it because I’m interested in it, but I never hear anything about changing the thinking. I often come back to Pirsig’s point about if you tear down a factory but the rationality that built the factory remains it will just build another factory. I see this as the challenge with digital transformation (or whatever we call it) and changes in response to the pandemic. If organisations do new things with old thinking, the old things will appear again. If you want to change, change your mind. 

And read some tweets:

Words don’t matter, except when they do 

Sarah Drinkwater tweeted, “Are you interested or building tech that’s inclusive, accessible, fair, innovative, not extractive….? If so, what do you call it? Kind of obsessed with how language blocks us; ethics or responsibility don’t resonate with all, and they’re processes we use versus destination”

The replies are really interesting. Lots of clever thoughtful people grappling with the same questions. I think there are two questions here; one about the tech and one about how we name things and communicate about them from a shared understanding. 

For the tech and responsibility question, the aim I would hope is to just be able to call it ‘tech’ because all tech is responsible, ethical, sustainable, etc. Responsible people build responsible tech. So its a people problem (aren’t they all) and the challenge is how we move people from where we are now (a long way away from responsible people building tech) to where tech is responsible by default because that’s how people build it, which takes lots of discussion and is why we need to name things.

I wonder if by naming something we think that we give us shared understanding, but then, as Sarah says, the words get in the way, and we slowly realise that we don’t have a shared understanding so we go looking for more words to have more discussions. The perhaps- useful thing is that we don’t have to have an agreed understanding. Responsible tech can mean what it means to you and you can explore that and build from it. And responsible tech can mean something else to somebody else, and they can explore and build from their understanding. Sometimes we think we need to reach agreement when really what we need is diverse exploration.

Words are the boat that carries us to the other side of the river of understanding, and once there can be left behind as we continue our journey. Intent matters. And action definitely matters. But words don’t matter.

Co-creating the Future

Panthea Lee tweeted, “I’ve architected, negotiated, led a lot of co-creation work. True co-creation. With stakeholders from diverse backgrounds (regionally, economically, politically, culturally) + some that hate each other” and goes on to share some of what she’s learned.

It’s fascinating. I’ve said before how with everything, the more you look the more you see. Everything has deeper and deeper layers and it’s easy to assume that when we say ‘co-creation’ we mean the surface layer stuff of getting people together who wouldn’t normally be together to work on something. Panthea is really clear that that isn’t true co-creation. True co-creation challenges power imbalances, reckons with historical injustices, leans into tension and confronts controversy, and invests resources in standing up what comes out of the process.

I read this and it blows a little bit of my mind. There are so many deeper layers to go into, with co-creation and with so many other things.

Alternative Education 

Ana Lorena Fabrega tweeted about curating a list of alternative education resources around the subject of ‘micro schooling’. It’s the first time I’ve heard the term but |I’m really interested in it. Micro schools typically have fewer students in a class, often of mixed age and ability, and make use of a wider range of educational activities. 

Given the pandemic and the situation of it being potentially dangerous to put large numbers of students all together in the same place at the same time, and being economically unviable to keep all those students at home where they need parents to also be at home, perhaps some models of micro schooling an offer some solutions. It certainly seems to be where adult education is heading but educating young people in this way will have very different challenges.

Personal site stack

Indie Hackers tweeted, “What’s your tech stack for your personal website?”

There are lots of really interesting approaches and wondered what you’d learn if you mapped the approaches against what each person was trying to achieve. For some it’s an intellectual exercise in making different pieces of tech work together, for others it’s about simplicity of use, and for some its about reducing cost (although probably as another intellectual exercise rather than because of the money).

One of the sites mentioned was built using Notion and Fruition. I’m really interested in this approach to building websites, especially for wiki/knowledgebase/note-taking sites. It’s probably the opposite from the completely hand-coded approach and might be really poor for accessibility, SEO, performance and best practices, and those things are worth considering, but as an easy for a group of people to work together in the open it’s pretty hard to beat.

You can have a long term strategy or agile delivery but you can’t have both

Admin on 05/07/2020

An organisation cannot have a long term strategy and have agile delivery.

A strategy, by definition, is “a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.” It is, because of the way it is typically approached, a long-term plan to achieve the long-term goal. And often this is for good reasons within an organisation, including the amount of time doing “strategic work” takes away from the actual delivery work and because it is often seen as a means providing clear and steady guidance, to signal certainty and reliability.

Agile delivery, is characterised as “iteratively delivering incremental value by responding to change quickly”. It’s mostly associated with software development but the principles and practices apply equally well in all kinds of disciplines and functions. An agile delivery approach requires shorter time spans, in fact the shorter the better, in order to plan the work, do it, and review what that work achieved.

An organisation can have a long term strategy with fixed delivery, or agile delivery with shorter planning cycles and faster feedback mechanisms. But it can’t have a long-term strategy that is delivered in an agile way.

Both can work towards achieving the same goals.

They are just different approaches. One approach says, ‘We know where we want to get to, and we think it’s going to take us this long to get there, so we’re going to walk in that direction for that length of time and then see whether we got there’. The other approach says, ‘We know where we want to to get to, but we don’t know how long it’s going to take, and we’re not even sure which direction to go in, so we’re going to take a few steps and then check whether we’re any closer to where we want to get to’.

Same goal, different approaches. Choosing one approach instead of the other doesn’t change the goal, although it arguable changes how likely the organisation is to achieve the goal.

Both approaches are about reducing risk, they just have different perceptions of risk.

The agile approach considers not responding to change and carrying on regardless as the biggest risk to achieving the goal. Being agile is about reducing risk by taking small steps and checking to see if they were the right steps, and changing direction if they weren’t.

The long-term strategy approach perceives the biggest risk to be not having a plan to follow and the perceived insecurity and uncertainty that comes from that. So, the best way to reduce risk is to get the best people to spend lots of time doing the strategic planning so that they get it right. They are expected to use their experience and expertise to predict the future, which is a stable world with a predictable economy and very little disruptive technology, they used to be able to do.

One doesn’t deliver faster than the other, or cost less. Being an organisation with a five year strategy provides certainty. Being an organisation that agile provides flexibility. But in fact, both certainty and flexibility take a great deal to achieve and are both as illusionary as each other.

Long term strategy and agile are on a continuum

Long term strategy and agile delivery, whilst not able to co-exist, are not opposites. They are on the same continuum of approaches to achieving a goal through planning to reduce the risk of not achieving the goal.

An organisation that plans its strategy every five years is at one end of the continuum, and an organisation that chooses what work to focus on on a daily basis is at the other end.

If the strategic planning cycle changes from once every five years to annual, the organisation is now five times as agile as they used to be. If they then go to quarterly planning they are now four times as agile and twenty times as agile as they originally were. If they go to weekly planning they are 260 times as agile as they were when they started.

Can you really not have both?

Some may argue that an organisation can have a long-term strategy that is delivered in an agile way because then the users are getting some value from the organisation earlier than they might otherwise, and yes, the organisation might get lucky and accidentally deliver something of value, or the users might have no choice and have to accept it regardless. But the key aspect of the agile delivery approach, in fact the reason for working in short cycles and collecting feedback, is that being able to respond to change. So even if the work is delivered incrementally, if it turns out to be wrong but has to continue to follow the long-term strategy then all an organisation gets from trying to have a long-term long and agile delivery is some awareness that it is going the wrong way but is unable to do anything about it until the next planning cycle.

How to Do Strategic Planning Like a Futurist

Admin on 25/06/2020

I recently helped a large industrial manufacturing company with its strategic planning process. With so much uncertainty surrounding autonomous vehicles, 5G, robotics, global trade, and the oil markets, the company’s senior leaders needed a set of guiding objectives and strategies linking the company’s future to the present day. Before our work began in earnest, executives had already decided on a title for the initiative: Strategy 2030.