Weeknotes #231

Admin on 01/01/2021

This week I did:

Annual Review 2020

I looked back over the year and wrote a bit about the things that went well and that didn’t. It helped me focus on my goals for next year.

900 Digital Tools

The Ultimate Digital Tools List now has 900 products and tools. Next target is one thousand.

Panta Rhei

I wrote and sent my second Digital Nomad Newsletter, and this one was actually read by my three subscribers. I’m getting a better idea about how I want to use the newsletter. It’ll be a bit about my experiences of being a digital nomad, places I’ve visited, etc., but mostly it’ll be about the underpinning thinking for the lifestyle and mindset of digital nomads, remote and flexible workers

Message me

Added smallchat to my website. Its a cool integration with Slack so when anyone messages me on my website I can chat back from my phone. It’s especially cool because no one is going to message me, so I can play with things like this without being bothered.

And thought about:

Meetings

I was thinking about how much we complain about meetings, but other than some ideas on asynchronous communication, we don’t really have any good ideas for replacing them. I wonder if it’s because meetings tackle different problems for different people in different situations, but we don’t call out what any particular meeting is meant to achieve. I don’t mean that each meeting should have an agenda, and that that would fix it all. I mean that when people started working in offices meetings solved a communication and coordination problem because getting people in a room together was the only way to do it, there was no technology that could solve those problems. Then, there was a period where we did have the technology but continued to put people in a room together, and now we put people in virtual meetings together. I wonder if we think meetings are still solving the coordination challenge that work ultimately is, when maybe they are solving other problems, possibly social connection problems. Do we have meetings because we want to be in the in crowd, don’t want to feel like we’re missing out on anything, don’t want to feel lonely at work. Perhaps understanding and decoupling those problems could lead to solving them in different ways.

Repetitions

I thought about Craig Burgess’, “Make the focus tighter and the repetitions more frequent”. It works as a solution to a particular problem, but it isn’t a starting point. Intuitively it make sense, especially if you have any pre-existing agile conditions. Feedback loops are really important. Just doing the same thing more isn’t going to achieve very much if you’re doing the wrong thing. How you build feedback mechanisms into the things you do, and use those to course correct seems far less understood. It also made me think about how so many wisdom-tweets are at a point in time, for a particular person, in a particular context, with a particular history, and with particular prerequisites.

One hundred innovation ideas

I was wondering if I’ve learnt enough about innovation, from an academic perspective and in practice, to write one hundred short blog posts. I thought it might be an interesting and challenge-ified way to revise and recap my knowledge. I wonder if I’ll ever have time to do.

And read:

Remote work

I read Exploring the opportunities of asynchronous communication and the (conscientiously) written word and Did A Virus Just Bring About The End Of The Office? as part of my interest in WFA

Midweek nudge

I read the Midweek Nudge Compilation by Deepansh Khurana from his newsletter. It’s interesting to me for a number of things, a) how useful the knowledge (expressed as information) is in all of these kinds of things, and as a side-project

Reading list

I put together my reading list for the module I’ll be studying this term on Digital Creativity and New Media Management. It’s about art and creativity and the use digital technology, so it should be really interesting.

Tweets read:

Liquid employment

I tweeted that “Liquid employment is going to revolutionise knowledge transfer“. Liquid employment is the idea that as employees don’t need to be in an office for eight hours a day it frees them up to work multiple part-time jobs for multiple employers. If employers are smart about this they’ll encourage the knowledge transfer between themselves and other firms and utilise it in competitive ways.

GDPR

Oikos Digital tweeted about the “changes for me and my clients regarding data protection when the UK leaves the EU“. It’s a really useful primer to make you think about the impact Brexit is going to have on data protection.

Indie economics for good

Traf tweeted, “A few things I’ve learned this year from building a small, profitable internet business from zero to $100k ARR in 8 months.” Apart from my interest in the indie maker economy, I’m keen to figure out some ideas about how charities can learn from this kind of thing, and where the overlaps are in the economics of what charities provide and how makers make money.

Weeknotes #230

Admin on 26/12/2020

This week I did:

Service blueprinting

I reworked our service blueprint to take account of a new programme design. I’ve been thinking about where our knowledge and information resides. How do we effectively develop shared understanding of user needs and business requirements across scope definition documents, service blueprints, user stories, etc., and how do we help each other understand how they all fit together. One of the interesting stances we’ve taken is the the user journey within the service blueprint is our single source of truth about what to build. It shifts the focus away from business requirements and what stakeholders want to what experience the user has and how all the parts fit coherently together.

Some thoughts on digital project management

Inspired by Be More Digital‘s post on Simple project management I wrote some of my own far less useful thoughts on managing digital projects, including why digital project management is different from non-digital project management, what is actually managed by project management, and why prioritisation leads to uncertainty.

The Ultimate Digital Tools List

I put my Digital Tools List on Gumroad. I expect the list to be up to a thousand products and tools over the next few weeks. I haven’t made any sales but that’s not surprising because I haven’t promoted (and I have no intention of becoming ‘the digital tools guy’ on Twitter), but the process of writing a product description helped me figure out the usefulness of the list. The Digital Tools List can be used to create a unique tech stack for an indie business. So, for each side-project or maker business someone decides to set up, they can either do it the way everyone else is doing it, or they can think more strategically about what tools to use to help make Twitter be an effective main promo channel, or to stream their video to multiple platforms at the same time. Productising this process was the idea behind Build Better Systems. It would help makers figure out their business model.

Why charities tackle wicked problems

I wrote up some of my ideas on why charities choose to tackle wicked problems rather than tame, solvable problems. The post veered off from what I intended it to be and went on more about my idea of the three spheres of societal life and how they can or can’t respond to wicked problems. My intention was to write about how charities are actually pretty well equipped for tackling wicked problems but maybe that’ll be another post.

2021 Goals

I started writing my goals for next year, which are mostly continuing with what I was working on this year (doubling-down, as they say). As part of ‘Know What You Bring’, one of my side projects, I was working on a method for identifying things like that are you interested in, how those areas of interest intersect, how you develop expertise at that intersection, how you communicate that expertise, and who will find it useful. The process lead me to conclude that I want to spend more time on the intersection of charity, digital and innovation than I do on indie maker side-projects, so I want to try to spend more time writing blog posts about digital charity and innovation than I do working on side-projects.

I also updated my Now page. It’s still a mess but I like the idea and want to try to find a way to make better use of it.

I read:

Learning attitude

I read A Summary of Growth and Fixed Mindsets and I assume I’m below average, both of which deal with having a learning attitude. Derek Sivers says, “To assume you’re below average is to admit you’re still learning.” and Carol Dweck says “There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.”

A foray into Online Film Clubs – a peek into the future of community building

I read Paulina Stachnik’s article talking about how “digital leaders, we have a unique opportunity to create this sense of community for our supporters.” Digital communities isn’t something I know very much about, but as Paulina says, they are more important now than they ever have been. What the article shows is that things that could be done without considering community can also be done with community in mind. That’s really interesting and opens up lots of possibilities. It basically says that anything and everything can be a community-building activity.

Why should community building be important? Well, there is some research that says that it’s intrinsic goals (like feeling a sense of belonging to a community) that improve our well-being, so how we create things that help people achieve intrinsic goals (being part of a community) whilst achieving extrinsic goals (watching a film) matters.

Moving Beyond Command And Control

I read Moving beyond command and control* by Paul Taylor. He talks about different assumptions and perspectives people hold on centralised control and localised communities, and how both are needed in national crisis situations like a pandemic. He goes on to talk about the different narratives around communities and how they shifted from celebrating the ingenuity of communities when they seemed to be abiding by the wants of centralised control to criticising communities for breaking the rules when they seemed to take too much of their own power. He ends with, “In 2021 we all need to get off the fence and state which one we truly believe in, and make that world a reality.” Do we believe that communities can hold their own power and make their own decisions, or do we believe that should not have power communities and so need central command and control in order to make decisions.

Out of context, but it made me think about loosely-coupled systems again. The issue I see with the either/or approach to where the power lies is that it is built on hierarchical structures from previous centuries. If we were building something new today with modern information networks (and what we’ve learned from how a global pandemic disrupted tightly-coupled systems) the available options might look quite different.

Thought about:

Learning from the past

The problem with learning from the past is that it assumes we’re facing the same problem in the present. Often it’s easier to assume we’re facing the same problem, and ignore the differences as inconsequential. Sometimes, saying that we’re learning from the past is a shortcut to conclusions even if the context is different. I don’t know how to resolve this, to tell the difference between when learning from the past is a good idea and when it isn’t. The only sense that I get is that the level of abstraction matters for the relevance of the learning. Too detailed and the differences between the past and the now means there is nothing to learn, too generalised and the lesson becomes so vague as to be useless.

User stories

There’s lots written about how to write User Stories, but I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about how to interpret user stories. Do designers think of user stories differently to developers? How are user stories useful for stakeholders, and for testers? User stories have a form and function, and a language of their own. Without a shared understanding of those how can we expect to understand user stories?

Posthuman charities

I’ve been thinking about writing a blogpost about how charities might work differently in a posthuman society. If we “reject both human exceptionalism (the idea that humans are unique creatures) and human instrumentalism (that humans have a right to control the natural world)” then how might we think about charities and for-good organisations that have their thinking rooted in humanist ideals?

Tweets:

Fake it till you make it

James Heywood tweeted, “Another problem with “fake it until your make it” is that you know you’ve faked it. That can trigger anxiety even as you succeed.” It made me think about how the phrase can be interpreted in a number of different ways. Faking it could be seen negatively as hiding inadequacies or incompetencies. Or it could be seen more positively as demonstrating a growth mindset and courage to go outside your comfort zone. It could be seen in different ways by different people, leading to confusion about how well-equipped a person is and where they might have development needs. I guess that’s the things about short phrases like this, they are purposely ambiguous, which can be a good thing when it leads to conversations to uncover and improve understanding.

Strategy for information products

David Vassallo tweeted, “A reliable info product strategy:

  1. Find something you know very well.
  2. Share what you know on the internet.
  3. Wait until people start asking for more.
  4. Do a brain dump of everything you know about the topic.
  5. Edit for high info density.
  6. Self-publish.”

It implies the idea that well communicated expertise can be part of overcoming the information product paradox, where customers don’t buy because the don’t know what they’ll be getting, but if they are given two much of the information then they don’t buy because they already have most of the value. Expertise signals value. If you’re known to be an expert in a topic then there is the expectation that what you produce will be valuable even without knowing what you’ll be getting.

Select who to serve first

Natalie Furness tweeted, “How to assess product market fit, while generating traction without spending money. A thread based on my experiences on scrappy startup go-to-market strategy.” She goes to offer lots of advice to indie makers including, “Product Market Fit : Select who you want to serve first. Try and make your test audience as narrow as you can to start with. Remember, this can change as your product develops.” The idea that indie makers start by building an audience around their area of interest before they even know what product they’ll be building is opposite to the usual approach of a business where they develop a product that fits their capabilities and then go looking for an audience. Its interesting to see these difference as the majority of business business models have grown out of industrial thinking whilst indie maker business models have grown out of internet-era thinking. I’ve said before that the maker movement will come of age when a single maker disrupts an established incumbent business, but perhaps another measure of success for the maker movement will be when businesses begin adopting their strategies (like they did with startups and software development).

*I don’t normally tag my links, just this once for fun.

Weeknotes #229

Admin on 18/12/2020

This week I did:

Wrapping up for Christmas

Or not. It doesn’t feel like finishing any of the things we’re working on has aligned with the end of the year. We’re still in the middle of lots of things and that’s ok, that’s how things work out sometimes.

Digital nomad newsletter

I sent the first edition of my digital nomad newsletter, titled ‘The end is nigh‘ (with a nod to Red Dwarf) to all three of my subscribers. It’s taken me a while to figure what I want to do with it but I landed on it not being about remote work or the nonsense of the digital nomad lifestyle, and instead being a more thoughtful discovery on ideas about art, life, the outsider, minimalist, stoicism, essentialism.

Exams. Done

I did the Research Methods in Business exam and Innovation Management and Policy exam. Six modules done, two modules and dissertation to do.

Getting organised

I’ve tried the simple kanban of To do, Doing, Done and I always found that lots of things stayed in Doing because I was technically still working on them even if I hadn’t progressed them recently, and I didn’t want to lose them in the To Do list. This made it increasingly harder to use the Doing list to focus. So I’m trying a time-focused approach. My columns are ‘Today’, ‘This week’, ‘Future’ (which is effectively To do) and ‘Past’ (which is mostly Done but also some things that had a date that I didn’t do. I’ve added lost of the tasks I want to do next year for all of my projects.

Step by step

Had a good chat about some of the product advisor work I’ve been doing. Its interesting professional development for me and is giving me some context for formalising some of my product thinking, not least that every product development framework and method is context specific, and that the best way to build a product is to build the process for building the product as you build it.

Digital tools

My digital tools list is now at 600. As a list of tools it seems to have limited value, and that value isn’t going to increase with the number of tools on the list, but how the info used on the list might have some value. Two of my ideas so far are around market analysis (if you’re going to build a video product you could quickly check out all the other video products) and building digital business models by connecting up the tools (a product for creating Twitter threads to promote the product you built in a nocode product which uses a subscription collection product to take payments, and so on).

I thought about:

Linear innovation processes

There is a paradox in how we present innovation as a linear process whilst knowing that it better resembles spaghetti. Obviously it’s human and management nature to simplify things into what can be easily explained and will fit on a PowerPoint slide, but its interesting to think about how to get past those out-of-date mental models.

Goal setting

Having organised my project tasks for next year, it made me think about different approaches to goal setting:

I’ve no idea which approach works best in what context but I bet they aren’t mutually exclusive.

Most Valuable Person

The most valuable person in an organisation used to be the one with the most power. Soon it will be the one with the most knowledge. Knowledge is value (and it doesn’t have to have power).

And I read:

Wicked problems

“In 1973, design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber introduced the term “wicked problem” in order to draw attention to the complexities and challenges of addressing planning and social policy problems“. I’d heard the term ‘wicked problem’ before but never knew it had a source like this and so much thinking behind it. It adds to some of my thinking about how charities choose causes and solve (or not) social problems.

Southern Co-op uses facial recognition

“Branches of Co-op in the south of England have been using real-time facial recognition cameras to scan shoppers entering stores.” Interesting tech ethics to consider when an organisation with an ethical ethos introduces technology that others raise ethical concerns about.

The structure and dynamics of the Third Sector in England and Wales

“The Third Sector Trends Study has now used data from the Charity Commission register, the Third Sector Trends Study and NCVO Civil Society Almanac to get a much clearer picture about the situation of the local Third Sector across England and Wales.” The report frames the Civic Space as existing between the private sector. the state and private space. In my thinking it’s the private space that exists in the middle of the three spaces created by the different modes of organising people. I also found the power law distribution of charity size and income quite interesting, although not surprising. I wonder how the age of the charity would map against its size and income. There are so many interesting things in the report.

And some people tweeted:

Working From Anywhere

Michael Wilkinson tweeted “Great weekend reading from Harvard on the Work From Anywhere (WFA) future. There are many benefits and challenges that the feature discusses which I thought I’d share here.” The thread has lots of really interesting thoughts about flexible working. The point I would add is about the long term benefits that flexible working has in knowledge transfer between organisations and the rest of society. By making the boundaries the organisation puts up (from Friedman’s statement that a firm’s responsibility is only to increase profits) between it and the rest of the world, more permeable, the way knowledge and information flows will fundamentally change.

Digital knowledge base

Paul Taylor tweeted, “A “digital repository to hold all of your organisational knowledge, that will allow unprecedented access to deep insights with a few keyboard taps” is a fantasy that only exists in the minds of people selling you a Silver Bullet“. Knowledge can’t (yet) be codified, it can only be translated into information to be codified (and then stored digitally) and so much is lost in that process. Turning information and/or knowledge into intellectual assets is a really difficult problem.

Small number of bold and unique bets

Jack Altman tweeted, “Most great companies are built by taking a small number of bold and unique bets, and then being as by-the-book / best-practices as possible on everything else.” The strategy is delivery. Execution wins.

Weeknotes #228

Admin on 11/12/2020

This week I did:

Safer by design

I spent a lot of time working on digital safeguarding and risk assessments. The more I learn the more I realise what a complicated and dynamic situation it is. Building systems that take account of how quickly a situation can change, how an effective response is dependent on having information about the person and about the risk, and that all the things we can do to keep someone safe still might not be enough, is a complex responsibility.

Awesome General Meeting

I attended the annual general meeting of the charity I’m a trustee of. Looking through the reports from the CEO, HR, Operations and Finance it’s easy to see what I tough year it has been. Dealing with mental health is challenging at the best of times but the pandemic has caused more difficulties for more people and made it harder for them to get support. However, despite that we saw a 17% growth in income on last year. Although that’s only one very simple measure it shows what an amazing job everyone at the charity has done in adapting and still being there for the people that need them.

Revision, revision, revision

I have two exams at the same time next week, My strategy for revision has been to focus on the topics where I have some knowledge but not quite enough and ignore the areas that I’m weakest in in the hope that the exam questions will be about things I know about rather than something I know nothing about.

I received the grade for the assignment I wrote a few months ago. It was right on target at 72. That puts it at the low end of a Distinction which what I aim for, hoping that its the sweet spot of a good score for the least amount of work.

Thought about:

Weisbrod’s nonprofit sector model

I’ve thought for a while that the nonprofit sector might deal with market failures of the state just as the state often deals market failures in the commercial sector. then I found out about Weisbrod’s nonprofit model.

“In the Weisbrod model nonprofit organizations satisfy a demand for public goods (non-excludable and non-rivalrous), which is left unfilled by government provision. The government satisfies the demand of the median voter and therefore provides a level of the public good less than some citizens’—with a level of demand greater than the median voter’s—desire. This unfilled demand for the public good is satisfied by nonprofit organizations. These nonprofit organizations are financed by the donations of citizens who want to increase the output of the public good.”

Economically, it seems to explain why such a thing as a nonprofit sector would exist. There are three important aspects; the market failure of the state as a result of a focus on providing public goods for those voters that will keep them in power (it could be argued that if Government’s aim is to create a more equal society then it should change it’s focus of spending), that a nonprofit sector is the only viable response to the market failure of public goods (the commercial sector doesn’t do public goods), and that the donations from citizens are not the only source of income for the nonprofit sector, which demonstrates that there is a further imbalance and that the market failure is not fully solved. It’s a complex thing to try to understand.

Stories and attention spans

Why are so many products introducing Stories. Instagram, Twitter, Spotify, and now Google? The tech trends are surely part of it: vertical video, better cameras, faster internet speeds. And user behaviour trends too (driven of course by the tech trends and products introducing this type of content) of wanting quicker means of consuming content. Are users shortening attention spans a factor? Yes, according to lots websites, but not according to Simon Maybin from BBC World Service who wrote that attention spans definitely aren’t getting shorter (in case you didn’t get it, attention spans aren’t decreasing but quality articles on websites are).

Perhaps the definition of ‘Attention span’ is something to consider. Perhaps the scientists think of attention span and ones ability to remain focused on a single thing, whilst attention span via product metrics is more likely to indicate how long a user spends on a single piece of content before moving on. By the latter definition our attention span on the internet is shorter because the content we are looking at is shorter and doesn’t hold our attention for long enough.

Of course, it’s impossible to know what causes what, but the introduction of Stories in so many products is a trend that shouldn’t be ignored.

The future of B2B software is a focus on the end user

Business-to-business software that meets the end user’s needs will increasingly win out against software that is focused on meeting only the buyer’s needs. It seems obvious to say if you’re an end user. And probably sounds like nonsense if you’re in the sales teams of business software companies that provides systems that don’t do things consumers do (HR, expenses, that kind of things). But watch out, this is where disruption comes from.

The tipping point for indie makers

The tipping point for small software startups occurred when they started to disrupt larger incumbent providers. The tipping point for indie makers will be the same. When an individual building products from nocode tools disrupts a market with incumbent players, the business world will start to take notice. The challenge for the indie maker will be what to do then. In order to compete on an enterprise level startups had to build and grow a company alongside their product. Can indie makers stick to their roots, stay as individuals, and scale their product without following in the footsteps of startups?

And I read:

Minimum Viable Creativity

The creative process that allows you to produce quicker and collect the maximum amount of validated learning from your audience with a lower barrier to production. Producing things that are a little bit of everything rather than all of one thing or all of everything.

The logic of the internet is bait

And that bait has “strategic ambiguity“. It is designed to draw you in, make you think you’re getting what you want, but is really in service of those that set the bait.

The New Marketing Infrastructure Layer

Ad blockers and the death of cookies are creating a need for a shift away from marketing suites and funnel-thinking towards a multi-modal use of data and use of authenticated identity. But we knew that months ago.

Tweets I read:

Neuroscience of messaging

Evan LaPointe tweeted, “As a system, the brain is super complex. But there is linearity to how the brain works, and that makes things WAY simpler. Here’s what happens with sensory data in the brain, and what you can do about it.”

Evan describes how our brains react to new information and ideas and for your message to be truly considered by someone, it needs to be novel and worth paying attention to, needs to be nonthreatening and careful, and needs to be a match to some existing paradigm. So, whether that message is big or small, we have to get t through those filtering parts of our brains before . (As an aside, it makes me think about user needs in a different way too, that there are user needs that users aren’t aware of.)

Curation As A Service

Sari Azout tweeted. “We are living through the emergence of a new business category which I believe will become an important part of our digital lives: community-curated knowledge networks“

The bundling of other people’s knowledge to create curated products and services, what I call Curation-As-A-Service, is an easy means for someone to get into being an indie maker and developing side-projects. Leveling that up to building a community that curates knowledge (their own and other’s) is an interesting challenge. Doing so in ways that empowers people to get the knowledge they want and need rather than building a product that drives product metrics is an even more interesting challenge.

10 Commandments of Product Management

Shreyas Doshi tweeted, “The 10 Commandments of Product Management“

I think my favourite is, “Thou shall take the necessary time to understand the real problem before starting to solve it. Thou shall not confuse Execution problems with Strategy problems, Culture problems, or Interpersonal problems”

Weeknotes #227

Admin on 05/12/2020

This week I did:

Planning for mobilisation

Now that we’re underway with development I’m shifting my focus to how we’re gong to be mobilising. One of the interesting things I’ve been working on this week is risk assessments. How we assess risks, understand our assumptions and biases about risk, maintain an up-to-date understanding of the risks that are constantly changing is an interesting challenge. Handling risk effectively is a balancing game.

Solving the tacit knowledge problem with AI

I had an interesting conversation with Matt Ballantine about “Microsoft patent filings describe a system for deriving and predicting ‘overall quality scores’ for meetings using data such as body language, facial expressions, room temperature, time of day, and number of people in the meeting.” Most of the outrage on Twitter about this patent was around it being used as surveillance technology to allow managers to monitor employees. I don’t disagree with this, but I think Microsoft has a very different end game in mind.

Lot of organisations are already using Teams for all of their communications. That means every word that is said in a video meeting or typed in a chat message is available for analysis. If Microsoft developed a means for doing a similar thing in real-life meetings then there would be even more communication being codified into information. But why not just record meetings? Because to understand the meaning of the information you need to understand the interaction.

I think Microsoft is trying to solve the tacit knowledge problem: to codify knowledge, wisdom, intuition and make it transferable. Michael Polanyi thought that tacit knowledge could not be codified, but that wouldn’t stop you if your hypothesis was that codifying the tacit knowledge held by employees and turning it into a competitive advantage was good for business.

Prioritising side-projects

I’ve got lots of projects on the go and even more ideas for projects that I haven’t started yet. So how do should I choose which one to work on? Some of my Tweeps had some suggestions so I put them all into a blog post.

Digital nomad

I’ve started a newsletter about my experiences of being a digital nomad, remote working, minimalism and leading an intentional life. I not quite sure what I’m going to do with it other than record my roadtrip and see what I learn about this way of life.

500 Digital Tools: a mega thread on Twitter

I set myself the target of getting my digital tools list to 500 by the end of the year and said I would put them all into a mega thread on Twitter. I wasn’t expecting to be an entire day’s work but at least I got it done. I’d really like to create make business model recipes as part of buildbetter.systems like these examples from Whit.

I read some stuff:

Innovation as learning

I read lots about innovation as part of my revision for my upcoming exam. There is so much interesting thinking trapped in pdf’s and held behind institutional logins. I’d love to have the time to write about each paper I read and bring those thoughts out.

Charities and politics

Like everyone else on Charity Twitter, I read Baroness Stowell’s article saying that charities shouldn’t get involved in party politics and culture wars. Lots of people argued that charities should and/or have no choice but to be involved in politics, but I wonder whether that was really the point of the article (which was very poorly written and not backed-up). I think it was more likely written with the purpose of inflaming the charity sector. To make a statement to effect that charities shouldn’t get involved in ‘culture wars’, by which we can assume she means the current events and movements around anti-racism, but doing so in a way that draws them into the culture war by writing an article in a national newspaper, seems suspicious to me. So, the question is, how should we respond to trolling?

Building your own website is cool again

This article about people getting into setting up their own websites is pretty interesting. It mentions some of the tools people are using at the moment and the interesting point around how personal websites compare to social media, which of course are different solutions to different problems, one being about ownership and longevity and the other being about immediacy and reach.

And thought about:

Learning business model

I’ve been trying to figure out a flywheel business model for my knowledge building. It includes how information is inputted into the system through newsletters, books, studying, etc., how it is processed into knowledge, correlated with other knowledge to form new ideas, and codified to be outputted. And then how the outputs feed back in as inputs to be correlated with any new inputs and drive the flywheel. My hope is that if I can design it to work hypothetically I can then optimise my learning practice to test and improve the model.

Connected to this but at a different level is the idea of the knowledge society, that knowledge (or probably more accurately ‘information’ as the aspects of knowledge that can be codified and transferred) is more valuable than physical goods in a post-industrial society.

Power structures and information structures

I’ve been thinking for a while now about how power and information follow very different structures within organisations. Power is typically organised hierarchically whilst information more usually follows a network structure. If we follow the assumption that innovation requires the creation of new knowledge, that how organisations allow information to flow (which I think fits with Christensen’s point that when orgs are small they are more resource-focused and maintain knowledge in individuals but as they become larger that knowledge becomes expressed by the culture).

In a way, this organisation-level thinking fits in between the individual knowledge flywheel, where the the unit of analysis is the individual, and the knowledge society thinking as that is information flow at the largest scale. So the question is, are information models fractal, in that the same pattern exists at every level, or is it not that simple?

Know what you bring

I’ve been thinking a bit about personal branding. I have an idea for a chatbot that helps indie makers identify their personal brand so I’ve been doing a bit of research.

  • In my personal branding (whatever that means, I still not sure) I think about what value I bring to any given situation I’m trying to have an impact in. It can take a while to figure it out, and something it feels more or less clear to me, but it’s what I mean by the phrase ‘know what you bring’.
  • Wes Kao said, “If you cringe at the idea of personal branding, reframe it to yourself as personal credibility. Personal credibility is about being good at your craft & keeping your promises.”
  • This OSINT framework is pretty cool. It’s almost like reverse personal branding. It’s intended as a guide for how to find out open-source intelligence about someone, but if you turn it around it becomes a guide of where to control your brand image.
  • People are trying to become brands. Brands are trying to become people.

Some people tweeted

Build in public

KP tweeted, “Building in public helps you put in reps and build muscles on:

  • shipping products
  • staying accountable to goals
  • handling PR & media
  • handling a multiple of inputs (often from customers or potential customers)
  • the art of storytelling
  • the thick skin to be a founder”

Building in public is the compounding network effects of the Maker community. It allows people to become known for something, to learn from others as they build, and create a sense of abdunance

But building isn’t enough

Toby Allen tweeted, “Want to validate your idea?

  1. Setup a Gumroad Pre-order page
  2. Add a wicked description and mockups
  3. Clearly state it will only get built if you pass X number of pre-orders
  4. Survey all users that pre-purchase.

Build it or Kill it!”

I completely agree about validating ideas by putting them in front of people, but perpetuating the idea that building is enough to get validation of an idea is unhelpful. Maybe this needs a step 0 of ‘Build an audience’ and a step 3.5 of ‘Promote the hell out of it’. Maybe the maker community focuses too much on building because building is the easy bit.

The 9 biggest lessons

Will Myddelton tweeted, “I’ve learned so much about doing product work in the last two years. These are the 9 biggest lessons I’m taking away.

  1. Riskiest assumption experiments are my north star
  2. Off-the-shelf software is cheap and crazy powerful
  3. Whole-team planning creates shared direction
  4. You’re gonna need a bigger goal
  5. User research with real signups is my jam
  6. People respond best to real people
  7. Written culture makes things resilient
  8. The runway won’t take care of itself
  9. Working with an ADHDer has changed me
  10. I made (more) mistakes”

All good things to learn.

Weeknotes #226

Admin on 28/11/2020

This week I did:

Kanbanning it

We’re going to start using Kanban for our product development process from next week. It’s been a few years since I’ve used it and I’m a bit excited. We’ve been discussing things like what the work in progress limits should be for each part of the process and how to communicate this way of working to stakeholders.

The evolution of technology and innovation policy

This week’s lecture was about the evolution of technology and innovation policy, patterns of uneven technological development and innovation amongst countries, the role of the state and innovation policy and the market failure argument. I find these kinds of ‘interplay’ topics quite interesting. What is the relationship between the state and the market in creating innovation? How is technology development and policy creation connected in driving innovation? Where is innovation investment most effective, in improvements and efficiency gains to existing technologies and business models or on higher risk new new innovations? Utilisng new technology has two aspects, the knowledge about the technology, which is a public good that no one can be excluded from gaining, and the non-codifiable tacit capability which is dependent on organisational routines to make use of the knowledge. That’s an interesting interplay too.

Qualitative data analysis

The other subject of study this week was thematic coding for qualitative analysis. I found this more interesting than I thought I would. The process of formalising an informal body of information, but doing so in a way that is unique to you, is interesting to me. It connects with some of the thinking around note-taking methods like Zettelkasten and Building a Second Brain. I guess the difference is that in academic research the coding must be done after the information is collected to avoid any bias whereas most note-taking methods recommend coding at the same time as creating the note.

30 to go

My digital tools list is up to 470, making the target of 500 by the end of the year easily reachable. At some point I’m going to have to decide what to do with the list. I can either continue to add to it in Notion where no one else really knows it exists or uses it, or I can think about how to make it more public and usable.

Thought about:

Which project?

With so much of my time spent on studying recently I haven’t done very much on any of my side-projects (other than think of a few others to go on the list). I feel uncertain about how to choose which ones to work on, and about starting new projects without ever getting close to finishing any. I like LaunchMBA’s idea of launching twelve products in twelve months but I know I’m not going to have time for the next ten months. And maybe that isn’t the right approach for me because it is about finishing things and maybe what I want is just the creative expression of playing with these ideas.

Layers of abstraction

I’ve wondering about how you might represent the layers of abstraction in product thinking. At the most real and elementary level the digital products we build are just a bunch of electrons that are represented (or abstracted) by 1’s and 0’s in binary code, which is further abstracted through various levels of programming languages to create a graphical user interface that people can interpret and abstract through their actions into ideas that fit into mental models at the highest level of abstraction. However you slice the layers there has to be translation between each layer. How good that translation is matters. Our ideas make electrons move. And electrons move our ideas.

Design principles

How important are design principles? Or any principles for that matter? Does having vague concepts help to provide direction, make decisions, achieve anything? One of Yves Béhar’s principles for design in the age of AI, “Good design works for everyone, everyday”, for example, looks like it makes sense. It’s hard to see how or why anyone would disagree with it. But it’s also hard to see how it could be achieved in practice. Is that the point? Are principles meant to be aspirational, a representation of something we value and so aim towards, even if we never achieve it? But then, how do you stop a principle being a cliché, or just some that sounds good but is meaningless?

Pressure junkie

Under less pressure I’m achieving less. I used to sleep five hours a night, work 15 hours a day, and get lots done. Now, with so much less pressure I’m not being anywhere near as productive. Relying on self-motivation to get myself to do things I’m not too bothered about doing isn’t working. Maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe its time to learn to live without the pressure.

Audience building

The basic business model for the internet indie maker is to start with building an audience, which means figuring out what you want to be known for and by who. I did a bit of thinking about how my audiences might be, one for digital charity stuff and the other for indie maker stuff. All the stuff I’ve written and the ideas for products I’ve started have always been purely for my interest, so thinking about audience building brought up the question, ‘Do I need an audience’? It’s a prerequisite aspect of a business model, you need to have someone to sell to, and based on the thinking expressed in Courtland’s tweet below, everyone should have their own business model.

Permissionless apprenticeship

Permissionless apprenticeship is an idea from Jack Butcher, that if you want to grab the attention of folks that you admire – start apprenticing under them without even asking for permission. It’s interesting on many levels, from the obvious of using it as a way to learn from someone and (perhaps) get their attention, to seeing how the maker community responds. Of course, as is right with the indie maker ways of working in the open and sharing ideas, people from the community jump on the idea and build-out their own ways products from video courses to worksheets.

And read:

What makes a good cucumber?

I read about Gherkin Syntax to remind myself about the behaviour-driven development approach and writing acceptance criteria.

What makes a good charity?

NPC’s guide to charity analysis by Ruth Gripper and Iona Joy from 2016 is really interesting. With statements like: “The starting point when looking at any charity is to understand how it wants to change the world”, “Scale is not necessarily a sign of success”, and “the digital maturity of an organisation is likely to be constrained by its size, budget and leadership”, it seems to take a pragmatic view.

What makes an excellent charity?

The King’s Fund’s ‘Modelling excellence in the charity sector’ report from 2017 with it’s characteristics of GSK IMPACT Award winners list reads like a a bit of a how to guide for making an excellent charity. It includes ‘services strongly rooted in the community’ , ‘strategic partnerships where charities play an active role in identifying issues and finding solutions’, and ‘board skills that reflect the changing nature of the charity sector’. One of the ideas I found interesting was the mention of the ‘added-value’ charities could provide, so that when commissioned to provide a specialist service they also offer more generic related services. In the commercial world this might be called cross-sell.

Service dominant logic

In Systems Thinking in Design: Service Design and self-Services, John Darzentas and Jenny Darzentas state that, “Services have moved from being a peripheral activity in a manufacturing centred economy, to an engine for growth and society-driven innovation… Known more commonly as ‘Service Science’ its aims are to integrate findings from these different disciplines to achieve better understandings, tools and techniques for creating innovative services… Vargo and Lusch (2004) argue that services require a change of perspective or ‘logic’. having been based on a model of exchange they term ‘goods-dominant logic’. In this view, services are being treated as products, as tangible resources with intrinsic values and with a basis in transaction. That is, the customer obtains the goods/services in exchange for money, and that is the end of the interaction with the provider. In contrast, ‘service dominant logic’ (SDL) describes services as intangible resources. Providers do not provide value, but ‘value propositions’; that is customers decide whether or not to make value out of those propositions or offerings, in effect they ‘co-create’ with the service providers.

Triangulation in research

“Triangulation is a method used to increase the credibility and validity of research findings. Credibility refers to trustworthiness and how believable a study is; validity is concerned with the extent to which a study accurately reflects or evaluates the concept or ideas being investigated. Triangulation, by combining theories, methods or observers in a research study, can help ensure that fundamental biases arising from the use of a single method or a single observer are overcome.” I wonder how much of the user research that is used to make decisions about websites, digital services, product development and business direction has been triangulated to any level of robustness?

Some people tweeted:

I’m a business, man

Courtland Allen, tweeted “You’re not an employee, you’re a business. We just changed all the names. Posting your resume is marketing, interviewing is sales, salary negotiation is pricing, your employer is your customer“. Like Jay-Z said, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.” It’s really interesting to think of individuals in this way as it changes the power dynamic between organisations and individuals (which is changing anyway).

Invest in your future self

Julian Shapiro, tweeted, “Judge your days by how much you invested in your future self. Judge your years by how much you cashed in on that investment“. It’s not about getting stuff done, it’s about getting stuff in service of future leverage and benefit.

Nocode, no problem

Whit tweeted, “Want to build your side project for less than $100? It’s very possible. We’ve done it 6 times in the last 3 months.” and goes on the explain the tech stack for each of the side-projects. Of course, building products is the easy part. Building an audience, building them something they want, and selling it to them, that’s far more difficult.

No future but what we make

Jason Crawford offers “Some visions of the future based on different views of technology“, which of course aren’t mutually exclusive unless you state ‘when’ the future is, but all take a dualistic opinion of technology being either good or bad. Perhaps the future for humanity and technology, as we learn more about complexity and systems thinking, is to move away from simplistic narratives.

Weeknotes #225

Admin on 20/11/2020

What I did this week:

Scope

Defining scope is hard. Because you don’t know what you don’t know. We’ve been trying to reach a base-lined definition of what we should deliver in our current project. Writing a list of things is easy. Feeling confident you haven’t missed anything is not so easy.

Study

Qualitative interviews and transnational innovation. As with most things, the more you look the more you see. I thought qualitative interviews would be easy after the statistics lectures (and they are, statistics is still the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to learn) but of course there is lots to learn about how to make them successful. Transnational innovation is about companies moving into other countries, not to access another geographic region, but in order to leverage the innovation and learning potential that doesn’t exist in their home country. This is based on the underlying thinking that strategic success for companies in the 21st Century comes from developing and leveraging knowledge rather than capital resources.

Wipeout

I bought a wipeboard. The note-taking cult on the Internet says you should write everything down. Connect those ideas. Build on them. Don’t loose anything. I wonder if letting go of ideas might be ok. I’ve also been thinking about all the things I want to do, products I want to build, all those projects on my roadmap, and I wonder if the world really needs more poorly implemented digital products. Probably not. I’m becoming more essentialist in my thinking.

Thought about:

What is product management?

I think the product management function in an organisation serves three purposes: interface between the customer and the organisation, vertical integration between hierarchical levels in an organisation and horizontal integration between teams, and feedback loops between all of those. When organisations learn to organise in ways that achieve this without a facilitating function/role then Product Managers won’t be necessary.

BPAAS vs. SAAS

What’s the difference between Business Process As A Service models and Software As A Service models? I think the key difference is that BPAAS model requires inputs from the organisation using the service, whereas SAAS doesn’t it is just used. I think BPAAS has an advantage over SAAS, it has two opportunities for learning. It has the same feedback loop that SAAS has where the usage of the service is used to improve the service, but it also can help the customers improve their inputs and so get better outputs.

Ramblechats

I’ve been thinking about making videos. This might be driven by three intersecting things: My ramblechat with Bobi Robson, upgrading my phone package to give me unlimited data, and spending most of my time on work and study meaning I don’t have time to write blog posts. I thought I might go for a walk and talk to myself about some of my ideas, having a ramblechat with myself whilst rambling. It might be a quicker way to explore ideas in a non-precious way whilst pushing me outside my introvert comfort zone.

Reading and tweeting this week:

Inputs

I normally have lots of inputs. It’s part of my synchronicity of ideas. I listen to podcasts, read newsletters, scroll through Twitter, add interesting articles to my website, and write notes about all the inputs I have. This week I’ve hardly consumed anything other than what was on my reading list for lectures. At the other end of the process, my outputs are drastically reduced at the moment too. Lots of work and study means I’m not participating in the digital charity or maker communities I’m part of, not working on any of my side-projects. I’d like to structure my time better to make sure I get some time each day for this kind of stuff but its hard to justify when exams are only a few weeks away.

Reframe the challenges

Not feeling bad about failure is an important factor in trying things more times and so increasing learning.

Weeknotes #224

Admin on 13/11/2020

I did:

Deadlines looming

Deadlines are getting close. Pressure is on. It’s been another busy week finding the gaps in our understanding. That’s what happens as the things we’re working on reach a higher level of fidelity. It’s interesting to see how we react to find the knowledge gaps, make decisions, refine and reduce scope, and quickly learn new things.

Dissertation

I wrote the title and abstract for my the research proposal for my dissertation.

Title: “A review of the innovation processes and practices used within the charity sector, and recommendations for improvements to innovation strategy to support new product development.”

Abstract: “Charities of all sizes across the United Kingdom face increasing pressures to deliver services that adapt quickly to meet the changing needs of their beneficiaries and yet innovation across the sector is stifled by a low appetite for risk and ineffective use of innovation models.

Where innovation can be seen to occur within the charity sector it typically follows first or second generation approach from the Innovation Framework Model with little application of an innovation strategy that utilises Open Innovation models, the spaghetti view of innovation process, or business model innovation.

In reviewing the recent use of innovation processes and practices used within the sector, by charities and by supporting organisations such as agencies, this study will provide an analysis of the current state of innovation capabilities and offer recommendations of innovation models, processes and practices for the charity sector to utilise in innovation strategy to support new product development.”

Bivariate regression analysis

I’ve been trying learn about statistics and prediction as part of the research methods module I’m studying. My maths knowledge could be described by the equation Mk=0 so I’ve got to rapidly get my familiarity to the level where I can do things like bivariate and multi variate analysis.

Read

Ideas

I thought a bit about how we manage ideas so read Cheap Ideas in the Junkyard, Ideas are just a multiplier of execution, and How To Treat Your New Ideas.

Thought about

Where failures are handled

Market failures are handled by the state. State failures are handled by the Civic space (charities, etc.). Where are failures in the Civic space handled? Bluntly by the state through more regulation? Or are those failures not handled at all?

Digital footprints

A good digital presence is an asset. David Perell has said something along the lines of his Twitter following being more valuable than a college degree, and there are plenty of others of the opinion that personal branding, working openly on the web, writing, etc., will bring good things (customers, collaborators, whatever) to you. Digital footprints is an interesting metaphor. It allows people to track you down, follow in your foot steps, or see where you’ve been. Tread thoughtfully.

Problem-first or market-first?

The entrepreneurial thinking says ‘problem-first’. Find a problem worth solving, usually a problem you face so you know it well, develop a solution and find an audience that also wants to solve that problem, and then sell your solution to them. This is then called Product-Market fit, or as Tim Jones phrases it, “I’ll know that my product solves my problem when I have users that use it, love it, pay for it” (As an aside, that’s an interesting frame for metrics: usage, devotion/advocacy, revenue). Contact that with the approach more usually adopted by established businesses. Market-first. Being already well-known in a market and knowing that market well, companies look to introduce offers into nearby verticals or horizontals. So, pick a problem and then find the market that has that problem, or pick a market and then find out what problems that market has (of course this is an over-simplification but its interesting to compare the two approaches).

Tweeted

Some lessons I learned from running five days of remote workshops…

Cennydd Bowles tweeted some advice on running remote workshops, including that cats should be introduced (I mean, obviously), and about using group tools like Miro. Having done a few remote presentations (which are very different and much easier from running workshops) I find it interesting to see some of the learning that is happening around how to do remote ‘x’. (I must finish his Future Ethics book some time soon…)

Government doesn’t need disruption, or even innovation

Bill Hunt, a Chief Enterprise Architect for the US government, tweeted some interesting thoughts about what government needs from technology, including Laurenellen McCann’s “Build with, not for” and how technology is almost never the solution to the problem, something that anyone who works in tech/digital knows.

What should every indie hacker read?

Well, they should read any of or all of these suggestions.

Weeknotes #223

Admin on 06/11/2020

This week I did:

Stopped and went back

We’ve been prototyping the new product and had been coming up against lots of questions where our discussions revealed very different understanding, so we stop for a day and went back to re-work the wireframes to ensure we all had a shared understanding. Sometimes, stopping and taking a backwards step helps you move forward more quickly.

I had lots of fun using logic statements to describe how content will be displayed based on the ranked order of variables and the combinations of values. It’ll be interesting to see long the final statement is.

I’ve been experimenting with reporting using Microsoft Planner, exporting the current state to a spreadsheet and having formulas to generate a status update report. If I ever get time I’d like to create Google Sheets version of the report for others to use.

Statistics

This week’s lecture was about statistics. It feels like the most difficult subject we’ve studied in the entire Masters programme. Perhaps because there are lots and lots of new concepts to learn whereas all the other lectures were about one big concept, and perhaps because there is a right answer when it comes to using statistics, which again is different from all the other stuff we’ve learned about.

Build Better Systems Chatbot

I started mapping out the flow for the Build Better Systems chatbot. The chatbot (if I ever finish it) will allow someone to select aspects of a internet business model such as distribution channel and revenue model and then it asks them to decide what to do in situations one of their Twitter followers launching a copy of their business idea, and how many paying customers do they want to reach before they consider their business idea to be validated. Based on the answers they select their business will either succeed or fail. The point is to prompt makers to think about how they construct their business model in the digital age and making it robust to respond to challenges. There are lots of variations in the flows so it’s going to be the most complex chatbot I’ve ever built.

300 Digital Tools

My Digital Tools list has reached 300 and I’ve set myself the target of 500 by the end of the year.

I read:

Innovation in the charity sector

I’ve been collecting research papers as part of the literature review for my dissertation on innovation in the charity sector, including one from 2016 on using Facebook as a fundraising tool (it’s effective depends on how you measure: direct impact on income is low, impact on connecting with supporters (presumably some make donations) is high) and another that looked at the metrics charities use to measure their marketing activities. Aside from these being interesting in their own right, I haven’t yet found anything that relates to my field of study.

Innovation as an emergent product of a value network.

I listen to a talk by Roland Harwood about entrepreneurial activism with lots of interesting ideas about how to use entrepreneurialism in places like South Africa, which has huge wealth inequality, to establish small businesses in deprived areas which kick-start economic growth and make corporate organisations invest in those areas in order to grow the market. He talked us needing a pragmatic vision of the future and mentioned quotes such as “Innovation is a byproduct of networks” from Verne Allee.

Thought about:

The difference between meetings and workshops

Meetings might be led, but often not. Workshops are facilitated.

Meetings are meandering. Workshops are structured.

Meetings are about ‘something’. Workshops are for ‘something’.

Meetings create more meetings. Workshops generate outputs.

Give and tech

If we say that civil society is characterised by individuals choosing to use personal resources for collective gain, from donating time and money to a charity, but often with no gain for themselves (arguable, as there are very different types of value but anyway…). And if tech ethics discussions are around what we and others give up in return for what we and others gain, such as data in a network effects system where the more data we all contribute the more benefits that data can lead to for everyone. Both involve us understanding ourselves as part of a complex system of other people and technology with non-linear effects.

Some some people tweeted:

Heads together

Wayne tweeted: “Thinking of creating a cross sector working group looking at transformation from every angle. Digital. Strategy. Fundraising. NPD. Wellbeing. Etc. Each month we pick a problem, put our heads together and try to solve it. For free. Anyone interested?” This made my think about Nesta’s Collective Intelligence Design Playbook and how some of the techniques in it could be used to record the outputs of all those heads coming together to solve problems in ways that can be used and built upon by more charities, perhaps a bit like Catalyst’s Service Recipes.

Regulate

Philliteracy tweeted, “The Charity Commission’s recent efforts to win friends and influence people <ahem> got me thinking about why we have a stand-alone charity regulator here in the UK.” and went into a really interesting thread about the history of the idea and application of an organisation responsible for charity regulation. How the state introduces and manages controls within the civic space (and market for that matter, given all the talk about regulating the tech industry) is important when thinking about what problem regulation is designed to solve, and who it solves for.

The future hasn’t arrived yet

David Mattin tweeted a thread about “the Four Futures framework, and it’s an amazingly powerful tool for thinking about what comes next“. The thread goes on to explain how, based on the work of professor James Dator, all predictions for the future fall into one of four categories; Growth: the present order continues to develop along its current trajectory, Collapse: our current trajectory comes to a sudden halt; the present order falls apart, Discipline: new restraints are imposed on the present order to prevent collapse, or Transformation: entirely new systems are found; we transcend the present order. The stories will tell ourselves about the future of anything always falls into these narratives.

Weeknotes #222

Admin on 31/10/2020

This week I:

Service Mapping

I spent more time this week mapping out how we want our online education service to work. It has been really interesting and has driven lots of really good discussion with creative and critical thinking going on. I get excited in the team calls where it feels like we’re all jiving. I feel like I’ve stepped up the amount of direction and leadership I provide with the team over the last couple of weeks which is good in some respects. Although it would be good if we could focus on this single priority I feel like we’re making some progress with increasing pace.

Build Better Systems

I bought the domain buildbetter.systems and redirected to a Notion landing page that I’m in the process of setting up. I intend to use it for an idea I have around generating business models for makers, entrepreneurs, and side-projects. I also had an idea for a chatbot that takes Makers through scenarios of running a small business to see if they make the right choices for their business to succeed or fail.

Ideas and impact

I wrote a blog post about my idea about claiming working from home tax relief and donating it to charities that tackle child poverty for Fundraising UK. If I was looking at the idea as a product manager I would compare it to two similar ideas; Marcus Rashford’s campaign that resulted in lots of businesses across the UK offering to provide free food for children during school holidays, and Joe Freeman’s Google Map of all those places. I think my review would would say that the simplicity of the idea matters, and having the platform/influence to launch the idea matters. Ideas that involve learning to do something new (such as claim tax relief) are much harder to communicate and so gain adoption. Getting one million people to sign a petition is an easier task to ask of them than getting the same number to claim their £60 tax relief, but if they had I wonder about the comparison of impact. Would £60,000,000 of tax income suddenly being claimed from HMRC have made the government take more notice than the petition? And if it had been donated to charities that tackle child poverty in a sustained and reliable way, would it have had a more impact than 165 cafes on a map offering free food to children but with no systems to facilitate or measure it. Maybe this is is where the Effective Altruism argument comes from along with the criticism that it doesn’t take account of how people actually behave. Anyway, the whole thing has taught me a bit about the practice of fundraising. There are lots of books about how ideas spread. Essential reading for fundraisers, I’d say.

Disrupted innovation

Lectures did not go well this week with technology issues on the part of Birkbeck University. They really are so far build the curve in providing online education. It’s fascinating and a bit meta to be studying disruptive innovation at the same time are experiencing education being disrupted. I’ve read a bit about the unbundling of universities, and whilst the sense of achievement of getting an MSc is part of my motivation (the ‘certificate’ is one of the things that is being unbundled), the main thing I want is the intellectual stimulation. There are lots of other ways to get that, and perhaps that’s part of my motivation for exploring Maker communities.

I worked on my assignment about the fall of Nokia, disruptive innovation, strategic alliances. I’m looking forward to getting it finished so I can focus my study time of learning and revision for the exams in a few weeks.

Valuing visualisation

I’ve been trying to engage in the Visualise Value community. There is a community website with some online learning and a Slack group. I feel like I haven’t been able to properly get the value of it yet as most of the learning is via video which I find takes more concentration than reading as it’s harder to dwell on points in your own time. I’ve been trying to share some knowledge/opinions in the Slack group and the community is proving useful research into my potential customer group for Build Better Systems and some of my other ideas. But the measure of its value will be how engaged I remain over time. There are a few of these maker communities/incubators showing up, which is good for growing the maker economy by sharing knowledge (feels like this model parallels with the ‘social inclusion to fix the digital divide’ thinking).

Product feedback

I provided some user feedback for a product that is under development and I’m really looking forward to getting into a deep audit of it. I’m keen to develop a bit of systemised approach which I can use in the future, and it also made me think about finishing the blog post I started ages ago for providing advice for small charities in assessing digital products and tools.

And read:

Beauty in science

I get quite a few newsletters, but this one grabbed my attention and I read every word. It’s three beautiful articles about Alan Turing, Mary Somerville and Audre Lorde.

The Mandelbrot Set

I watched this video about The Mandelbrot Set because I thought fractals might provide a useful analogy for something I was thinking about but I can’t remember what. It happens. Anyway, it’s still an interesting video.

The tragedy of the tragedy of the commons

This article is about how the “man who wrote one of environmentalism’s most-cited essays was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamaphobe—plus his argument was wrong”. This is why we need to be rigorous in understanding the history of ideas and the assumptions they are built upon.

And thought about:

Where capabilities reside

I’ve been reading about Christensen & Overdorf’s concept of disruptive innovation and how “the factors that define an organization’s capabilities and disabilities [to innovate] evolve over time- they start in resources; then move to visible, articulated processes and values,- and migrate finally to culture.” The point they make is that as the capability to innovate moves along that chain away from people and becomes embedded in the organisation, which is why large organisations find it difficult to deal with smaller new entrants into a market. This is where I think the maker community starts to fit as it is at the very resourced-focused end of the market. I wonder if as we’ve seen over the last few decades of small start-up companies disrupting large firms, that trend will continue and we’ll see the next few decades with individual makers disrupting large firms.

The merging of products and services

Productising services is hard. Moving a service that utilises people to provide value only at the point of use to a product that provides value at any time (and moves people up the skills ladder) is a complicated thing to do, especially when the service involves lots of different tasks that can’t all be completed by the same piece of technology. The discussion seems to comes down to the complexity of the existing service and how much of an operational pain point it is. The more complex a part of the service is, the harder it is to codify and more likely it is that it should continue to use the service approach.

The Maker community and economy

I’ve been thinking about the connection between a loosely-coupled economy (one where the majority of wealth creation is distributed across a wide range and high number of organisations that aren’t reliant on each other for their value chain) and the Maker community (where individuals aim to achieve financial success through the use of internet-era business models, products and services).

  • The reason the Maker community is important is because 20,000 people making £50,000 a year is better than 1 person making £1,000,000,000
  • A decoupled economy would surely rely on lots of small sources of value rather than fewer larger sources.
  • If innovation, in the economic sense, is the creation of new value, then a growing and vibrant Maker community could probably contribute more than large organisations.
  • Influence and credibility are the most important aspects of any information age business model.
  • Currently, the biggest issue I see is that the maker economy is mostly focused on selling to itself. Makers buy from other makers because makers are making things that makers want, but that no one else does. So the viability test for the Maker movement will be to create products that sell itself of the maker community.

And some people tweeted:

Optimise for the size you are now

Toby Rogers tweeted, “One of the shortest routes to failure is scaling your product too early.” This resonates with something I heard in one of David Perell’s podcasts about optimising your product, service, systems and team for the size of the audience as it is now. He gives the example of how the CEO of Stripe received and acted upon customer feedback and complaints, something that no company would do if it was already putting in systems designed for scale but absolutely essential for a small startup that needs to know what their customers think about the product.

Toast

I performed a comprehensive, nay definitive, study on how people cut their toast and can reveal that 15% of people cut their toast into triangles, 30% rectangles, and for a whopping 55% the shape they cut their toast depends on how they intend to use it. That means that more than half of people have a creative growth mindset when it comes to toast. I’m sure my PhD certificate is in the post.