Month: September 2021

Weeknote 37/2021

Posted on September 19, 2021September 19, 2021 by Doug Belshaw

This was a shorter working week, as my wife and I went away (a week late) to celebrate our 18th wedding anniversary. We stayed, and were upgraded at, the Crowne Plaza in Newcastle. We both really like this hotel for its location, amenities, and comfort. We ate at The Muddler, which was good but not excellent; the service was slow and my vegetarian options mediocre compared to what Hannah had.

Still, we had an enjoyable time. It was slightly odd given the Great North Run happened last Sunday and the hotel was full of runners and their families. Still, as our upgraded room gave us access to the Club Lounge we were able to remain somewhat aloof.

This wasn’t my only trip. As with last week, I walked and camped on Friday night. This time, instead of being picked up, I walked a couple of hours on Friday night and then back on Saturday morning. It was pretty spectacular, especially now that I’ve got my Jetboil to make some Firepot meals.

I’m writing this with a sore shoulder. I wrote my last weeknote, and several before that also with a sore shoulder. It’s affected my sleep for the last couple of months, but it was only yesterday that I realised how I damaged it.

Sometimes at the gym I use the Smith machine to do squats. Back in late June, I accidentally placed three 20kg weights on one side, and one on the other (instead of two and two). I’m not exactly sure how I managed this, other than I must have been distracted listening to an audiobook. After a set of 10 squats, I realised my mistake, moved one of the weights to the other side, and continued.

After some research and conversations with people who know about these things, it seems I may have damaged my rotator cuff. So I’ve booked a physio appointment for the week after next. It’s frustrating knowing that I’ve caused the injury, as is reading this on the website I’ve linked to:

You can also have a combination of wear and tear with an injury, which is why shoulder injuries or pain can become more common over the age of 40.

Ah well. It could be worse.

Work this week has been mainly two streams of work for Julie’s Bicycle, one of which I can discuss publicly (the digital strategy stuff), and the other which WAO is working on with Outlandish. It’s fascinating working with organisations who are putting together a product team for the first time: Laura and I really enjoy the challenge.

Other than that we’ve started a new contract with Participate. We’ll share details soon about an online event we’ll be running next month which is an outflow of our Keep Badges Weird (KBW) project. I’ve also been meaning to spend time writing up a potentially-fundable idea I’ve got about Open Badges + ActivityPub, but didn’t get around to it this week.

We had a co-op day this week, which Laura wrote up on our blog. All of the members were there, plus Anna (our intern) and we managed to get through quite a few proposals. It’s so good being part of an organisation that you own, with processes in place to ensure consensual decision-making. We’re doing well, and are in a much better place than we were this time last year.

The only thing I wrote this week was The difference between individual and organisational decision-making which is a reflection on my time as an employee and also a consultant working with various organisations.

Finally, there has been a lot of coming and going of parcels this week as we got Hannah set up with an external monitor, webcam, keyboard and mouse to go with her MacBook Pro. Her office space in our loft conversion doesn’t really give her space for anything other than a 24-inch monitor, and there are precious monitors of that size with 4K resolution. (Anything less looks fuzzy given the MacBook display) We eventually settled on this LG model, although disappointingly it doesn’t have speakers and also required a USB-C to DisplayPort cable.

In terms of webcam we went for the Logitech C-925e as it has a privacy shutter — unlike my (otherwise brilliant) Logitech C920. Then, for the keyboard and mouse, anything other than the official Apple versions doesn’t really cut it with a Mac. I unapologetically ordered most of these from Amazon as their returns process is so fantastic. The only one I ordered from eBay caused me a right hassle.

Next week looks like it will be remarkably similar to this week. I’m hoping to get another wild camp in somewhere!

Image from a photo I took during my overnight camping trip.

The difference between individual and organisational decision-making

Posted on September 18, 2021September 18, 2021 by Doug Belshaw

Often, when our co-op starts helping an organisation for the first time, we talk about organisational decision-making. To me, the way that organisations make decisions shows how effective they are now, and how effective they are likely to be in future as they grow.

No organisation likes to think they’re poor at decision-making. That’s because organisations are collections of individuals, and we as individuals don’t like to think we’re poor at decision-making. But individual and organisational decision-making are two separate things: you can have an organisation full of fantastic individual decision-makers, yet have poor organisational decision-making.

How can this be? How can individual people who are good at decision-making be part of an organisation which is poor at it? For me, the answer lies in three areas:

Context
Consent
Culture

None of this is rocket science, but it does take some intentional thinking to ensure these three things work together to ensure effective decision-making within organisations. In the following, I’m drawing solely on my own experience both with organisations as an employee, and outside organisations as a consultant.

Context

In order to make a positive organisational decision it’s important to have as much relevant context as possible. In a startup situation, this often means that the founder, who has all of the context, makes most (if not all) of the major decisions as they can see the big picture and have all of the context in their head.

However, as an organisation grows, a founder’s individual decision-making on behalf of the organisation becomes a bottleneck. The founder cannot be expected to be up-to-date with every single thing that’s happening, so decisions are pushed to the edges.

At the edges, individuals or teams need to be able to make decisions that will not negatively impact other areas of the organisation. As such, they need to understand the context in which they are making the decision. In our experience, this means working openly (sharing everything publicly by default) or at least transparently (sharing everything within your organisation by default). Removing barriers to information helps knowledge workers flourish and make good organisational decisions.

Consent

Individuals and teams at the edges of organisations can have all of the context they need to make a decision, but if they do not have the consent to make that decision, they will be stymied.

Consent within an organisation is different to consensus. This is something I’ve discussed elsewhere, listing the advantages of doing so:

Consent balances groups and individuals
Consent allows for forward motion
Consent is safe

The mantra here is ‘good enough for now, safe enough to try’. With that kind of attitude, the organisation can continue moving quickly and avoiding bottlenecks.

Culture

All of the above is for naught, however, if the organisational culture is one where recriminations are common. I’ve worked with and within organisations were line managers are passive-aggressively cc’d on emails to form an ‘audit trail’, and where witch-hunts follow decisions that ended up being problematic but were made in good faith and with all available information.

To be successful, organisations have to innovate. Part of innovation is failure, to figure out what doesn’t work, so that you can double-down on what does. If decisions made to the best ability of individuals or teams turn out to lead to problems, the best thing to do is to run a retrospective rather than apportion blame.

Ultimately, culture flows from the top of an organisation. Whoever is in charge has to personify the values for which the organisation stands, including a tolerance for decisions being made at the edges of the organisation. These decisions should be made in a way that has all of the necessary context, and in a consensual way. Whoever makes the decision should not fear reprisals, but rather be celebrated for being decisive.

To conclude, organisations should be continually thinking about how they make decisions, especially as they grow. I read somewhere once upon a time that organisations’ workflows break at multiples of three and ten and, if true, that certainly includes their decision-making.

The three things to consider when reviewing decision-making, in my experience, are context, consent, and culture. Get these right, and your organisations will have empowered people making decisions based on good information, and without fear of what might happen if they get things wrong.

Image based on an photo by Jan Genge

Weeknote 36/2021

Posted on September 11, 2021September 11, 2021 by Doug Belshaw

It’s been back-to-school week in the Belshaw household, meaning a change in routines. In parallel, the weather’s started changing; it’s not cold, but there’s been more wind and rain this week. Happily, this seems to have had an effect on the tomato plants I’m growing up the south-facing wall of my home office — several are turning red!

As a parent, my routine depends heavily on that of our kids, so them returning to school has meant less lying in bed reading Foucault, and more getting up and making sure they’re getting ready on time. The kind of reading that’s perfect for this scenario is the writings of authors like Marcus Aurelius and Baltasar Gracián. I read their works on repeat, along with The Oxford Book of Aphorisms. People can disturb me while I’m reading these without me getting too annoyed!

I shared some of my gleanings on Mastodon, with my favourite being this gem from W.H. Auden:

The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.

My (former?) therapist would be having words with me if he read this; wearing a ‘mask’ in our relationships with others is not conducive to good mental health. However, sometimes, in some situations, you’ve got to be what other people expect you to be.

Thankfully, after a reasonably-intense Discovery period over the summer, my wife’s user research role is a bit more chilled-out before the Alpha phase starts next month. I’ve been mainly doing work with and for Julie’s Bicycle with Laura. As she explained in her newsletter this week:

Julie’s Bicycle is a “not-for-profit mobilising the arts and culture to take action on the climate and ecological crisis.” They’re going through a transitional period, and the co-op is working to support them. The work is strategy, digital transformation, leadership development, open methodologies and more. Intense brain stuff. I’m getting to nerd out and do design stuff with Mural and Whimsical, two jazzy tools that are making the thinky thinky stuff easier.

I quote this partly because Laura has a better way with words than I do, and partly because of the mention of Whimsical. It’s an amazing tool that I love using, as does everyone I’ve ever shown it to. This week, I got to talk to their Founder & CEO, Kaspars Dancis, as I sent my CV in application for their Head of Product role. (Since that chat, I’ve withdrawn from the application process as they’ve recently taken outside funding. My previous experience of orgs taking VC money hasn’t been great.)

This week, I felt a real brain / body disconnect, especially when it comes to exercise. I try and do some form of exercise every day, with my usual go-to routine including the gym (arms/legs), running, and swimming. This week, my shoulder was hurting at the gym while doing pull-ups meaning I couldn’t finish my routine. On Wednesday, when I went swimming, I was exhausted after 32 lengths. Then, on Thursday, when I tried to beat my previous record for one of my running routes where I do the same circuit twice, I had to give up after one ‘lap’. My lungs felt like they were going to explode, and my calves were telling me they didn’t want to go any further.

I guess this is the tragedy of getting old: the mind is willing but the flesh is weak? It’s doubly-frustrating as I’ve got a fit, sporty, and competitive fourteen year old snapping at my heels. At some point, I guess, I need to look in the mirror and realise that ‘middle-age spread’ is a thing, my hair isn’t going to get any less grey, and those wrinkles are permanent. But not yet. I will not go gentle into that good night.

I got around to writing up part of a podcast interview with Vinay Gupta: Bright green, blight green, and lean green futures. I also continued publishing microcasts at Thought Shrapnel:

If you only listen to one of these, I’d suggest making it #094 as it also references the above blog post.

Perhaps part of the reason I started from a baseline of being tired this week was my wild camping trip last weekend. It was the first time in my one-person tent somewhere other than my garden. I walked 4.5 hours from my house, found a disused and suitably-private bit of field, and pitched my tent. I was woken a couple of times in the night by some kind of animal sniffing around, but I just stuck in one of my earbuds and turned on a relaxing channel of Brain.fm.

I never get an amazing night’s sleep in a tent, but it wasn’t terrible. The added bonus was that I woke up close enough to The Running Fox in Felton that I could spend a couple of hours there having breakfast and reading the paper before my family picked me up in the car.

My wife and I achieved 18 years of marriage on the 6th September, but couldn’t celebrate it on the day as she was heading to London for an NHS 111 team meetup. Instead, we’re going away this Sunday night, trying The Muddler for food and cocktails. It’ll only be the second time we’ve eaten inside at a restaurant this calendar year, and I only stopped eating fish in February. So I’m a little unused to going out for meals being full vegetarian. Looks like I’m going to have to get a liking for tofu…

Next will be pretty much a four-day workweek as we’ll not be back from our trip until Monday afternoon. Tuesday morning is our monthly co-op planning meeting, and then we’re diving into work for Participate. The work we’re doing with Julie’s Bicycle, both the strategy work and the tools-focused stuff we’re doing with Outlandish, will dominate the rest of the week, although I do have some other calls for potential projects. It’s likely that the next phase of a Greenpeace project we’ve been involved in will start soon, so I don’t want to fill my days up just in case!

Dithered image of my stealthy tent in a field somewhere.