Weeknotes

Weeknote #10: External affairs

Rob Cawston

13 Mar 2026 — 5 min read

Sticks things on Portobello beach.

A week mostly spent out of the office on training, committee meetings and conferences. Lots to ponder and then lots of emails waiting on my return.

What happened this week?

Monday was spent in a full day of online training about personal impact. I've previously undertaken Myers-Briggs assessment (hello, fellow INTJs 👋) and this course took a similar "colour-based" approach to communication styles. I'm very purple, a mix of analytical (blue) and direct (red). A full day was a little too much, but the framework will be useful to structure conversations as we head into appraisal season.

The focus on conscious modes of communication recalled this post from 2022, Good conversations have lots of doorknobs: "What matters most, then, is not how much we give or take, but whether we offer and accept affordances."

Tuesday was another full-day out of the office attending a Scotland Committee meeting for the Heritage Fund. It's a privilege to be on the committee and assess a wide range of high-value funding applications. Lots of paperwork and some difficult decisions. Dr Heather Reid expertly chaired her first meeting and it was sad to say goodbye to Stuart Housden whose experience across large-scale nature projects has been invaluable.

On Wednesday I attended the AI in the Public Sector Scotland conference. Overall, it felt like organisations can see the opportunities, but aren't sure how to move beyond the pilot stage to implement trusted solutions at scale. Some highlights:

Paul McGinness from StormID presented their recent white paper on AI in the public sector, Automate tasks, not jobs, identifying X5 repeatable service patterns that could be automated at scale.
Eilidh McLaughlin, Head of the Digital Citizen Division, spoke about the assessment of "dull AI", a phrase that is being increasingly surfaced across the sector. It will be interesting to see what's in the 2026 AI Strategy from Scottish Government launching next week.
A good session on evaluating AI noting the emphasis shouldn't be on the tool itself, but the relationship between people and technology.

Back in the office on Thursday for back-to-back meetings. There was a heavy focus on some of the less glamourous elements of the IT world, including retention schedules, file management and a review of our Information Security policy. Setting standards and best practice is one thing, encouraging staff to put them into action on a regular basis is another.

One interesting challenge this week involved creating a large-type version of our Digital Routemap document for a staff member with significant visual impairment. Enlarging things to 36pt type is tricky and not easily dealt with in Word with tables and long footnotes proving particularly irksome. Overall, a time-consuming process, but instructive on what accessibility means in practice.

Interesting things

Image Empire by Alan Warburton: an intriguing and beautifully animated "fairytale" about the fusion of the real and the virtual within contemporary AI models. Worth a 3-minute watch.
Ash Mann is trying to measure the layer of hidden digital work in cultural organisations.
The core value of Museums remains their ability (as open civic spaces) to create conditions for people to do things on their own terms. An interesting piece exploring how Danish museum visitors use spaces and perceive value:

This network map of UK government departments, agencies and digital services by Tom Wynne-Morgan is both overwhelming and illustrative of the complex web of dependencies within government.
A summary of Nick Forster's book, Could, Should, Might, Don't from the RSA Journal (h/t Hugh Wallace). I enjoyed the resistance to convert his four modes of futurist thinking into some sort of creative matrix or workshop tool: "We don't need any more of that kind of thing".
Happy map made me happy.

AI haze

Talking of "intellectual clutter" there's far too much noise, change, hype and doom-mongering out there about AI. I'm trying to step back and pay attention to our specific context, and I noticed John Fitzgerald is adding "implications for charities" to AI articles in his weeknotes👍

Here's a short list of things that caught my eye:

Gary Marcus is tracking the Anthropic versus the US military fall out and goings on at OpenAI, where things do not look particularly happy.
Grok continues to spew bile into the world, this time mocking football tragedies. Urgh.
The view on the existential crisis of AI from an educator and parent: "The best I can do is try to treat expertise as a form of care, not a status".
Sifting the Digital Heap: An interesting paper scoping how AI can help address the rapidly growing volume of born-digital government records: "Access ... underpins transparency, accountability, and trust in democratic institutions. The ability of citizens, journalists, and researchers to scrutinise government decision–making depends on records being both preserved and accessible."
A useful piece from Margaret Mitchell on the "anthropomorphic traps" of LLMs, where the outputs of a system are mistaken for evidence of its inner nature:

Watching, listening, reading, doing

📖 Glasgow Boys by Magaret McDonald ⭐⭐⭐⭐ A little clunky in places, but very readable and surprisingly moving. Would recommend for teens.

📺 Industry ⭐⭐⭐ An unsettling end unable to mask a plot that tried to embrace too many grand themes (iPlayer).

📺 Hostage ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Intriguing documentary into the capture and fate of war journalists James Foley and John Cantley (iPlayer).

🎞️ Sentimental Value ⭐⭐⭐⭐✨ Amazing performances from Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve.

🎧 The kids gave David Byrne's cover of Drivers License a big thumbs down. I think it's cool (h/t Ash Mann). Geese and Cameron Winter are on heavy rotation.

🏃 A focus on what trainers I should buy is proving distracting, although a burst of sun on Friday prompted a spontaneous half.