Weeknote #31: Clear skies
A strange week with a big focus on exam results. The boy did amazingly well, managing to pull off the perfect ratio of hard work and outcomes for each subject. There's now a bit less pressure on his final year.
I was less delighted getting up at 2.30am on Wednesday morning to make sure he got a coach to Boardmasters in Cornwall. A 16 hour journey but he's having a much more exciting Summer than the rest of the family!
With various colleagues away on leave, this week was mainly spent churning through overdue admin tasks, recruitment scoring and longer-term planning. It's been helpful to line up tasks through the day and keep doing something until it's finished and off the list.
One highlight was a morning stroll down the Royal Mile to meet Ross Ferguson in his new role as Head of Digital Transformation at the Scottish Parliament. Some helpful pondering around defining "transformation" for an organisation and when/how to really accelerate AI adoption.
As an aside, I was approached, via LinkedIn, for a board role focussed on digital transformation in the commercial sector. Not usually my bag and I'm now stuck in a strange loop exploring an opportunity without knowing exactly what it is. Just. Tell. Me. The. Thing.
The Edinburgh Fringe kicked off this week making it almost impossible to reach the office (grumble, grumble). On a positive note, my first show, Ten Thousand Hours, featured great staging and an incredible physical display from Australian outfit, Gravity and Other Myths ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (One mark off for starting 30 mins late, which in Fringe terms is an age...)
Interesting things
- Ted Chiang on Why AI is not conscious and Kate Devlin ponders the human desire to connect.
- Public Digital's Tom Loosemore on the need for organisations to prepare for AI agents.
- Possibly useful? An AI case study bank from local councils.
- Is AI content creation "cost free"? Sharon O'Dea sets out why healthy content ecosystems need a little friction:
Copilot has driven the cost of creation towards zero. Well done, have a biscuit. It hasn't done a thing about consumption, context or governance. If anything, AI has poured petrol on all three by making it effortless to produce an infinite quantity of perfectly plausible-looking words.
- A fiveishmonthnote from Tom Dolan, Director of Product at Which?, including thoughts on OKRs, working with finance teams and aiming for velocity (speed + direction).
- An insightful post from Daffydd Vaughan (from 2025) on why some DVLA services turn off at night and the complexity of transforming legacy tech.
- A depressing glimpse into the perilous state of UK universities.
Watching, listening, reading, doing
📺 I keep thinking about Mark Rylance's performance in final episode of Wolf Hall. Exceptional ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
🎞️ I had forgotten watching Toy Story 5 last week, which probably says a lot about the throwaway nature of the script. A strange moral universe and definite IP exhaustion ⭐⭐
