Another week where I’ve felt wiped out. Having a look at the Sleep Cycle app, I can see that I’m on a bit of a dip. I find this reassuring, despite not knowing what’s causing it. There’s a lot of stuff going on right now, from the smorgasbord of things at work, to family things, to the hideous things in the news. So perhaps it’s just all of these adding up. It’ll pass.
This was a week in which I:
- Met to discuss the preliminary outcome of a regulatory audit for one of our entities.
- Joined the rebooted project meeting for setting up an office in a new country. We suddenly have lots to do.
- Had the weekly project meeting with the team working on the project to refresh and refurbish another of our offices. Our vendor contracts are nearly all in place and the plan is taking shape.
- Met with colleagues in our sister company to review the status of their refurbishment project in our shared building. I spent some of Sunday evening putting together a slide for their project Steering Committee pack on our plans for the shared meeting space in our building.
- Had more conversations about consumer devices that record audio that can then be processed by AI, either for immediate language translation or to help with productivity in other ways. There is a massive digital literacy angle to this, but I get the feeling that in wider society, functionality and utility of the tools will trump any privacy concerns. People are going to be recording conversations and uploading them all over the place, with little regard for where those recordings may eventually end up. At work, we need to ensure that people are equipped to understand the difference between using approved, controlled and audited tools, versus a device that they can buy on the Internet.
- Met with colleagues ahead of one of our governance committee meetings to ensure that we were aligned on the messages relating to our actions.
- Reviewed the outcome of a software delivery that didn’t go as planned, and discussed what the teams involved in the management of the work can do about it.
- Had another reminder of how communication is hard when I watched an issue raised about a network connection go off track into a discussion about something very different.
- Met with our audio/visual consultants to refine our updated design for a divisible space that we will be fitting out towards the end of this year.
- Reviewed a proposal for support services from one of our hardware vendors.
- Met with the senior team at our most significant vendor to discuss the implications of the news that they had recently been acquired.
- Joined a meeting to review our progress with an initiative that gives our outward-facing staff more insight into their clients. We agreed how we would expand the initiative, covering more clients in specific sectors and geographies.
- Held a handover meeting between the construction company and our Facilities team for the accessible door installed in our office a few months ago. We still need to schedule regular servicing visits and a longer-term maintenance contract.
- Formally completed the small project to make microwave ovens available to our staff in our office.
- Reviewed a colleague’s progress with some data analysis work relating to how we store documentation relating to our clients. It was my first time seeing Power Query in Excel; I had no idea such a powerful tool had ended up in the application. In the early part of my career, anything that got slightly complex with combining different data sources led me to spinning up an Access database. If Power Query had been around, it might have kept me in the spreadsheet world instead.
- Had a conversation with a colleague about our nudges towards them using our corporate password manager. About a third of our staff are weekly active users. I don’t know how this compares to other organisations that have gone on the same journey, but I bet it’s not bad. Getting the other two thirds on board is going to be a fascinating exercise in digital literacy and change management. We met later in the week to review our plans for driving adoption and better security practices.
- Spent time thinking about how people ‘recruit’ others as champions for the things they care about. The corporate password manager is a good example; how do I take the fire in my belly about keeping ourselves, our clients and our organisation safe and make it a fire in your belly? Years ago I read Euan Semple saying that “Social media adoption happens one conversation at a time, and for their reasons not yours.” I actually think that this is generalisable beyond social media to the adoption of any technology, or the championing of any change project.
- Came up with an idea over lunch with a colleague for an experiment in engagement during our larger internal Teams meetings. We created three solid-colour backgrounds — green, amber and red — each denoting our level of engagement in the meeting. If a conversation is going off track or into too much detail and we find ourselves disengaging, we can flick our background to amber or red to signify this to the meeting chair. We tried it out in a couple of meetings towards the end of the week and other people took to it as well. There may be some legs in this.
- Joined colleagues across our divisional Technology department for a global town hall-style meeting. Participating remotely was challenging, but it is always better to be included than to be left out.
- Met with colleagues on our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum to talk about plans for National Women’s Day. At first I was confused as I thought we’d already had Women’s Day, back in March. It turns out that this was International Women’s Day, and South Africa has its own National Women’s Day too. One thing I’ve noted about South African public holidays is that they have such unassuming names, belying the seriousness of the events that led to their creation. For example, Youth Day isn’t just a celebration of all of the young people in the country, it actually commemorates the Soweto Uprising in 1976 where hundreds of students were killed by the police. National Women’s Day commemorates 20,000 women who marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to petition against the pass laws under apartheid. As a member of the DEI forum from outside of the country, it’s difficult to understand how people feel about these holidays now. In the UK, we don’t have any recently established recurring commemorative public holidays, and therefore we never have a conversation about them. From discussions I’ve had this week, it seems that although these South African holidays have important origins, people don’t tend to want to dredge up the past and generally just look forward to a day off. Perhaps it’s the role of government and leaders to mark the occasion in a more somber way. I’m learning so much.
- Lost half a day in trying to fix a keyboard and mouse issue with my laptop. On Thursday morning I got to the office and plugged in my computer, waking it from sleep. My mouse pointer felt jerky and the keyboard seemed sluggish, not responding and then repeatingggggg lots of charactersssssss. After 30 seconds of research, I decided to try updating the drivers directly from the AMD website. I’d done this a few times before and knew how easy it was; the software detects what system you have and usually handles the update without any fuss. Unfortunately, this time the installer got to the point where it removed what was already there but then failed with an ‘access denied’ error when trying to put new drivers in place. Worryingly, external displays had completely disappeared from Windows Device Manager. I tried running it again, but got the same result. I rebooted, and ran the installer before doing anything else. Again, no luck. A concerned cry for help via ChatGPT led me to the AMD ‘Cleanup Utility’ that removes drivers. I figured that running this may get me to a place where I could rerun the installer and it might work. The Cleanup Utility wanted me to reboot my computer in Safe Mode, where presumably it would have better luck at uninstalling files as less of them would be locked in use. This is where things got really hairy. Safe Mode left me in purgatory — I couldn’t use my PIN or my password to log in, and no other options were available. The journey continued through obtaining a 48-digit Bitlocker key (which I had to enter three or four times), using the command line in ‘recovery mode’ to manually edit the boot configuration, and using Display Driver Uninstaller to clean things up before trying to get the driver installed again. I ventured away from my desk for a while and when I returned I found that my monitor had finally sprung to life. I decided to connect my keyboard and mouse via Bluetooth instead of the dongle, which solved the original issue from three hours before. I’m not touching anything else.
- Met a young man who was with us in the office for a week’s work experience.
- Dived into my Kindle library to find — or rather, not find — a book that I had previously purchased. I’d been thinking about Euan Semple’s Organisations Don’t Tweet, People Do and wanted to go back to the original text to find something specific. But all I got was an option to purchase the book. It wasn’t that the book had disappeared from my device, it was as if I hadn’t purchased the book at all. I remembered reading about this happening to someone else, and their remedy was to get in contact with Amazon customer service. I used the button so that they called me, and a nice customer service lady immediately found ‘the problem’ and restored the book for me, along with 175 others. Why did they get removed from my library in the first place? You really have to keep track of what books you’ve purchased, otherwise you might find yourself buying the same thing all over again.
- Completed some health questionnaires ahead of a checkup that I’ve got booked for a few weeks’ time.
- Had a wonderful dinner with the beautiful people of WB-40. After a drink at The Dovetail (and a reminder that Sportzot is the best tasting alcohol-free beer), we went to a private room at the Bourne & Hollingsworth Buildings for a delicious meal. I’m so lucky to have made such lovely friends over the past few years, just through listening to a podcast and joining a chat group.
- Went with a friend to see The Ancient and Moderns play at The Hope and Anchor in Islington. I’d never been to the venue and was pleased to find a perfectly-sized small pub basement as our home for the evening. The band were amazing, making every song sound great. (Well, except for The Cranberries’ Zombie, which is my musical kryptonite. Nothing can save that song.)
- Loved watching the Women’s Euro 2025 tournament. It seemed to have a very low-key start, without much mainstream coverage, but built as England made progress. Chloe Kelly and Michele Agyemang were the clear stars of England’s tournament, getting us out of trouble in all of the knockout stages. Spain were the better team in the final, but sometimes it’s just not your night.
- Had a fun ride with the cycling club on Saturday morning, despite a few mechanical issues in the group. Years ago my dad taught me how to find a hole in an inner tube by using the sensitivity of your lips to detect the air coming out. I put this to good use, finding the tiniest of holes, and subsequently found the tiniest of flints embedded in my friend’s tyre. If you don’t find the cause, it’s so easy to fit a new inner tube only to immediately get another puncture when you start riding again.
- Enjoyed a Sunday morning bike ride with my eldest son, whose post-exams holiday viewing of the Tour de France has given him the cycling bug again. A friend very generously lent him a road bike and he already had a helmet, so he just needed to buy some shoes and cleats in order to get going.
- Had a visit from an engineer to investigate why our home oven is so noisy. Apparently it has two cooling fans, and based on what he heard he has made a plan to replace both of them.
Media
Podcasts
- Enjoyed the conversation with researcher and ex-OpenAI employee Daniel Kokotajlo on the Your Undivided Attention podcast. I’ve added his ‘AI 2027’ paper to my reading list. The conversation began to lose me when they spoke about AI cheating; these aren’t beings and therefore don’t ‘cheat’. At least, not in the sense that we understand it. The host said that “…AIs in that process become smart enough that they hide their motivations and pretend that they’re going to do what programmers train them to do or what customers want them to do, but we don’t pick up on the fact that that doesn’t happen until it’s too late.” The language we use about AI is filled with traps that we easily fall into, in this case “smart enough”, “their motivations” and “pretend” are all problematic.
Articles
- I love Ton Zijlstra’s reflections on needing professional peers for conversation and challenge.
- “A remarkable 40 per cent of Brits aged between 18 and 24 think it is acceptable to answer a phone call without any form of greeting, a YouGov poll found last year.”
- Arresting people for peacefully protesting is an absolute scandal. Despite all of this country’s recent problems, I used to proudly boast that someone could go wandering down the street shouting how much they hated the monarch or the Prime Minister and it was their right to do that. This is not the country I want us to be.
- I do feel sorry for people who have apostrophes in their names. The Internet is busy talking about AI taking over the world, but we haven’t yet solved basic problems like this.
- Randahl Fink’s cautionary tale of how a simple piece of technology can lead to unintended consequences and social media pile-ons.
- I’ve been thinking about Euan Semple’s work a lot this week. I found these three great blog posts as I scoured his archives for a specific quote:
Books
- I’m still not reading as much as I would like. Continued with Apple In China, and I’m now at the point where they have launched the iPhone. The stories of the processes to bring the product to life and how successful it was in the early years are mindblowing.
Next week: The return of the WB-40 Album Club, fixing the oven, and getting together with old friends.
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