The busiest, most stressful week I’ve had in a long time. On Sunday evening I flew to Barcelona to attend the annual Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo. I’d booked the trip months ago, and at that time it was due to take place after our last major programme milestone of the year. But our timeline had slipped and that milestone moved to the Monday following the event. So I found myself at the conference while the project team navigated a variety of last-minute issues without me.

It was very difficult to focus and concentrate while things were happening back at home. At one point I left a session as I needed to make a phone call, and later squirmed in my seat as a keynote overran into time where I was due to be in a project meeting. Added to this was the drama of the US election; I went to bed on Tuesday night after watching CNN for a while, had a restless night, and then woke up to find that Trump had walked it. I’m still having random moments of shock, disbelief and despair peppering each day.

Last year I went to the conference by rail, but my need to get back to the office and my experience of trying to work on the train put me off doing the same thing again. The catastrophic weather system in Eastern Spain was persisting, which meant that we were kept on the ground for two hours after boarding our plane at Heathrow as they waited for the area around Barcelona to clear. The delay meant that the in-flight food cart was in high demand; it never made it to where was sitting at the rear of the plane before we started our final approach to land. I ended up at my hotel just before midnight, having to find something to eat from a little shop nearby.

The first keynote presentation of the week always has maximum attendance. Like last year, the main auditorium was full, so I ended up watching it in a second giant room via a live video feed.

Ten minutes in to the presentation, it sounded as though the fire alarms were going off. I wondered how the presenters would cope, but they just carried on. It turned out that the noise was the collective sound of thousands of smartphones, all of which had received a government alert that warned of torrential rain that was heading our way. As I sat in sessions throughout the morning, I could hear the thunder outside the conference centre. Later I learned that rain flooded the airport and roads around Barcelona, but we seemed to dodge the worst of the impact.

This year our subscription meant that I had access to the CIO Lunch on the first three days. These lunches are held in the giant overflow hall. You wander in and get directed to an empty seat by a small army of staff with illuminated marshalling wands, say hello to your immediate neighbours at your table and then tuck in. It was an incredible operation; setting this many places and switching people from their starters to their hot main courses was amazing to watch.

Each day, as people tucked into their desserts, we settled in to hear from a guest keynote speaker on the stage in the room. The first of these was Carla Harris, who ended up being my favourite speaker of the entire event. Her talk was called Lead to Win: How to Be an Impactful, Influential Leader in Today’s Environment, but the title didn’t really do it justice. She weaved a wonderful narrative about her time at Morgan Stanley, where she continues to work, and what she has learned about effective leadership.

Versions of talks from most keynote speakers are usually available on the Internet, and Harris is no exception. Here she is talking to an interviewer in December 2022 at the Wharton School:

Most of each day at the conference is filled with short presentations, in rooms of all shapes and sizes. Some of these were really valuable, such as Laurie Shotton’s presentation on a framework for evaluating emerging technologies, Tom Scholtz’s 3 Essential Tactics for Mastering Board-Level Cybersecurity Presentations and Kevin Smith’s How New CIOs Can Accelerate Their First-Year Impact and Value as an Executive and Functional Leader. Others, not so much.

Last year, ahead of my first Symposium, I spent ages agonising over which talks to sign up to in the Conference Navigator app, trying to avoid any timeline clashes. This year I took a completely different approach, adding everything that looked even remotely interesting to my personal agenda. Typically I would then have a choice of three or four sessions to attend at any given slot throughout the four days. I’d make a just-in-time decision based on downloading and skimming through a copy of the slides for each of the sessions in the app, making a call on what I thought would be most valuable one to go to.

I also had access to some ‘CIO Roundtable’ sessions, which were peer-based conversations led by a Gartner facilitator. These were valuable but too short, particularly one on the use of Generative AI in Banking which was just getting warmed up by the time we had to stop.

At a Roundtable session on AI Governance we were deep into a fascinating conversation about ethics when, ironically, I spotted that the CIO sitting next to me was recording the audio of the conversation on his phone. I spent the rest of the session wrestling whether to say something about the ethics of recording without people’s consent, versus the fact that anyone could be recording any of us at any time, and it being incumbent on us to not say anything that we wouldn’t be happy sharing in a public forum. I didn’t say anything at the time, and I’m not sure that was the right thing to do.

In another lunchtime keynote we heard from Martha Lane Fox on Strategic Leadership in the Digital Age: Driving Innovation, Inclusion and Impact. She told us that McKinsey had published a report on how long it will take for different industries to reach parity between the sexes. For technology, the answer was ‘never’ — we’re actually standing still or going backwards.

Some of the sessions felt as though they were there just for the ‘wow’ factor as opposed to being actually useful. It was amazing to be in the same room as Arnold Schwarzenegger (and to hear him quote lines from Kindergarten Cop), but I don’t think he offered any insights that I will take back to my day job. Gartner had originally announced that Jensen Huang would speak — which would have been great, and very relevant — but Schwarzenegger replaced him in the build-up to the event.

At Monday night’s drinks reception they brought Ruud Gullit in, simply for the purpose of having photos taken with him. I posed for a photo without us speaking a word to each other, and wondered if he even knew where he was.

I was excited to hear Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote talk, but a few days after the event I find it difficult to recall the key points.

Mick Ebeling gave an inspiring talk on the work that he has done to ‘make the impossible not impossible’, including 3D printing low-cost prosthetics in Sudan, enabling an artist with locked-in syndrome to paint again, and helping a jazz pianist with Parkinson’s disease to be able to play the piano.

The final keynote of the week was by digital anthropologist and author Rahaf Harfoush, talking about ‘wellbeing in a constantly connected world’. None of what she said was revelatory, but it was a good reminder to look after ourselves and our teams. As she discussed burnout, I was thinking about another blogger and weeknoter who has been writing about his own experience of this.

I spent most of Thursday working and in meetings instead of attending sessions. I’m hoping to catch up with the recordings of anything significant that I missed. (But I’m also hoping that I don’t encounter this song¹ again, which was played in the countdown to the start of each keynote.)

I’m glad I went, but it wasn’t as impactful as last year. I’m sure that there’s much more that Gartner can do to foster communication and collaboration between CIOs, which would be extremely valuable. They do provide a ‘Peer Community’ app and website, but from my experience most people just want to be in a WhatsApp or Signal group. You need to build trust and friendship, which isn’t easy to do. At dinner on Tuesday evening I spent time talking with an account executive about the WB-40 podcast Signal group and how invaluable it is to me, wondering what the special sauce is that makes it such a successful forum.

One last thought is that Gartner really should start sharing the secrets of their own technology. The conference looks and feels absolutely stunning, with incredible Wi-Fi, breathtaking audio/visual setups and apps that just work. I’d love to learn how they do it.

Aside from the Symposium, this was a week in which I:

• Contributed a written section to our quarterly board report.
• Updated a report for one of our next Governance Committee meetings.
• Prepped for the programme Steering Committee and ran the meeting.
• Fielded a variety of last-minute issues on the programme as we got ready for our go-live date.
• Prepared and rehearsed a short speech to make to our staff on Monday.
• Went for a run in Barcelona but quickly hit a problem with my calf again, the same one that caused me a problem when I ran a half marathon a few weeks back. I had to pull up after a couple of kilometres and ended up limping for the rest of the day.
• Was very proud of my eldest son who achieved a new 5k PB in Manchester:
  

• Got out with the bike club for the first time in weeks. It was lovely to see everyone again.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Your Undivided Attention have yet another important episode, this time covering how companies are offering AI chatbots as companionship, one of which led to the death of a teenager.
  

Most of the time when we talk about AI today, we talk about what it can do and not really so much about what it’s doing to us. And when people talk about the harm of AI, of course there are many harms that we talk about like misinformation or deception and many things, but the psychological harm of AI I think is a really, really important topic.

• 404 Media’s subscriber-only feed had a brilliant interview with Susanna Gibson of My Own Image, where she talked frankly about her experience of experiencing sexual violence through having an explicit video of her shared online. For people that have been a victim of this kind of abuse, it never ever goes away, and they never know when the trauma will re-surface afresh and impact them all over again.
  

Articles

• Ken White’s thoughts the day after the US election.
• Paul Graham’s post about the “writes and write-nots” struck a chord with me. “[W]riting is thinking.”
• There have been a few things this week that have got me concerned as to whether violence against women, and women’s rights in general, are taking steps backwards. And how technology will play a significant role in this. Heather Burns writes compellingly about this:
  

It pains me to report that yesterday the voting women of America, and many men too, adopted her as a role model as well, but not as a force for good. They have no intention of having other women’s backs. They want Savita as an exemplar of what can, and should, happen to women every day, everywhere.

They want more dead women, they are already getting them, and they are not going to stop until no one knows their names because there are too many to count.

• 404 Media also recently wrote about technology used by the US government that can track individual phones. They also covered this story on their podcast. Imagine this now being in the hands of Trump and the rest of the new administration.
  

Video

• This documentary from Channel 4 of the experience of women in Magaluf is simultaneously shocking and completely unsurprising. Coupled with the articles I read above, it left me feeling a little depressed about the normalisation of treating women so dreadfully.
  

• Continued to scratch my Tears for Fears itch with this timely release from Trash Theory:
  

Books

• Got about halfway through My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall by John Major. It feels as though a book is the wrong format to learn about these old music hall stars and their songs. A three-part documentary would probably be much more immersive and enjoyable.
  

Next week: Returning to the office, and getting to see Magdalena Bay again.

1. Don’t click this link, you’ll end up with a dreadful earworm. You have been warned. ↩

I spent the first half of the week walking around like an old man, tentatively tackling stairs and taking an age to move between sitting and standing positions. It’s been a while since I’ve had delayed onset muscle soreness from running and I wasn’t really expecting it after the half marathon. This was me:

I was grateful for an early morning meeting on Monday that meant I would be working from home; I’m not convinced that I could have tackled the walk to the train station as well as all of the stairs at the tube stations.

By Thursday the stiffness had passed except in the calf muscle that caused me the problems during the run. I get the feeling that there’s something else going on in there as it still feels very tight and sore when I move any faster than walking pace. I decided to skip running this weekend and give it a bit more time to sort itself out.

This was a week in which I:

• Gave my presentation on An Introduction to Large Language Models and Generative AI to the board of directors of one of our African companies. It had been a few months since I last presented on the topic, but I found that I didn’t need to make many updates to my slides. It’s amazing how much content is still valid 18 months on from the first draft.
• Met with our external legal team to review a vendor contract for some minor works that we need to finish off in one of our office spaces.
• Collaborated with my colleagues to write a speech that we are due to give at a ‘town hall’-style meeting on Tuesday. We’ve seamlessly knitted our own narrative with key internal content from the past few weeks. I’m very pleased with the results. Most of the attendees will be in the room in Johannesburg, but I’m grateful to be stuck in my home office as it will allow me to read from the document instead of clutching paperwork in my hand.
• Caught up with the project team for opening a new office for the first time in a while. Things will get busy again soon.
• Had my first monthly meeting with our technology advisory consultancy.
• Heard from two different vendors that a key person from each of their teams is leaving. Agreed an approach for how we will mitigate one of these changes for the next few weeks.
• Made a couple of visits to our vacated office with a colleague to work out where our new meeting room artwork should go.
• Visited a corporate furniture vendor to look at new meeting room furniture. I loved the analogy that buying a boardroom table is like a car; it comes with a basic chassis and you can upgrade various components that are factory-fitted before delivery.
• Joined the first part of a follow-up workshop on sustainable careers.
• Had a useful meeting with my team, primarily focused on our upcoming Microsoft Copilot trial.
• Met an online friend for a chat about the vacancy in my team. It was lovely to meet them in ‘high fidelity’ after having just been talking in a Signal group for so long.
• Attended the Thoughtworks Technology Radar preview. I asked a question in the Q&A about where the company had seen Generative AI deployed with a massive impact as I am increasingly skeptical about it having ‘breakout’ value, but didn’t get much of an answer.
• Fixed a problem with my laptop. I had rebooted and then suddenly the desktop and Office applications on my external monitor were VERY LARGE. After tentatively exploring some simple causes for a few days I ended up going for the full driver uninstall and re-download from the Lenovo website. The fix didn’t even ask for a reboot.
• Bumped into a friend and enjoyed a lovely morning commute with him. He has been a Chief Financial Officer for many different companies. I felt like an information vacuum as he answered the many questions that I bombarded him with about his current business.
• Went to a special event at school with my wife and youngest son to learn about the subjects he might take for A-Levels in the Sixth Form. Just like the last time I went to this event, I was jealous of the learning adventure he has ahead of him. He’s quite sure about what he wants to do, but we made full use of the time by checking out some other subjects that were on his long list.
• Had our main bathroom repainted. This now seems to need doing on a roughly annual basis as (a) some people in the house like to drain the whole tank of hot water and (b) possibly these same people are reluctant or forgetful in opening the window. As a consequence, the bathroom regularly resembles the aftermath of particularly packed, jaunty evening at the legendary Cavern Club. We probably need to get an extractor fan in there, but I’m not sure they make one powerful enough.
• Enjoyed two Album Club evenings, both with albums I’d never heard before. Talk Talk are definitely on my ‘to explore’ list.
• Found a couple of gems at our local Oxfam Books and Music store.

My latest haul from our local Oxfam Books and Music store

Media

Podcasts

• Fascinating episode of Quiet Riot where host Naomi Smith talks to Gareth Dennis about Britain’s railways. I loved the sentiment that successive governments have “lost a diamond whilst chasing the glitter” with their focus on FM (f’ing magic) as opposed to AM (actual machines). There’s lots that I learned here, including how intensively used Britain’s railways are, which makes maintaining and fixing them more expensive as it has to be done more intensively in a shorter timeframe. Electric vehicles are important, but the ‘embodied carbon’ in their manufacture and usage versus the train means that they can’t be the only vision of the future.
• The regular Thursday episode of Quiet Riot left me open-mouthed with its description of the Single Justice Procedure, and how “anyone can end up with a criminal conviction after a magistrate looks at a case for 45 seconds, behind closed doors, with no scrutiny or reasoning.” Magistrates themselves have asked for reform.

Video

• Finished watching Kaos on Netflix. Loved it. Can’t believe it’s been cancelled.

Web

• Continued to read some of the posts about Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, WP Engine and various other things in this space. There’s so much going on.
• Found myself again sharing this article that explains why USB-C is a specifically-shaped connector, not a standard.
• “It turns out I’m still excited about the web.” Love this.
• Molly White has written about writing on your own site and then syndicating the content everywhere else, something that I’ve done for the past few years.
• This Sketchplanation about ‘leading from any chair’ touched a nerve with me. I think that this is one of the keys to a mature, high performing team.
• Interesting viewpoint on capitalism and gig workers.

Books

• Finished my book. Crippled with indecisiveness about what to read next and the commitment involved after picking one, I started wondering how I could make better decisions. Over time, I’ve built up a backlog of around 1,400 unread books and have their information in a list I keep in Obsidian. It feels a bit like I can no longer see the wood for the (mainly electronic) trees. So, I used Claude.AI to help me to put together some Python code to take a title (and author, where available) and use the Google Books API to fetch additional data. After an hour or two I got everything working and now have descriptions, genres and other metadata about my books in a spreadsheet. I now need to work out how to get better ratings information as this seems to be very sparsely populated in the Google data. I’m hoping that once I finish a book and am deciding what to read next, I can use the metadata to narrow things down. For example, I should be able to filter the list by biographies or fiction and pick something from the smaller selection.

Next week: Starting the annual review cycle, joining a conference from my chair and heading to the cinema with a friend.