What I’ve been doing
I’m on the train home from a ‘Team Retreat’ in London. This is a (roughly quarterly) day when we physically meet in a room and discuss important matters (often strategic) that we feel benefit from an in person group grappling. Today we covered our roadmap for the next year, our influencing approach and started the day with an exercise to identify our different approaches (perhaps even value sets) to a range of provocative statements. Our warm up / practice statement was “cream should be on top of jam on scones” (rhyming with cones). It was a polarising discussion and when factoring in the debate one whether it was scones (cones / bones) or scones (gone / skonz) I’m surprised we didn’t come to blows! ;-) It was a good day and people seem to have finished feeling energised rather than drained.
In other things I’ve been doing we set up a Blueksy profile. We don’t want to be on Meta platforms but also want to start building an audience elsewhere to X (despite all the reasons not to be there we still get our biggest social media interaction and connection there).
I started monthly reconciliation this week and discovered (thanks to what initially appeared to be someone claiming £300 for water!) an error in our processing which has been working in local currency rather than GBP. So I have some work to do correcting those transactions (though Jeni has mind-savingly done all the coding to help reduce that manual process).
We had our first week of a new pattern of meetings. The ‘Meeting Monday’ as it has been dubbed aims to consolidate our organisational / project management onto a single day. It feels intense but also I think helps keep focus too. There’s a lot of time spent in meetings which is challenging (no one wants to be spending time talking about doing if it isn’t essential) but I tend to think that will help hold us to account on what time we are spending in meetings - we may not recognise it so much if they were spread over the week. It’s also a challenge to hold onto a recognition of the importance of connection time (particularly in a remote based organisation). Time to discuss “meaty” topics has oft been desired over the recent months but when faced with it in our calendars it can risk feeling like a luxury. Likewise we have a Confab session each week which I suspect I will strongly protect when we review how the new pattern is working. It is the closest we get to a space for the “water cooler” conversations. Again, in a remote organisation, being intentional about these moments is essential and contribute to the relationships, trust, and working understanding that is important in any team (and in many ways more so in a small organisation).
What I need to take care of
The Board met this week and passed a special resolution to our articles of association. I need to sort that paperwork and get that filed with Companies House.
I need to sort the monthly reconciliation that stalled this week and gear up for end of year accounts. We’ve also taken the decision to get VAT registered from this year so I really really really need to beef up my understanding of the impacts and changes to practices. I have concerns here.
Last but by no means least I need to start making some meaningful progress on our annual report for 2023-24. It’s been slipping down my to do list and it must not keep doing so.
What I’ve been inspired or challenged or moved by
I consider myself to be a runner. Not fast. Occasionally far. And increasingly not in rain. But I do run. And I love it when I do. I am inspired by all sports people but particularly athletes that dedicate themselves to their goals. I came across this video of Eilish McColgan at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. Such an incredible run - to keep pushing as she does. It gives me goosebumps, and makes me want to go and run. As the commentator summarised “Eilish McColgan is the Commonwealth champion, just like her mum was back in 1986. This is the performance of her lifetime. All that work, all those miles for all those years, and she has become the Commonwealth champion. That was spectacular!”
What I’ve been reading
I’m still working on reading ‘Resisting AI’. It is a really interesting read but I’m out of the habit of reading academic style works which I’m finding a bit of a slog and most of what I’m reading I’m having to pause and process too - so progress is slow. I was really struck by a line that said “The fact that AI solutions don’t live up to the hype is overridden by AI Realism’s sense of inevitability” which is interesting as I see it true at the moment. It feels like in all my circles of friends people are talking about AI (they mean generative AI but just use it as an umbrella term) and the “fun” of it. That actually a lot of the time it is producing inaccurate or unrealistic results is glossed over. And there’s evidence of that in more substantial spaces too - take the Amazon Walk Out tech has been exposed as having failed (and needed to rely on humans to do its job) but all the narrative is that Amazon will “persevere” or it was just a “stumble” - there is an inevitability that the change is coming regardless. (Resisting AI does a much better job - obviously - of articulating this issue).