Stardate S02E29

Mood: 😵‍💫. Plenty to juggle. Just need to break the cycle of playing catchup.

Had another lucky Thursday catching so many folks in the office. Strategy chats with Jon, Harri and Liam was the main agenda — we discussed the ‘law’ of attraction at one point, I’m wondering if that was also at play? Just on the other side of the office, all the Mission Beyond trustees were all huddled around the whiteboard mapping out their priorities, and I had a chance to say hello to Harriet, Manny and Michelle during their breaks. Caught Joel for a quick pint as well at the end of the day. It’s definitely the unstructured interactions I miss the most in the remote working world.

I didn’t realize Medium sometimes curates posts that aren’t behind their paywall. I’m super happy that Meg and I finished our joint blog this week and despite quietly putting it out into the world, they decided to pick it up…!

Something I became super conscious of after the fact — I’m unaccustomed to the immediacy of being directly challenged by someone sitting across from me in a meeting room. For so many months, these interactions have been mediated through a screen, but I’m pretty sure my body language betrayed me when I crossed my arms and inadvertently hunched in response. And with the camera trained on my full body in the room, broadcast to the rest of the group… a potential faux pas in our new world of hybrid working? Hoping it went under the radar.

On Friday, I underestimated how long a fresh document would take to pull together, being a bit out of practice. There’s got to be a better way to check our math as well — the whole thing is very prone to copy-paste errors. Not having internet at home since Wednesday has also been a bummer, but more on that later.

The latest round of consultative sales has been quite enjoyable, and I’m enjoying tag teaming with Rui on a small shaping piece. Everything is headed towards closing and finalizing people plans as a result. Monday looks a bit insane — why did I let myself schedule so many 30 minute sessions back to back? Potentially 5 interviews to do across the week as well.

I saw it coming a couple weeks ago, but I’m officially behind on my IDEO U course and now playing catchup. D’oh. That said, there was a very practical opportunity to put their strategy frameworks into practice this week with the Cell D directors, and thinking through how we could help achieve the wider goals Dave set out at our last company meeting.

The kernel from Good Strategy, Bad Strategy also layers nicely onto the IDEO U framework. Proximate objectives are your winning aspiration; diagnosis informs where to play (perhaps even why* to play); guiding policy covers how to win and coherent actions leverage your capabilities and management systems.

With all the focus on creating good strategies, one might forget the equal importance of executing them well (i.e. what’s the plan). The hard part is many things masquerade under the name of ‘strategy’ or ‘plan’ that aren’t necessarily so. Having a breakdown like this to rely on helps with spotting impostors.

Am I a Luddite for waiting until 2021 to try to get tech support via Twitter DMs for the first time?

When my internet went out on Wednesday afternoon I was (a) initially grateful I didn’t have any client calls or screen sharing I needed to do for the rest of the day, (b) worried when usual troubleshooting failed and it wouldn’t come back on its own, and (c) dreading dealing with my ISP. Rather than wrangle with phone menus or figure out live chat on their own site, I felt a bit more in control getting help in a ‘neutral’ space like Twitter.

The Openreach mafia in the UK doesn’t make for a speedy resolution, unfortunately, so I’m still hotspotting tonight and probably will be out of commission for a week plus when it’s all said and done. I’ve had a good run of luck with life admin lately, so something was bound to go wrong — Murphy’s Law and all that. 😅

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