Thoughts from the week…

• I’ve been thinking about what it means to challenge the ‘norm’. Thinking about people who I would consider outspoken or innovative, I think there’s a certain amount of credibility that enables them to buck against conventional thinking. Where does that credibility come from? I suppose it could be self generated. It could be through recognition of accomplishments, or endorsements from other credible people. Perhaps a mixture of all those things. I do think one of the risks of being a maverick is only being able to work at the fringes after being repulsed by the system. Are the most successful change makers the ones who can work inside the system and effect change, but without triggering that immune response? To me, that infers that you have to know the system well enough to be able to work within and know which rules to intentionally bend or break to bring about positive change. I’m reminded of the saying “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist”.. which is allegedly attributed to Pablo Picasso.
• We are a reference site for the work we do with Low Code. So I occasionally have the opportunity to speak to other organisations who want to hear our experience. I quite enjoy these sessions as well because it’s reassuring that the same familiar themes and challenges pop up in people’s questions. I’m ever more convinced there’s scope of re-using thinking/design/plans for many of the things that housing associations have done/are doing. But I think we need a framework to hang that collaboration on because just talking about it in separate channels isn’t going to coelesce into something tangible, and that’s purely based on my own experience of it almost but not quite coming together a few times.
• My attempt at daily blog posting was about as successful as I suspected it would be, which is to say, inconsistent at best after an okay start. It was useful for capturing snippets of interesting stuff, but I found it difficult to sustain that effort during busier working days. If I was going to do it again, I think I’d need to block out 30 mins on a daily basis to write them. The days I succeeded were because I used a train commute to quickly rattle something off.

Interesting things…

• Lots of very good learning in this post on roadmapping – https://www.leaningforward.com/blog/2023/11/toms-roadmap-heuristics-a-work-in-progress/
• Less is more? Good & healthy provocation from Paul here pushing back against the idea that productivity means more stuff – https://paulitaylor.com/2023/11/25/we-should-all-delete-more-work/
• Zoom fatigue is real according to brain scans – https://spectrum.ieee.org/zoom-fatigue
• In case you didn’t know already, doomscrolling is super bad for you – https://www.wired.com/story/doomscrolling-bad-news-mental-health/