Weeknotes – Ending 26/07/24

Had a conversation with someone this week who’s work history was so fascinating (and very different from mine) that I could have honestly spent another few hours hearing more about it.
A former school teacher told me of an approach they used to use with kids who would fall into the habit of asking for help without trying to solve the problem themselves. The mantra goes… Brain, Buddy, Book, Boss. As in, try those things in that order before coming to ask me for help.
I needed to take some feedback out of a sheet (about 90 rows worth) and group it based on commonality. Found some very useful clustering functionality in Miro which can try and group things based on keywords or sentiment. As with anything AI related, needs plenty of sense checking to make sure it’s not doing anything bizarre, but was good enough for a first sift. I have a slight reservation that I might have grouped things differently if I done the whole excercise myself. – https://help.miro.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409706795410-Clustering
Had a reminder that you can work hard to be open and transparent to try and bridge a boundary, but it requires some level effort from those on the other side of the boundary to take advantage of it.
“Market driven brittleness”. An interesting take on the Crowdstrike outage. – https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/07/the-crowdstrike-outage-and-market-driven-brittleness.html
“Data reveals 96% of C-suite leaders expect AI to boost worker productivity, but 77% of employees report AI has increased their workload”. I’d take this with a pinch of salt, but food for thought. – https://investors.upwork.com/news-releases/news-release-details/upwork-study-finds-employee-workloads-rising-despite-increased-c
Renewal is good, but it’s important to remember what’s come before. – https://www.dxw.com/2024/07/why-the-new-government-needs-to-draw-on-the-power-of-institutional-memory/
“There’s a different between a productive process, whereby the making of a diagram helps the participants understand something, through the process of making the diagram and the making of a diagram that helps people on the outside understand something”. – https://www.mynameismartin.co.uk/blog/making-good-diagrams
Corporate blogging is hard; Open a GitHub issue instead – https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/07/corporate-blogging-is-hard-open-a-github-issue-instead/
“86% of risk is strategic, something auditors rarely look at. Policies rarely destroy companies, strategy and culture does. But cultures are rarely audited as it’s hard to do.” – https://paulitaylor.com/2024/01/20/are-you-a-positive-deviant-a-negative-deviant-or-just-plain-boring/