Argonaut Coffee at Town Square in Kingston

This week I have been:

• Hustling to find a home for a South Korean startup's technology. This has reminded me of the power of weak ties, and also the power of just dropping into someone's office on the off-chance they're around.
• I've redone my website to (hopefully) make it easier to understand what I do and why you should hire me as a freelance design strategist.
• I checked out the new home for Argonaut (arguably the best coffee in Kingston) at Town Square co-working (see picture). It's a great little spot.
• I got a pair of Nothing Ear headphones and they are excellent. Really good sound and the noise cancelling is pretty good (I haven't given them the Victoria Line test yet).
• I'm still reading The Unaccountability Machine (and it's really very good), but I also read 'Why do we get the wrong leaders?' on a similar theme.
  • The article argues that politicians have lost the ability to exercise judgement in the face of uncertainty and also that ministers don't need to be experts in the thing they are, erm, ministering.
  • The link back to The Unaccountability Machine: "For the sociologist Max Weber, judgement denoted the ability to weigh up and strike a balance between two divergent ethical imperatives: one, to follow one’s convictions; and the other, to take responsibility for the consequences of pursuing one’s convictions."
  • I like the article because it fits with my view of leader as director in the auteur sense of the word. A director pulls on experts in cinematography, set design, costume etc. to bring their vision to the screen, but has no qualms challenging them as a non-expert in order to better realise their vision. There's a link to one of my favourite articles on leading creative endeavours: The Eleven Laws of Showrunning
  • "As a showrunner, you must communicate your vision so that everyone understands it, and then preach it, day in and out, to the point of exhaustion until everyone feels it in their soul like a gospel. And here's the great part of successfully communicating a shared vision: your employees will love you for it."
  • I think some consulting projects, especially ones bringing together different disciplines, don't work as well as they could because there isn't someone in the role of Director/Showrunner preaching a vision for the project. Not a vision for the content, or the deliverables and not checking we're sticking to a plan, but preaching a vision of what the project is trying to achieve so that the experts on the team can work within that frame.
  • (As I'm learning from The Unaccountability Machine, this is a failure of system 5 in Stafford Beer's viable system model.)

Lastly, one more plug for a post I wrote on getting employees to use AI at work (I'm putting my MA Behaviour Change work to use): Real experts don't need AI