It's been a busy one work-wise as we welcomed some Korean startups to the UK and helped them test their solutions with residents in Dagenham. 2 pilots going live next week too. I'm also getting to fulfil a long-held ambition as we've enlisted the help of a documentary filmmaker to help us tell the story of everything that we've been doing with the Adult Social Care Accelerator.

I was made up when one of my colleagues on the project told me that she hadn't realised I had created the Ways of Working Canvas and that she'd used it with great success before she'd met me (and sent it to her mum, thanks Maxine!). This is one of the things I've created that I'm most proud of.

I also got a boost from Stephen Wendel, author of Designing for Behaviour Change, sharing my Miro talk on behavioural science, systems thinking, and design thinking. "Some nice ideas there." I'll take that endorsement any day.

I finished reading Appetite for Innovation by M. Pilar Opazo. This is a sociological study of creativity at elBulli and it was really good. I found it fascinating how, in revolutionising the food world, elBulli actually took very incremental steps (e.g. they didn't eliminate a la carte dining from their menu until they'd secured 3 Michelin stars), a far cry from the sudden disruption of platform innovation. Yet they were seeking a new culinary language. I guess it's just an example, a really good example, of having a long term vision, and making incremental strategic decisions to get there. Something that you can do when you have the same visionary leader at the helm for 25 years.

This got me thinking about 'opinionated software' and how some of my favourite apps (e.g. Readwise) take a real stance on how a space should be navigated (learning in Readwise's case). It can be a harder sell because you have to help people adopt your mental model rather than shaping your product to theirs. That's a harder sell internally and externally because you're, initially at least, excluding potential customers. It's been interesting working in the adult social care space for the last six months, where things go a lot more easily if you line up with the theories and mental models backed by NHS and DHSC.

Anyway, enough. The sun is shining, there's a beer in the fridge, and the Snakes and Ladders game going on downstairs sounds hilarious.