Now
I saw someone else's "now" page and liked the concept. I'm not a heavy social media poster and I like the idea of keeping a place where you can get a holistic sense of what I'm doing these days.
September 2024
At the risk of this page becoming a Charlie-ised version of One Day, I am writing this update almost exactly a year after my first Now post. And, as they do, things have changed!
I'm shifting gears on my career. Our global Ignite team was made redundant from Salesforce and that presents the opportunity to work for myself as an independent design strategist. As well as being a great way to work with some new folks and get exposed to different ways of working, many people will know that I have a lot of opinions on how businesses should be run. Running my own business means I can put my money where my mouth is. I also see this as a good way of experimenting with different futures of work.
My initial hypothesis is that I'll help people with these types of problems:
- You need to understand how the world is changing, how it might change further, and explore how best to respond.
- You think you've identified an opportunity, but you don't know how to win in the space.
- You've got a team who is rushing off to build and buy things, but no one agrees on what they're aiming for or how to make tough, coherent decisions.
- You've got a team coming together for the first time for an important project and they need to work well together quickly. (Or you need to reset a dysfunctional team.)
- You've launched something, internally or externally, but it's not working as well as you anticipated.
But the thing about running even a one man business is that you've got to find product-market fit, so I expect, and I'm excited to see how, this list will evolve.
Given the instability and hard graft that comes along with setting up and running my own thing, I'm pausing my MSc Behaviour Change for a year. The first year was really good fun and I learned a lot. The goal was to develop some new methodology and I was able to experiment with a couple of pieces on client projects. I also got to talk about it at Miro's Distributed Conference.
Speaking of changing behaviour, one thing I realised about myself this year is that I'm much better at doing something everyday than I am at doing things a couple of times or even once a week. This has changed how I approach strength training for running (that is, I now do a short strength routine every day), and consequently I'm suffering from injuries less. I'm also much more sensible about listening to my body. This is in pursuit of faster 5k times (my ultimate goal is to run under 15 minutes for 5k). I made a (very reversible) decision in the Spring to focus on 5k because I can train for it easily. While I love running in the mountains, living in SW London means I can't train for it well enough to perform how I want to. Running very quickly for a very short amount of time, frankly plays more to my strengths and I'm enjoying learning more about physiology to coach myself there.
Coaching was a theme this past year. I've been facilitating a lot of team coaching and I've really enjoyed it. The coaching toolkit I'm acquiring is also super helpful for parenting as the boys get older. The eldest boy has just started year one(!) and the young 'un will be in school next year! I've always maintained that the things you learn at work should be applicable to life outside work and, while there has been a lot of resistance to me facilitating workshops and prioritisation sessions at home, coaching skills seem a more acceptable crossover.
September 2023
Let’s start with work and get holistic from there. I’m on the Ignite EMEA team at Salesforce. This is a group of designers, researchers, strategists–but really just generally awesome, creative business types–which helps Salesforce‘s most ambitious customers to overcome some of their toughest challenges. The engagements are interesting and fun. We’ve just reshuffled a little so I’m going to be spending 75% of my time focusing on Financial Services clients (well trodden ground for me) and 25% of my time supporting our practice team’s growth (those designers, researchers, and strategists I was talking about).
I’ve also just started an MSc Behaviour Change at the University of Derby. The course is mostly online with one 3 day stint in person per module, which suits me perfectly. Behaviour change, behavioural science, is something I’ve been talking about and dancing around for years and, while this might not be the best time to do this course, it’s far from the worst. The course gives me the focus to think about behavioural science as it relates to innovation and business strategy. My goal is to use that focus to develop some new methodology. I’m already finding more opportunities to experiment with it in my work at Salesforce.
Any surplus creative energy goes into our house. Toria and I have all but finished working on the infrastructure (extending) and the interior, making it a useful space for four people (including two growing boys) to live in. That means we’re turning our attention to the garden and trying to find the right balance between a place for the kids to play and a place for the adults to relax.
And any left over physical energy should go into running, but I’ve been struggling with plantar fasciitis for a year and haven’t been able to get into a good training rhythm. Despite that, in May I managed to get round the Ultra Trail Snowdonia 50K (a fantastic day out) and that gave me two entries into the lottery for the CCC at UTMB 2024. Fingers crossed I get in, and then fingers crossed I can train properly because spending 16 hours or so running around the Alps sounds like an excellent way to spend a day.