Have added Google Analytics to this blog, via the Sitekit WordPress plugin. I guess it will be interesting to see the numbers, but it isn’t really why I do this, so maybe I’ll switch it off again once the novelty wears off. #
Audree Fletcher posted a little while back about Demanding predictable solutions for uncertain and complex problems⬈:
I understand it, truly, the desire to know specifically what you’re going to get for your money. It’s what people have come to expect of transactions with suppliers. I give you money, you give me a caramel chai. You give me money, I give you my time.
But it only works when you are really certain that the thing you’re buying is the thing you need to achieve the outcomes you’re seeking.
Straightforward for my posh tea in a high street coffee shop. Less straightforward in a complex adaptive system like, say, education.
Because the more specificity and certainty you demand in advance around what will be delivered in order to achieve the outcome, the lower your chance of achieving the outcome.
I posted an article yesterday about writing good strategies, based on some of the work I have been doing lately. Also copy and pasted it into LinkedIn, and will send it out on a newsletter at some point too. #
A lovely chat with James⬈ this morning, rather out of the blue. It was great to catch up and share stories about what we’ve been up to for the last 10 years, or however long it was since we last spoke. We talked a lot about online communities – particularly of practice – and shared a bunch of experiences and ideas. He reminded me of a few things I’d forgotten about, like the GDS community development handbook⬈. #
The community development framework⬈ sets out the things that communities need really well: people, programme, and platform. I do struggle with the latter, nothing seems to work terribly well, particularly when it comes to making it easy to extract knowledge out of discussions and into some kind of searchable archive. I’ve not expressed this very well, but I do wonder whether this is the sort of thing that a large language model type thing might actually be useful for. #
Have just come across this great blog⬈ from a local government technology person. They don’t mention their name on their blog, so I won’t do it on mine. Well worth a read and a subscribe though! #
Richard Pope⬈ has a book in the works⬈! Exciting! #