By Tom Watson in weeknote —

Weeknote 14-02-25

Learning from a retro, vibes based consultancy, maps as conversations, letting go and just doing the work.

Less going on this week as I was off Monday

What I did

Met with 2 small charities I'm helping with CRM, data and tech related things, lots of scoping stuff, not exciting but necessary.

Met with a small grant giving foundation who are looking for a grant management system. I'm going to act as an advisor to them.

Sent a (very hacky) functional web page with an Airtable backend over to Jo for The List. I pulled in data from 360Giving, matched up with her work on the tracking of changes to foundations and trusts, and was able to quickly show additional details like potential financial value loss to the sector. Some of the figures are eye watering. The data structure also helps keep consistency and make things easier to manage longer term hopefully.

Wrote and shared a concept note entitled 'Maps as Conversations' based on the Data For Action mapping work. We'd love to help make this type of work happen in other places.

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Main thing I did this week

Ran a retro/reflect learning session with ClientEarth who we've worked with for about 18 months. We were asked to help them develop an impact platform. As with most things, it was probably 10% tech and 90% culture & people. It was good to look back with the team about how we got to where we are now. I'm going to turn this into a full write up, but a couple of things came out quickly.

  1. Organisational memory is both long and very short. We often remember the emotions related to a change or transformation for a long time. But we very quickly forget the details of what actually happened along the way. This is why one of the key things we do is devote time to cataloging all the things we did along the way. It was great for the team to look back on everything, and pick through what worked, and what didn't, and really tease out why.
  2. Vibes are important. We sometimes joke that Data For Action is a vibes based consultancy. But there's a lot of truth to just getting the vibes right. And no, I don't mean ping pong tables and afternoon beers. I mean creating enough trust and safety to be playful and experiment, and be liberated from stifling expectations of being a 'professional'.

Things I thought about

I thought about the new 'AI Charity Taskforce' announcement more than I probably should have. I put some rapid thoughts here.

Tom Watson on LinkedIn: New 'charity AI task force' set up to improve sector's AI influence
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I have questions around openness, transparency and many other things. I'm always nervous when groups, however well intentioned, self appoint as a 'voice' for others, especially on issues where loss of rights and consent, democracy and power are baked into the concerns. And I guess this will end up with some white paper style things and then a fund like the Digital fund, but this time with AI, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I'd just stop tinkering at the edges. And then I thought about all the commissions and taskforces that have come before and will come again, and I'll just keep getting on with the work and that I should just go running in the forest. So off I go...

And off I went

A trail through the forest. Beautiful trees and moss. Breathe.
A trail through the forest. Beautiful trees and moss. Breathe.

Oh, also thought about the language of things briefly, related to guides, playbooks and toolkits.

In my opinion, which is often wrong, Most toolkits are actually guides Playbooks are menus of things to play and explore that might help you get to a broad goal. A toolkit should have specific actionable things with specific focus for each tool in the kit.

— Tom watson (@tomcw.xyz) 2025-02-12T10:48:35.293Z

Interesting things