By Tom Watson in weeknote —

Weeknote 26

A double week. Lots of writing, lots of work, productive. Interesting things includes something called Sporesight Fungi as your Futurist - got to be worth a read just to get to that

Weeknote 26
The forest in the sunshine.

A double weeknote. Lots of writing, lots of work. Productive

Two weeks isn't very long, but recapping the last two weeks it feels like a long time. I did what last Monday?! Oh yeah, I guess I did. This in and of itself is why weeknotes are useful me.

There's that quote (Bill Gates maybe) "Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years." Yeah, possibly. But I think we actually underestimate the days, the weeks, of small wins, we lose track of the movement and so we often think we haven't achieved, and then we stop. Find a way to keep that movement alive, when you're working on projects, at home, or at work, especially at work. People forget, organisations forget.

What I did

A whole 11 days ago I coached someone through setting up an automation between wix and airtable using zapier. Yes everything is AI now, but there is still a need to connect things, to move data from one place to another. I used to do quite a bit of this stuff, I even still have slides and demos. But I haven't really used these tools in a while, and the interfaces have all changed, and things have been added and it's all a bit different. But the same fundamentals apply, and so it was fine and we succeeded. As we push more and more into 'autonomous agents' many of the fundamentals still apply (or should, especially in organisational systems). What's the trigger and what are the conditions? If these aren't well defined then you're in for a wild ride.

Automations - when this happens (trigger) do that (action), only if this (condition) otherwise do this (alt-action)

Spent time with t'other Tom in Newcastle at One Strawberry Lane a lovely bit of social infrastructure. We chatted about a bit of shift for us. More on that soon. Afterwards Doug arrived and we all shot the shit for a while before heading over to our first Vibe Club

So on the wednesday evening we ran the first Vibe Club, an informal space to hang out, play around with AI assisted building or vibe coding. We all came into it with various levels of experience and just learned from each other. I mostly learned that you WILL burn through credits at speed on free tiers. But I also learned a neat trick to get a deployable version within these limits. It was good fun, we will do more. Thanks to Hannah (and husband Steve!) for the space and pizzas

Got to work on helping a small charity who support refugees with a data strategy. There are some excellent people out there, but often isolated unless part of wider networks of data people.

Friday was an anomaly for me, as I generally don't work* fridays I did a couple of things. First I jumped on a webinar that Jo was hosting about The List, just to say hello. Seemed to be a great bunch of people on, all wanting to know more about using the list. Sidenote - it's up over 1000 subscribers now.

Following that I then delivered a session with Liz on an Introduction to Organisational Resilience with The Fore. This was great, I had a lot of fun working through our refreshed principles and focus. It seemed to land really well (hopefully the feedback says so also). It was also really great to spend an hour of it just listening to Liz talk about the organisational resilience compass, the balance of people, money and purpose, so good.

I did a LOT of thinking on the Organisational Resilience Programme after that, and my thinking went further and wider and then I had ideas that had been there for a while, but now I just knew I had to get them out. So I started writing, the rest of Friday, and over the weekend. I published, revised, published again. The more I wrote, the more I noticed. I started see articles and ideas from other people, that maybe I'd missed before, but now I was seeing them. Being in the world helped me be of the world. I ended up writing 4 things, all connected, continuing ideas I'd had in 2023, entitled People As Code

People as Code 2 - Collapse, rewild, regenerate.
People as Code reflects on how generative AI, built from human data, now mirrors and shapes us. As AI flattens difference and optimises for plausibility over truth, culture risks collapse.
Tomcw.xyzTom Watson
People as Code 3 - Quantum Uncertainty
What happens when we stop pretending control is ever possible and design with uncertainty.
Tomcw.xyzTom Watson
People as Code 4 - Entropic Systems
Embracing Entropy as a concept for design. Turning from the theoretical to the practical. Observability, not measurement. Questions as interfaces, data as plural
Tomcw.xyzTom Watson
Field Notes: Designing Entropic Systems
More on the exploration of what designing with uncertainty and entropy might mean. The Observability Dashboard, The Collective Foundation Model, The Entropic Fund
Tomcw.xyzTom Watson

Are they good? Who knows. But I had to write them, and I begun to bring my thoughts into something a bit more useful. Doug described it as moving through the scale of Ambiguity, Creative Ambiguity moving towards Productive Ambiguity. I liked that.

Had a board meeting for Tandem. It's hard for charities, even one's well established with trading income, but Sarah and the team are doing really excellent stuff. There was discussion about the wider implications of the challenges in the sector, loss of people, skills which could be maintained if only Local Authority partners thought more about Collective Resilience. There's probably a whole post on this as some point.

More resilience work with a charity I worked with 6-8 months ago, revisiting progress and what to focus on next. Resilience is ongoing.

Went running in the sunny forest. I've fallen a bit out of rhythm with fitness so it was nice to just get out and cut loose. Any day in the forest is a good day.

Interesting things

There's some weird and wonderful things this week. Starting with...