Gaining insights from the creator of Sustainable Squad on the art of storytelling through video

I like making content. I like photos. I like TikTok. But every time I’ve tried to make anything it’s ended up on the virtual cutting room floor. All of it. 

So I went and talked to an expert. My colleague Katie St Laurence is a client partner by day, and the creative force behind Sustainable Squad, on Instagram, podcast, and events project focusing on sustainability. I was particularly interested in discovering how Katie approaches video content creation, as I’m eager to enhance my own skills in that area.

Katie shared some invaluable advice on her creative process, which can be broken down into a few key steps:

1. Collect and store ideas: Katie emphasises the importance of being ready when inspiration strikes. She constantly collects content and ideas, storing videos in an album on her phone and jotting down potential topics for a program or video. When the perfect opportunity arises, she combines these elements to craft a compelling story.
2. Plan the structure: Using the example of a video she created for International Women’s Day, Katie explained how she writes down the key messages, compiles a list of shots, and uses this foundation to build her video. She spends around three hours shooting and editing, a process she clearly enjoys, as evidenced by the enthusiasm in her voice and the quality of her work.
3. Tell a story: Katie knows that every piece of content she creates must tell a story. However, she also acknowledges that sometimes things just don’t work. Her advice? “If you’re not feeling it, abort.” This resonates with my own experiences in writing, where having a clear plan can save time and effort.
4. Pay more attention to beginnings and endings: The last piece of advice Katie shared is that the start and finish of a story can be the most challenging part. She admits to spending more time on these aspects than any other, ensuring a strong and engaging narrative.

As I reflect on my conversation with Katie, I realise that many of my own attempts at creating short-form videos have been unsuccessful because I’ve tried to do everything at once – brainstorming, shooting, editing, and adding music. By adopting Katie’s more methodical approach, I’m hoping that I can create content I’m proud to share and that truly resonates with viewers.

If you’d like to check out Katie’s content and learn from her expert storytelling, head over to Instagram or Spotify (or search Sustainable Squad on your podcast app). 

It took until now, 30 years after the WorldWideWeb made using the internet easy, for more than half of the global population to get connected to the internet. There were a measly 1 billion people online then (about 16% of the global population). Now there are 4.5 billion (56.25% of people alive today).

It’s nearly twenty years since this blog was set up. What am I doing here?

Thinking out loud on the internet is a different game to a couple of decades ago when blogging became a thing.

Twitter was a place to think out loud for a while, but it lost its charm for me a long time before Elon decided to use it as lighter-fuel for the bonfire of his reputation.

Now that we are well in to ’23, it seems clear that Twitter really is dying. Twitter lost its charm for me a long time before Elon decided to turn into part of the self-immolation of his reputation.

It pushed out blogging as a place that you could share thoughts as they came. Meanwhile, at the time of writing, TikTok is ascendant and simultaneously delightful and malevolent. Facebook is an always on round-robin. LinkedIn is often quite useful, but noisy and lousy with “Ten Things I Learned By Reaching Out To You About My Product”.

Blogs look like home.

But what is this blog for? Nothing, last year, it seemed. In 2022 this one was completely neglected, while I developed Antonym, a weekly-ish newsletter sharing ephemera and thoughts. Kind of what a blog used to be. I have enjoyed learning how a simple newsletter works, and it also helped as a way of reflecting on things I’d read or seen the previous week.

It’s also served as a writing flywheel. I’m writing more than I have done in years. Not all of it fits in the newsletter. Not all of it belongs there.

I’m bringing this blog back as its original incarnation: a public notebook.

This is the third part of a series about the best books I read in 2021. Usually I publish these over the Christmas holidays – this one was slightly delayed by a wonderfully busy and productive January. The posts about fiction and non-fiction books of the year can be found by following the links.

I almost merged the non-fiction and business categories in this year’s review – they seem so close together. The Art of War and Working both have a great deal to say that is relevant here. How To Be Broken‘s advice about resilience is as relevant to the workplace as any other in our lives. So the division is slightly arbitrary, and given another round of editing I’d probably move a few around. However, all of these books were useful to read and apply in my work, and I recommend them to you…

1. Creating Adaptable Teams, by David Webster

We hear about leadership, and sometimes about followership. David Webster has focused on the idea of “teamship” – and it’s a profoundly useful and practical concept.

David Webster is a coaching psychologist, and an expert on how teams work. He’s worked with us at Brilliant Noise for some years. His company, Centre for Teams, is hugely respected by myself and my peers. (He’s also worked with coaching teams at some of the biggest companies in the world and sports teams.) David asked me to write the foreword to Creating Adaptable Teams, a task which I was deeply honoured to take on.

The key to the book is simple but under-explored in business books, how teams really work. As David puts it:

Team leadership is really the forgotten art. There is no more important role in any organisation than those who lead small teams. Given the critical place that teams play in all our lives, learning how to lead them effectively is similarly critical. Without effective team leadership, the teams will falter, and the organisation will fail its team members.

If you lead a team, or aspire to, this book is a gift. It’s published by Open University Press, and while underpinned by academic rigour, it is very much a manual – practical, evidence-based frameworks and processes – for working in teams. As you can see from my copy (below) – it’s a book that works hard, earns its keep, and lives close at hand on my desk.

2. Noise: A Flaw In Human Judgement, by Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony, Oliver Sibony and Cass R Sunstein

Another book whose ideas were immediately put to work at Brilliant Noise this year was the latest title from Daniel Kahneman and his co-authors, who wrote the influential masterpiece Thinking Fast and Slow.

Why do different people make such different judgements? The book starts by looking at judges sentencing and insurance loss adjusters paying out and then works through all of the ways in which “noise” creeps into decision making.

Of particular practical use to everyday business are its application of the concept to decision-making, recruitment and forecasting:

Forecasts are noisy. Professional forecasters offer highly variable predictions about likely sales of a new product, likely growth in the unemployment rate, the likelihood of bankruptcy for troubled companies, and just about everything else. Not only do they disagree with each other, but they also disagree with themselves. For example, when the same software developers were asked on two separate days to estimate the completion time for the same task, the hours they projected differed by 71%, on average.

Although this is a popular science book, Noise sometimes makes you work for the insights, at least if, like me, maths isn’t your strongest suit. I enjoyed this aspect though – it felt like Noise asked something of you in the reading as much as telling you things.

3. Uncanny Valley, by Anna Wiener

This is an odd book to have here. It’s literary non-fiction, a memoir, but one which is all about living within the tech boom of the 2010s, first in New York and then in San Francisco.  It is a business book though, because it is all about work, a history of business in a strange time and place, though not from the usual perspective of the guru, expert or successful executive. 

I recognise this world, I spent chunk of my career going abck and forth to the America it describes. I even visited Silicon Valley for two whirlwind tours of campuses and technoplexes in the period this book covers, and lived and worked inside its expanding halo for all of that time: the books, the blogs, the businesses and ideas that connected with its coming giants, its technologies and ethos.

Like Nobody Is Talking About This and its mentions of “the dictator” and “the portal”, the book doesn’t use the names of big companies or public figures. Instead it refers to “the social network everyone hated” or “the VP at the search engine giant whose well-publicized hobby was stratosphere jumping”.

I recognised a reference to one of my favourite business books, The Hard Thing About Hard Things in one thinly veiled description:

He was reading a book by one of our investors, he said. I was familiar with it. The book offered guidance on how to navigate the choppy waters of entrepreneurship and conquer the twin demons of self-doubt and external pressure. It spoke of learnings, battles, journeys. Every chapter opened with an epigraph from a rap song. The struggle was real.
[…]
The book was good, the CEO told me. If you like this, you’ll love therapy, I did not say. I looked at his phone. He was on the first page of a chapter titled “Preparing to Fire an Executive.”

Ouch. I’d still recommend The Hard Thing About Hard Things to anyone starting a company or navigating its first years as a CEO, but still. It’s a New York book kicking the bloated and over-moneyed San Francisco tech scene. The swipe at “the struggle” is a dig at one of the sections in the book describing how intensely stressful and lonely running a start-up can be. That passage is one that got me through a couple of tough spots. Also not every chapter starts with a rap lyric – the first one is from Gloria Gaynor. But now I’m getting petty.

It was a great read. Not a comfortable one. For me, it was balancing more than balanced. Given how much tech Kool Aid I gulped down over those years, I was nauseous see echoes of my own naivety in its accounts of the time:

Social would bring liberal democracy to the world. Social would redistribute power and set people free, and users would determine their own destinies. Deeply rooted authoritarian governments were no match for design thinking and PHP applications. The founders pointed to Cairo. They pointed to Moscow. They pointed to Tunisia. They side-eyed Zuccotti Park.

The book’s flavour is piquant and complex but with a curious bitter aftertaste. Going back over my notes and highlights the rancour is more pronounced than I recall. Why did I like it so much at the time? One reason is where the book, and social media and the Silicon Valley it portrays eventually led.

I read Uncanny Valley in the first dark days of January 2020, when social media’s ugly side was reified on the steps of the Capitol in Washington. It ends with the author and other confused San Francisco tech workers campaigning on suburban doorsteps for Hillary Clinton and finding more support for Donald Trump than they expected, realising their companies, their culture, had made the Trump phenomenon possible:

We were too old to use innocence as an excuse. Hubris, maybe. Indifference, preoccupation. Idealism. A certain complacency endemic to people for whom things had, in recent years, turned out okay. We had assumed it would all blow over. We had just been so busy with work, lately.

An author I love rated this with one star on Goodreads. I gave it five stars at the time, but I know what they mean. I know why you could hate this book. But Uncanny Valley challenged me and stuck with me through the year, so it belongs on this list.

4. Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It, by Ethan Kross

We keep being told to try and “live in the present” and “be more present” – but it’s just not what our minds are made for, says neuroscientist Ethan Kross in this book about that constant companion: the voice in our heads. We spend just a third of our lives in the present tense, the rest of the time we are time-travellers, skipping between back and forwards, re-writing the past and drafting possible futures:

Our verbal stream of thought is so industrious that according to one study we internally talk to ourselves at a rate equivalent to speaking four thousand words per minute out loud.

Reminding me of to Julian Bagginni’s beautiful phrase from The Ego Trick –  “‘I’ is a verb masquerading as a noun” – Kross explains how our inner voice is we tell to invent ourselves from moment to moment:

Our verbal stream plays an indispensable role in the creation of our selves. The brain constructs meaningful narratives through autobiographical reasoning. In other words, we use our minds to write the story of our lives, with us as the main character.

The time-travelling mind can also bring comfort if we use it consciously, through its distancing effect:

You can also benefit by mentally time traveling into the future, a tool called temporal distancing. Studies show that when people are going through a difficult experience, asking them to imagine how they’ll feel about it ten years from now, rather than tomorrow, can be another remarkably effective way of putting their experience in perspective. Doing so leads people to understand that their experiences are temporary, which provides them with hope.

5. Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil, by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, and Francis de Vericourt

Where Chatter says we can’t “be present” no matter how much eat-pray-love advocates tell us we should, Framers gives the tired old “think outside the box” advice a kicking:

The evolution of human thinking has played a crucial role in all these improvements. Before there is a change on the ground, there is a transformation in the mind. All that is without starts from within. We frame and reframe our world, and civilization advances.

So, less “think outside the box” than “be conscious that you are thinking in a box but you can try a whole load of other boxes to see if they work better”.

We reframe things all the time. Some of us are better at it than others. What Cukier et al do is lay out ways that you can get better at this skill and apply it more deliberately to decision making. Fantastic.

The links in this blog post are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, an online bookseller that supports local bookshops. In the event of me making any commission I will be spending the proceeds on more books. All of these books and more curated lists will can be found in my Antonym Books page there.

This is my seventh annual round up of books I’ve enjoyed. The emphasis is on things I read rather than what was published. Although the publication of the lists is consistent, the format is not. This year I’ve tried to name my favourite three books and a short list of others I loved and recommend to others.

Top three

1. No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood

A poem and a tragedy wrapped up in all the poems and tragedies of its age – the time of the dictator, the portal and – after its publication – the plague.

There is no book I read this year – fact or fiction – that surprised me more than No One Is Talking About This. I want to read it again and again. Beginning it tentatively, afraid of the newness and the modernity of the structure, I was worried that I wouldn’t connect, that it would be too important and self-involved to let me in. But then it swallowed me whole, and part of me is still there in it. It’s magic was there from the first sentence: 

She opened the portal, and the mind met her more than halfway. Inside, it was tropical and snowing, and the first flake of the blizzard of everything landed on her tongue and melted.

And this (followed by the author reading it aloud):

Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole. It was not so much the hatred she was interested in as the swift attenuation, as if their collective blood had made a decision. As if they were a species that released puffs of poison, or black ink in a cloud on the ocean floor. I mean, have you read that article about octopus intelligence? Have you read how octopuses are marching out of the sea and onto dry land, in slick and obedient armies?

2. The Netanyahus, by Joshua Cohen

A fictionalised-stranger-than-fiction-true-story about a monster in the shape of a family that calls at a house that is un-equipped to deal with it. 

Whatever you think this book may be, it will surprise you. The experience of reading it is like being on a runaway train that’s gathering speed. Only about halfway through as the pace starts to feel dangerous do you realise you are trapped, it’s going too fast to get off.

I’m grateful for the brevity of this format. It’s pointless to try and describe it to other people, you just have to recommend it.

Some favourite passages: 

So many of my former students—especially those from my last stretch of teaching—were so tolerant of others’ psychosocial fragilities and resentments as to become intolerable themselves, junior Torquemadas, sophomoric Savonarolas, finding fault with nearly every remark, finding bigotry and prejudice everywhere.

And:

The history of every people is also a history of its craziness, and the more science becomes a religion, the more religion must pretend to be a science, desperate for all logical explanations.

3. Klara and the Sun, by Kashuo Ishiguro

An AF – artificial friend – tells her story as she is bought as companion to a girl with a terminal illness, in a world which is close to coming apart.

Ishiguro plays the amazing trick of telling a story so vivid and strange that you feel like you have implanted memories from it mixed up with your own. Sitting in a shop window waiting to be bought, trying to navigate something as simple as a field when your perception can’t process the complexity of the long grass. It doesn’t explain itself or all of its world, but you are there, looking through the eyes of a machine.

Some favourite passages: 

… what was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom, and I saw it was possible that the consequences of Morgan’s Falls had at no stage been within my control.

…

The trouble is, Chrissie, you’re like me. We’re both of us sentimental. We can’t help it. Our generation still carry the old feelings. A part of us refuses to let go. The part that wants to keep believing there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer. But there’s nothing like that, we know that now. You know that. For people our age it’s a hard one to let go. We have to let it go, Chrissie. There’s nothing there. Nothing inside Josie that’s beyond the Klaras of this world to continue.

…

‘Hope,’ he said. ‘Damn thing never leaves you alone.’ He shook his head almost resentfully, but there was now a new strength about him.

Other fiction I loved this year: 

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

The guards had been forced to undergo sensitivity training and were furious about it.

A women’s prison novel by the San Francisco writer, Rachel Kushner, self-described “world’s leading expert on ten square blocks of the Sunset District, the west section of the Great Highway, a stretch of Market, a few blocks in the Tenderloin”. It set a theme for the fiction I read this year. Something that sounded like a worth literary premise that turned itself into a thriller and left me resonating with its power.

Cold Earth by Sarah Moss

I’d always wondered how Virginia Woolf could be so flippant about the 1918 Spanish flu in her journal, slipping it in as a joke between Lytton Strachey’s sore finger and Lady Murray’s invitation to lunch, when the death rate in parts of London was higher than it had been in the trenches and people who had been well at breakfast were dead by bedtime and deadly as plutonium to everyone who saw them in between, but I think I understand it now. When you’re not dead, life goes on and there are buses to catch and lamb to cook.

This year, stories about being marooned in the cold North held a gripped imagination. Oddly, and in the wrong I order I watched the TV series The North Water (and then read the novel – see below) and, later, The Terror (which I’m reading now, at the time of writing this post). Contemporary where the previous two are historical, Cold Earth felt related in place and themes; a suspense story that builds to an almost unbearable pitch of tension by the end. Told in the form of letters from the six members of an archaeological expedition to Greenland, it shows people losing their grips on their various certainties when a pandemic begins and they lose contact with home. The isolation and the fear read like emotional prophecies of the current pandemic (it was published in 2010).

Rodham, by Curtis Sittenfeld

“There are two kinds of marriages,” Barbara said. “The ones where you’re privy to how messy they are, and the ones where you’re not.”

A high concept alternate history yarn and political thriller that works on so many levels: “What if Hillary never married Bill?”

I read this on holiday (a holiday I never really expected to be able to take in 2021) and it was everything I’d want from a book to read on the beach: the character and voice of the fictionalised Hillary Rodham feel completely real, the clever play with alternative timeline is familiar and unexpected. You find yourself rooting for Rodham, of course, but she doesn’t present as simple hero – the twists in the story playing out alongside our remembered reality without losing sight of the evolving complexities and contradictions of the politics of race and gender in the last 50 years.

The North Water, by Ian McGuire

Drax shrugs. ‘I do as I must. Int a great deal of cogitation involved.

It’s the end of the era of sail and the boom years of artic whaling are coming to an undignified end. A boatful of lost souls and one very dangerous sociopath head into the ice with various plots and hidden agendas crammed on board with them. 

I read this after watching the TV adaptation. The book was very similar I could see how well the production had adapted the text. It’s a great thriller, but the character of Drax – a bundle of needs and urges and violence wrapped up in the shape of a man –  was the thing that set it apart. There’s a sickening plainness to his evil that makes him utterly believable. Colin Farrell did a superb job of playing him.

Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam

Of course they’d never heard a noise like that before. You didn’t hear such a noise; you experienced it, endured it, survived it, witnessed it. You could fairly say that their lives could be divided into two: the period before they’d heard that noise and the period after.

A simple premise, a brilliant realisation. A family are on holiday in a remote cottage when the owners arrive unannounced saying the power is out in the city – it begins as an awkward situation and twists into the end of the world.

The feeling. Then the dread of something coming grows more intense. We know more than the characters, but are still unable to see the full facts. And what’s happening begins as a known dread, becomes mysterious and then as it becomes truly known is too horrible to comprehend.

That’s all the fiction for this year, folks. The non-fiction and business books will follow shortly.

All links are to bookshop.org which supports local bookstores (and book reviewers who publish affiliate links).

This was originally a newsletter on my Substack.

Guaranteed royal news-free reading since last week

Dear Reader

A year ago today we shut the office after one of us started showing symptoms. A few days later the UK was locked down, and then I fell ill with the virus as well, the first of two bouts.

A friend of mine who also had it and I exchanged what reliable information about Covid-19 we could amongst find over WhatsApp a couple of times a day. Around a week after symptoms first showed there was a credible rumour from a GP friend that anosmia – the lack of a sense of smell, one of those pandemic words I didn’t know a year ago – was a symptom. I tried smelling some Branston pickle in the fridge and… nothing. A complete blank. I knew for sure.

As my “Covid buddy” and I approached day eight, he a little ahead of me, billed as the day where you either got worse and headed for ICU or started getting better. Knowing that as late-40somethings with a bit too much tummy for comfort, we might go either way, we waited and hoped and lay still in bed. he got through, then it was my turn. Right on cue, the much-warned-of band of tightness around my chest came on. I Netflixed and drank fluids and tried to ignore it and slept and then… it went. The next day I was a little better.

Meanwhile panic raged and business got ugly for a little while. Some people and organisations were very helpful (clients reassured on plans where they could, furlough bought breathing space, a deeply valued executive coach pitched in with emotional support pro bono while we gathered our wits). Some weren’t, but c’est la vie.

A year on we’re still fighting that hydra-like challenge of business-in-the-Covid-times, but the tide seems to have turned. The vaccinations, the adaptations in society and in our organisations are bringing results and rebuilding the sense of optimism that was kicked out of me at the start of the year with the resurgence of Covid in the UK and elsewhere.

Allora. Here we are then, in March 2021 and here is a list of things I recommend you read.

“Every leader needs a fool. And the fool should tell you you’re full of shit, on a regular basis.”

– Manfred Kets de Vries, management thinker. From his recent Lunch With The FT interview.

Award-winning us

It was such a boost at Brilliant Noise a year after the shizzle hit the fizzle that to be given this lovely honour from The Drum this week. Doubly sweet as it was largely won on the basis of feedback from our clients.

Highly re-targeted digital emperor’s apparel

Speaking of pipe dreams, the FT asked “If Big tech has our data, why are targeted ads so terrible”.

As one former Facebook employee said in a court filing that was recently released “more than half the time we’re showing someone other than the advertisers’ intended audience”.

“Yes! Facebook spends $14bn a year on R&D but it can’t stop me being stalked by the pair of underpants I’ve already bought.”

“Because we are way more complex that “hard” data scientists thought we were :-) (they should have asked soft scientists).

Because if they have inventory they will sell it even if it’s a bad fit.

Because brands employ social ads managers on the cheap that don’t really know about building a highly targeted audience.

All of the above from experienced (20 years+ marketers). Sigh…

Google’s killing cookies, but you can bet they won’t be killing “targeted” advertising. There will be a whole other billion-dollar box of tricks one can buy to make sure campaigns are missing the mark but with authoritative data to explain why they’re actually doing a great job.

So it goes…

How close the past looms, circling the present like a dead moon, lifting slow repetitious tides on the living planet.”
– Terry Bisson, Fire on the Mountain

You need a friend. Possibly, 5.

Friends by Robin Dunbar, he of the Dunbar number, sounds like an excellent read. I’ve ordered a copy to sit atop the teetering pile of must-reads.

According to The Guardian:

In this pleasantly chatty book, a miscellany of modern research on sociableness, he rehearses this argument and his other famous idea – that language evolved so that gossip could replace time-consuming mutual grooming – as well as citing lots of other social-science experiments.

Some, to be sure, will not amaze anyone who is not a literal extraterrestrial: “We gain a surprising amount of information from the nonverbal cues that we wrap around our words when we speak,” for example, though it’s not surprising at all. Others are more interesting: the fact, for example, that people who sing together in choirs subsequently enjoy an increased pain threshold, or that conversations involving more than four people are unstable and will usually split into two

Some writing advice from Colson Whitehead

In an interview for 60 Minutes, the author of The Underground Railroad and many other fine books said:

“Write for yourself, because time is short. [I write] really for me, which sounds very selfish. Should I have written a zombie novel? It made perfect sense to me. I grew up loving horror movies and then horror fiction. Is that something I should be doing as a literary author? I don’t know . . . if it gives me pleasure, if it’s exciting, you know, our time on earth is pretty short. I should be doing what I feel like I should be doing”

Source: LitHub

Zone One is Whitehead’s Zombie novel. I enjoyed it hugely.

Tom Ford’s OK

Some fashion and creative project consolation from Tom Ford. The best-dressed man of his generation, and a creative fireball across our heavens, Ford is both a brilliant designer and a director of exquisite cinema.

We can take courage then from his admission that he is going to find it hard to stop wearing “indoor clothes” and also that lockdown has not been the creative opportunity some hoped for:

I’ve been wearing these same dirty jeans with holes in them and this same dirty jean shirt for, it seems like, months. As soon as we can go out again, we’ll want to dress up. It’s only natural.

I have two things I’m working on: an adaptation and an original screenplay. To be honest, I thought that during Covid I would have time to work on these. I’m so lucky, I have everything in the world, but I think everyone has felt a certain depression. It’s been a very turbulent year. And I have a child at home who hasn’t been to school in a year. So, unfortunately, I have not felt as creative as I thought I was going to feel.

[Interviewer] what do you do in that situaiton?

I go to bed. Maybe I drink some coffee and lie in the bathtub and probably watch way too much CNN and MSNBC and just make myself even more agitated. I try to get some sleep, which I never get. I just lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.

Fair play, Tom. Me too…

Talking of fashion. This is what Rick Owens revealed as post-lockdown inspiration:

The look fits perfectly with the New York Times realisation that New York has actually become the set of Blade Runner.

Pun of the week is from Science Daily

Quick links

• WPP sounds confident about the marketing services recovery (hope they’re right). Investor’s Chronicle: WPP hails digital shift as it restarts digital
• The Economist has a special report on retail, including trends like “one-to-one commerce” and “democratised retail”.
• The Nightingale Hospitals opened to deal with the pandemic were never really used and are now closing.
• How to make a transcript of any podcast (requires Otter.ai, but seriously, you should get it if you don’t already).

Quote of the week

Robert Shrimsley on lockdown beards:

“Chins it seems are Covid’s invisible casualties.”

Made me laugh because my beard is now at a new peak and I have no idea what its fate will be when The Great Return begins in a few weeks.

Well, I leave you with that image to haunt your dreams, and wish you the very best of weeks to come. I hope there was something here of use, interest or amusement.

Your ballistic epistlistic,

Antony?

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P.S. Spent some of this week moving offices. I’ll talk some more about it when we’re properly in and up and running, but this is the building – the new Plus X Innovation Centre in Brighton. It’s quite an incredible space and community.

P.P.S. Most of the links this week are from the Financial Times. I appreciate it is an expensive subscription, but if you can find a way to make it work, it is incredibly good value for its business, politics and culture coverage. Otherwise, you can get some free articles by registering.

This post originally appeared my Substack newsletter Antonym.

Dear Reader

Stewart Lee, pro-grump pot and favourite comedian of annoying, self-righteous liberals like myself, has a section in his some-time emails to his fan-base called: “I Arrogantly Recommend”. That’s what this newsletter is – a bunch of arrogant recommendations of things I find fascinating and think you should too, even though you have a completely different set of tastes, perspectives, needs and interests. It’s a passive-aggressive challenge to how you spent your attention this week with an implied instruction about how you should spend some time today. If you demur, you will just confirm my worst suspicions about your vacuousness and unsuitability to belong to this mailing list. I suggest you unsubscribe now, and download TikTok which should kill some time until the kids go back to school for little more cost than carpal tunnel syndrome from your thumb obediently scrolling and like for little dopamine squirts like the good lab rat in the Zuckerwelt complex that you know deep down you are.

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. It’s been a tough week.

Here are some links and quotes to interesting things that I humbly offer for your clicky pleasure… (DON’T FORGET TO LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE)

Nerd on this: personal tech stats

This from a letter to my company this week indulged in some technology advance vertigo:

I’ve got the keys to the new office. They magically appeared in my email inbox and I downloaded the app and – Voila! – there they are!

Full disclosure: I love technology. I grew up at a time when pocket calculators and digital watches seemed like the cutting edge. My Dad won a competition for – wait for it – predicting the future of the office, and the prize money went on a ZX Spectrum, one of the first affordable home computers when I was about ten. OMG it was amazing.

The Spectrum had memory of 48K. To give that context, 48 kilobytes is enough memory to hold 23,000 words in a plain text document. A third of a novel. My watch has about 350,000 times more memory and cost about the same, adjusting for inflation, as the Spectrum did in 1982.

While we’re nerding out about tech. The app that opens all of the doors at I’ve got the keys to the new office. They magically appeared in my email inbox and I downloaded the app and – Voila! – there they are!

Full disclosure: I love technology. I grew up at a time when pocket calculators and digital watches seemed like the cutting edge. We weren’t that well off, but my Dad won a competition for – wait for it – predicting the future of the office, and the prize money went on a ZX Spectrum, one of the first affordable home computers when I was about ten. OMG it was amazing.

The Spectrum had memory of 48K. To give that context, 48 kilobytes is enough memory to hold 23,000 words in a plain text document. A third of a novel. My watch has about 350,000 times more memory and cost about the same, adjusting for inflation, as the Spectrum did in 1982.

While we’re nerding out about tech. The app that opens all of the doors at Plus X is 21.8MB. It would take the combined power of 458 ZX Spectrums to let me into my new office.

My phone has 5.6 million times more memory than my first computer. X is 21.8MB. It would take the combined power of 458 ZX Spectrums to let me into my new office.

Read this post: Brian Morrisey on unbundling the events industry

Brian Morrisey, the former AdAge journalist and editor at Digiday, has a useful analysis of how industry events will emerge from the pandemic in his The Rebooting newsletter. These events serve a whole bunch of different purposes – sales, inspiration, networking, market intelligence, training, entertainment – all wrapped in a big, ugly package and plonked in Cannes, or Earls Court, Las Vegas, Singapore, or wherever:

The problem of this bundle is the same for every bundle. Many of the features don’t apply to different audience segments. Sales people have no interest in the programming — most would be out by the croissants buttonholing people — and top executives had no interest in being pitched by vendors. The CFOs hate the boondoggling. And so on.

Early on in the pandemic, at a company meeting, I urged our sales team to skip mourning the loss of in-person events and find ways instead to solve for the needs of clients because those didn’t go away. Events are a means to an ends — most are about fostering relationships between attendees — and inevitably, the adaptions of the past year will change events, as they’re reformulated to serve different purposes. Just as you don’t need a full cable subscription to watch live sports programming, new models will emerge that reconfigure the benefits of in-person events.

Sign up for this free thing: Caroline Webb on how to have a good day despite the pandemic

Caroline Webb wrote the amazing How to Have a Good Day, which uses sound findings from neuroscience to help understand how are brains work during a typical working day. (There’s a character called Anthony in it who may be a thinly veiled version of yours truly.) Now she’s running a series of webinars every Wednesday to talk about practical things we can do to work while dealing with the emotional turmoil of these pandemic times – “How To Have A Good Day in Uncertain Times.”

Every Wednesday on LinkedIn, at 10am Eastern Time time, I’ll pick one practice you and your colleagues can use to stay centered, upbeat, productive and clear-headed, whatever life is throwing aat you right now. Each video will outline practical science-based tips you can apply right away. The first one will be on March 10th.

You can sign up for the series here for free. If you’ve not read her book, I really can’t recommend it too highly, we very often include a copy in the induction pack for new joiners at Brilliant Noise.

Get your hit of the sublime with this map of black holes

As Tim Harford explained in the FT, amazing ideas are often overlooked:

In 1928, Karl Jansky, a young radio engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, began researching static interference that might obscure voice transmissions. Five years later, after building a large rotating antenna and investigating every possibility he could think of, he published his remarkable conclusion: some of the static was coming from the Milky Way.

It was ten years before scientists stopped scoffing at the idea and radio astronomy was born. This week we have what Nature charmingly called “the best-ever map of supermassive black holes” (full paper here). Literally a map of things we cannot see.

Believe a human wrote this

The Drum carried a piece on AI-powered creative:

In the near future, the smartest creative teams will be those that can use A.I. writers in productive ways, as a computer assist to a creative session and a source of ideas that might spark better ones.

That makes sense. I’ve not heard anyone seriously worried that humans are going to be out of a copywriting or creative job soon because of machine learning tools. The lazy thinking approach to this kind of analysis is that AI it’s an either or choice, when in fact thinking will be supported by new kinds of tech. See the concept of centaur chess for the model for this, sometimes more helpfully called Advanced Chess.

Doug Engelbart and JCR Licklider are two of the people who thought deeply about what competitors should be able to do for us and our cognitive work. If you want to see someone trying to invent the future and largely succeeding, watch Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos (or some of it, it’s about 100 minutes long. Here’s a taste of the first mouse and outliner apps being demonstrated in 1968.https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/JQ8ZiT1sn88?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0

AI used well, like all tech, will boost our ability to spend time on high quality thinking. According to Howard Rheingold in his book Mind Amplifiers

Licklider had been a psycho-acoustician before World War II. Returned to his scientific investigations after the war, Licklider grew frustrated with the long hours that he, as a scientist, spent “getting into position to think.”34 Like Engelbart, Licklider imagined that computers might evolve into machines to help scientists — if only there were a better way to link scientists with computers than punch cards and printouts.”

“Getting in a position to think” is what we should ask of all of computing tools, including the ones we use today.

Quick links

• No shit! Parents around the world were 40% more likely than other people to find themselves drinking at “unusual times”. Meanwhile everyone has drunk more than usual during lockdown according to a report by GWI.
• Pompeii has been an archaeological site for hundreds of years and is still yielding new discoveries. Ars Technica | Archaeologists discover “Lamborghini” of chariots near ruins of Pompeii
• Bookshop.org is an inspiring example of business model innovation. Bookshop.org raises £1m for UK’s indie booksellers amid lockdown | Booksellers | The Guardian
• Essence, the media agency, has published a report about the future of advertising: 2030 revisited. It sets itself apart from similar publications by having some real substance and depth.
• “How about three signs you should not be talking about psychology on tiktok“

That’s it for this week. I hope you found something interesting here.

Hasta luego

Antony

? PreviousTopNewWhat is Antonym?© 2021 Antony Mayfield. See privacy, terms and information collection noticePublish on Substack

Two of the books I’ve been reading this week – Thinking In Systems and Wolf Hall – connected in a surprising way.

Let’s start with the thoughts of a furious Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall, confronted by the tactical success one of his enemies:

Christ, he thinks, by my age I ought to know. You don’t get on by being original. You don’t get on by being bright. You don’t get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook; somehow he thinks that’s what Norris is, and he feels an irrational dislike taking root, and he tries to dismiss it, because he prefers his dislikes rational, but after all, these circumstances are extreme, the cardinal in the mud, the humiliating tussle to get him back in the saddle, the talking, talking on the barge, and worse, the talking, talking on his knees, as if Wolsey’s unravelling, in a great unweaving of scarlet thread that might lead you back into a scarlet labyrinth, with a dying monster at its heart.

Cromwell should suffer from imposter syndrome. A Hackney lad with an informal education he got on the road running from a violent father and on the job as a soldier and then a city trader in Italy. He understands things those with the money and the power don’t because he has seen behind the curtain, how the system of the world really works. Where the nobility have been raised on ideas of nobility, courtly love and glory through war, he has fought in the wars and then seen how they were financed.

In this passage above we see a brief flash of his deepest fears, the fear of being dragged back into the wreckage of his origins. His master, Cardinal Wolsey, is being taken down by the establishment and it could well ruin him as well. He has risen so far by applying his insight and practical knowledge about how the world works and – “he likes his fears rational” – suppressing the emotional. Through skills in practical professions – law and finance – he makes himself valuable to the establishment. While playing this game has helped him achieve massive success and a growing reputation, he is reminded that his is not the only game, the strategy does not always work. The idiots sometimes win, the game of favours and hereditary privilege and courtly intrigue will sometimes be won by the wrong people with the wrong ideas and whom history is not behind. Just because he is smarter and in many ways better than his enemies, doesn’t mean they can’t bring him down.

At the end of Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer, she talks about understanding the limits of being original, being bright, perhaps of being right. She wrote the book in the 1990s but was thinking back to when she was early in her career and part of a cohort of clever systems thinkers who were advancing the field in the 1970s. Fired with the zeal of their insights and a desire to make things better they went out like missionaries to fix the systems around them:

Our first comeuppance came as we learned that it’s one thing to understand how to fix a system and quite another to wade in and fix it. We had many earnest discussions on the topic of “implementation,” by which we meant “how to get managers and mayors and agency heads to follow our advice.”

Having an insight feels great. It gets you a bit high. You do stupid things sometimes. Like think the idea will win because it feels so damn good.

Naive leaders act as if the idea itself is the ultimate selling point. Experienced leaders, on the other hand, understand that the process is just as important, if not more so.

– Act Like a Leader Think Like a Leader, Herminia Ibarra

Advice to my younger self, then: Smart isn’t enough. It’s one of the reasons you should pull your head out of your rear and read Machiavelli, himself a prime example of why being right and being smart doesn’t mean you get to win.

One job of a leader in a long crisis like the pandemic is to explain what’s going on – offer a frame, a narrative about what is happening and how we can deal with it. The first challenge, you discover, is that that means explaining things to yourself.

Just when you think you have the measure of the crisis – the nature of its threats to the business, your sanity, you’re health and your family – it changes into something else.

The FT has started a monthly series called Leaders’ Lessons, asking a “global panel” of CEOs about their experience of the pandemic. This week’s question was about making mistakes:

With the exception of perhaps one, the respondents offer candid and helpful admissions of error and how they have adapted since. One quote has stuck with me from Jaelle Ang, CEO of a co-working space in Singapore, who said that she focused on the wrong things at first:

I know exactly what she means. Cash flow isn’t unimportant – the only inviolable rule of business is do not run out of cash – but it was only one of the games we would have to play over the coming months. Those first two sentences distil the crisis perfectly – I’ll break them down a little here:

• Shape-shifting: A year ago, with the Cheltenham Festival just finished and Boris was shaking hands in Covid wards the discussion was – seriously – whether business would be affected at all. Then, it was about whether the recovery would be v-shape or u-shaped. The lockdown – three weeks or three months? Then panic set in. Things were delayed. The world changed. It was not a crisis, but a series of challenges and mini-crises that we faced – how and if to use furlough and loans, how to forecast, how to keep projects going that would have been happening in other countries.
• Forward & backward: Q4 last year seemed like a recovery. Revenue lifted and bookings returned, we finished the year in high spirits at Brilliant Noise. Intact, proud of the work we were doing, proud of the resilience of our colleagues. While we craved to see one another and work around real tables and real whiteboards, we’d got really good at remote work. In some ways, our skills had got better and the cost of delivery, especially for international work, had lowered. But Q1 has been a sharp reverse. Literally hours into the first workday of the New Year it was clear the Government would be locking down the country again and that the disease was getting much, much worse. Our plans, once again, had to be completely changed.
• Infinite round of games: The idea of games is perfect. Business can often be a hard game – “This isn’t checkers, this is m*******n’ chess”, as Ben Horowitz says in The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Business in the pandemic, though, isn’t a game of chess. It’s a long series of games of chess, in different formats – now speed chess, now timed, now against three opponents, now a single game over a week – and you never know which type of game, or games, you will be playing next.
• We may not know when the whistle blows: Where the game metaphor breaks down is that games usually have a defined endpoint. While we may have “Freedom Day” provisionally booked in for the 21st of June in the UK, for instance, things aren’t going to be magically easier for most businesses the following Monday. Even with government support, many have had to dig deep into personal and corporate reserves of energy, cash and goodwill to get through to now. Many will face insolvency once things get back to “normal”. The after-effects of Covid-19’s worst phase will last for years, and even then we will be facing new challenges. We’ll raise a glass if we get to end lockdown fully, no doubt, but it won’t be the end of anything as much as the beginning of the new game.