I’m not sure I could say there was a consistent theme of this week. The new FY is just around the corner and there is a lot of planning for that, not just financially but in planning for changes, for scale and what happens if all our chickens come to roost at the same time.

  • 🤖 - The week started with the monthly management meetings. The usual topics were covered by one standout part of the discussion of how we scale AI across the business. We spent enough time now on the security, on the skills, on the scenarios. We now just need start using it deeper into the day to day of the organisation. This means not just giving people licenses and a bit of training but also educating people about all the options available. Example: when to use a skill vs an agent vs traditional automation vs real software. There are some blurred lines there for sure, but we want to make sure we’re not just vibe coding our way to a future mess.

  • 💭 - One thing about being in a growing business is that optionality is really important. Also, you don’t always know when and where your next scaling point is going to come from, you can aim in a direction with an intention, but you rarely know with any certainty when it comes. This means from time to time I find myself working on some scenario planning e.g. if X happens and Y happens then we’ll do Z. This week had some of this activity. We have a lot of interesting projects and pipeline coming and we’re preparing for all the things we’ll need to do if in people and systems if these projects land with different timing scenarios.

  • - One piece of advice I give to new managers, comes from some advise I was given in a coaching session once - don’t book all your 1:1s on the same day and don’t do them back-to-back because you’ll want to make sure you have enough emotional energy. Well this week, there was a lot going on across the business and I found myself in the exact situation I don’t recommend (so do I say, not as I do folks!) with 1:1s and appraisals all on the same day. There were a few others across the week also, but this is where I am also preparing my team for scale, asking for their input on next FY strategies and reviewing their plans and asks for support. I always enjoy the sessions but wow! I left it all on the field that day.

  • - This week was also interspersed with fighting Copilot Cowork which continues to be unstable. This week was particularly difficult with it managing to “loose” all my skills, not be able to read the skills in my OneDrive so I had to re-create them all before I workflows would start again. I’m midway through a blogpost on this, so I’m just adding it to the long list of edge cases. I love Cowork, but I think it might be a while before it comes out of Frontier.

📈 - This weeks stats:

  • 123 minutes of podcasts
  • 4,683 average weekly steps
  • 71 book pages read (Homeland - p294-365) - Finished

📺 - This weeks background entertainment: