These notes are a tool I use for reflecting, remembering (to counter my SDAM), networking within my profession, and public accountability. Read more here.
Gleðileg jól. I’m just back from 3 nights and 2 dark days in glorious Iceland (more on that below), now thawing myself out by a crackling Netflix fireplace and having a quiet one, as they say.
Here’s how my December went, rounding off another consecutive year of unbroken (albeit less frequent than last year) life logging. Thanks for sometimes reading it!
**Work, work, work **
Working at exec level in the culture sector (and maybe anywhere?) right now is about how the fuck to balance the budget in these ever more straitened times. Consecutive years of belt-tightening mean tough calls in the short term and deeper …
These notes are a tool I use for reflecting, remembering (to counter my SDAM), networking within my profession, and public accountability. Read more here.
Gleðileg jól. I’m just back from 3 nights and 2 dark days in glorious Iceland (more on that below), now thawing myself out by a crackling Netflix fireplace and having a quiet one, as they say.
Here’s how my December went, rounding off another consecutive year of unbroken (albeit less frequent than last year) life logging. Thanks for sometimes reading it!
**Work, work, work **
Working at exec level in the culture sector (and maybe anywhere?) right now is about how the fuck to balance the budget in these ever more straitened times. Consecutive years of belt-tightening mean tough calls in the short term and deeper rewiring in the medium term are unavoidable to make ends meet and keep delivering the org’s core mission.
For me and my DDaT lot, constrained finances feels both catastrophic and catalysing. We’re in desperate need of funds to keep the digital lights on, not all of which we’ll get, meaning tough priority calls will be needed locally too.
But these are also the conditions where us DDaT folk can get the most traction for our best work: radical service redesign, joining things up more, challenging outputs of questionable value, decommissioning legacy stuff and getting teams working smarter with IT and AI. So the financial constraint is driving focus in a helpful way.
Related to which, I had two inspiring moments in the last working days of 2025.
First a presentation from the BFI’s marketing partners AKA, on what AI is doing to search. It was galvanising on the need to get sharper on a unified content and structured data publishing strategy, to stay relevant and discoverable.
Second, another of my mentoring chats with Laura. She pushed me on seizing the AI opportunity more, and pursuing a bold digital-first plan for the BFI, leveraging the Board’s clear support for it.
All in all, lots to ponder and refocus around after the break. I’m not going to actively work during Yule but I’m hoping my brain will passively puzzle stuff out from a dispassionate distance before we regroup.
Jia hosted an event for cyber pros at the BFI Southbank (venue hire info here!) and I came along to speak about what execs care about and how to get their attention and trust.
Here I am, being charming and subversive (or at least, it would appear):
Among other things, I said:
- It’s hard being the DDaT guy in the room, navigating peers’ varying digital savvy and appetites for detail. So help your SROs help you by giving them layered information, translating the jargon and anticipating the questions they might need to deal with.
- Execs care about the org’s reputation and trust with customers, the board, sponsor bodies and compliance bodies – and not being caught with our pants down. We care about risks to financial stability and staff wellbeing.
- Cyber investment can feel like a bottomless pit, or worse still a protection racket. Avoid brinksmanship and give us choices linked to levels of risk, so we can make the call. Talk up the benefits of cyber confidence, like meeting users’ raised expectations, not just the avoidance of a negative.
- Make us feel good about the wise investment already made, by sharing KPIs about avoided risk. The goal is to feel confident we’re investing enough but not diverting funds unnecessarily from other things.
(By coincidence, I contributed to some recent research by Ash Mann into how to make effective proposals to senior people more broadly. It will be well worth checking out, when he publishes it next year).
Other stuff of note included a show and tell on the cinema digital service transformation, brunch with Ross Ferguson, cake and hot chocolate with my SLT at Italian Bear Cafe, furthering plans to tackle shadow IT, an all-staff Donut Time, and an end of year email roundup to my directorate.
It’s not all work, work, work
Iceland is magical and other-worldly. I’m amazed how sorted and developed it is despite a population the size of Croydon (the comparison ends there!) and so much of the year spent in darkness.
Day one was wonderful. Highlights were Laugarás Lagoon, a flavoursome trad lamb soup and the Golden Circle sights including this busy geyser:
Day two was a dud. The Blue Lagoon had all the luxury and charm of a concentration camp, and we spent 5 hours on a coach and in the cold not seeing the Northern Lights. Still, there’s always screensavers, and we enjoyed being together.
Fun Iceland facts:
- The Yule Lads and the Christmas Cat are great bits of Icelandic festive folklore, emphasising the preciousness of food, clothes and candles in Iceland’s pre-electric and pre-trade past. My favourite lad names are the Sausage Swiper, Window Peeper and Door Slammer.
- There are barely any dogs. They were banned for decades and remain out of favour (vs. a cultural fondness for cats) and hard to get permission for. IMO it adds to Rejkayvik’s vibe of a clean, modern city.
- They have an Iceland in Iceland. But no Maccy Ds despite the presence of Dominos, KFC and Subway. The import costs don’t work for a McDonalds franchise, apparently.
- The language is protected against ‘digital extinction’ in two cool ways. Iceland’s government funds a massive open-source database of Icelandic speech to help tech companies integrate the language into AI and smart devices. An Icelandic Language Committee makes up new words to keep pace with tech and avoid the diluting effect of English – like podcast (Hlaðvarp) and computer (Tölva).
- There’s pretty decent digital government in Iceland. Obvs where I would work if I emigrated there to escape the dogs and be with the cats and the happy, healthy people.
- Tourists outnumber locals 6:1
Camera dump:
Other non-work bits:
- Like lifting your child for the last time without realising it, I ate in Michael’s caff near the Brit school for the last time this month. It was always mediocre tbf but they were friendly and knew my order, and I’ll miss the routine of drafting these notes there now that son 2 has outgrown the Saturday film class.
- We accompanied Son 1 to his Cambridge interview, and he came out smiling. It’s in the lap of the gods now.
- It was my wedding anniversary in the same day as the all-staff party. A handy excuse for my JOMO.
- Made good progress health-wise with my PT. Undoing it a bit now but will get back on track in Jan.
- Delighted to have discovered Caffe Tropea in Russell Square. Unassuming menu and friendly service by a family of Italian cockneys.
- My fucking boiler sprung a motherfucking leak the day before we flew for Iceland, costing me £500 to fix and leaving my kitchen ceiling in a mess, for the second time this year. Sigh.
🔎 Found, interesting 🧐
- My old boss Tom nails it again: Why your operating model is now your biggest risk
- The New Rules of Innovation (goodbye beanbags, MVPs, pre-emptive ROI calculations and digital first … hello to curiosity rewarded, Most Vital Experiments and autonomous venturing)
- This is really excellent on “projects” versus agile, from April but I missed it until it resurfaced in someone’s newsletter (maybe Emily’s): The holy framework war
- Trump’s security strategy is horrible and scarily authoritarian, but there’s something to be said for its clarity.
- On a similar vibe, “certainty artefacts” is a useful phrase in this piece from Tash Wilcocks
- Matt Jukes has been reposting content from an “IMHO series” he ran at MHCLG. Well worth a look, like these two (there are more) Agile Planning – Roadmaps and Releases and The Art of Effective Agile
- I keep seeing stuff about this rising trend for “admin nights”, where friends hang out and individually work on tasks they’ve been failing to make time for: “I hosted the most “boring” party of the year last night at my home and it was actually great” and Ain’t No Party Like an Administrative Burden Party and Admin Night, right?
- Cracking stuff from Ben Holiday: From product to a service mindset
- James Plunkett asks what if government is stuck like a robot vacuum cleaner under a table? and Could 2026 be the year of public interest technology? (nice to see the love for LocalGovDrupal)
- UX Writing in Cybersecurity: Help Users, Not Imposters is interesting.
- More good thinning from Ash: How organisations lose what they learn – the half-life of discovery insights, and how myths sneak into our digital work
- Insights from the first five months of the GOV.UK app public beta 🤔
- Ross found another public roadmap for the list
- Why Labeling Relationships Is So Important
- Why Croydon is the UK’s answer to Hollywood and How This Chameleon UK Location Became a Little-Known Hollywood Backdrop and Taylor Swift reportedly secretly flies 3,500 miles in private jet to film music video in Croydon shopping centre
Listening, watching, playing, reading
📓 Books
⭐⭐⭐⭐*There Is No Antimemetics Division *by qntm. Starts great, gets a bit samey, not enough character or story to grab onto. ⭐⭐ *This Bursted Earth *by Garth Merenghi. Actually bad, rather than spoof bad. ⭐ Murder land: Crime and Bloodlust in the Rime of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser. Thought I would love this but it’s deadly dull
🎬 New films
⭐⭐⭐ Dragonfly ⭐⭐⭐ *Sirat * ⭐⭐ Vicious ⭐⭐ The Watchers ⭐The Running Man (2025)
Excited to see Marty Supreme before the month is out. Avoiding Avatar 3, cannot sit through another of those.
🎬 Older films
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Dancer In The Dark (rewatch) on BFI Player ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Troll Hunter ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Get Hard (rewatch) ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Black Pond ⭐⭐⭐⭐ *S/He Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary *– on BFI Player ⭐⭐ Adam Ant: The Blueblack Hussar
We plan to watch Zodiac on Christmas day, among other bangers.
🎧 New (to me) music
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Florian D Zeisig, A New Life ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐* Tourist, Music is Invisible* ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Joanne Robertson, Blurr ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Calibre, They Want You ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Billy Woods, Golliwog ⭐⭐⭐ Aya, hexed! ⭐⭐⭐ Fred Again, USB 2.0 ⭐⭐⭐ The Bug and Ghost Dubs,* Implosion* ⭐⭐⭐* Nas & DJ Premier, light-years*
📺 TV
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Simon Cowell: The Next Act ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Ink Master seasons 17 and 5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐* Here We Go* previous specials ⭐⭐⭐ Never Mind the Buzzcocks Xmas 2025 ⭐⭐⭐ The New Yorker at 100 ⭐ The War Between the Land and the Sea
🕹️ Games
Planning to start Death Stranding 2 and Divinity: Original Sin 2 this week.
Distractions
- Ponderclub more puzzle games
- Stewart Lee saying true things about immersive art [TikTok]
- Ducks that sound like they’ve just been told some juicy gossip [TikTok]
- Is DownDetector down?
Merry Christmas to you and yours. Don’t let the Christmas Cat eat you or the Window Peeper do whatever it is he does while he peeps at you. I’ll post my best films list, resolutions etc. on New Year’s Eve or thenabouts. Bye!