After starving myself for over twenty-four hours last week ahead of a colonoscopy, this week I once again found myself going without food for a whole day. Unfortunately, this time it wasn’t planned. We’re not sure whether it was food poisoning from the prawn-based dish we cooked on Sunday night or some kind of stomach bug, but it whacked both me and my wife from the early hours of Monday morning.

I was up at 4am feeling horrible, with a stomach ache and the shivers. When my alarm went off, I went into my morning routine of having a shave and jumping into the shower, but as the water cascaded over me I realised that I couldn’t face being stuck on a train, feeling like I might be sick. Reluctantly, I climbed back into bed and only got out again two hours later.

One of my colleagues had come over to London from Johannesburg for the week, and I had planned to spend a lot of time with him. He was running a hybrid workshop first thing, which I managed to dial into, but halfway through I had to run away from my desk in order to vomit. Somehow I managed to get through quite a few things in the first half of the day. As the afternoon rolled in, I found myself struggling to keep my eyes open as I read a document at my desk, so I gave in and moved to the sofa for a nap. I hadn’t realised that my wife had also been suffering badly until she came in from work and told me that she’d only eaten a small rice cake all day. I cooked our son’s dinner and we both left him to it as we headed up for a very early bedtime.

I made it into the office for the rest of the week but was only really feeling myself again from Thursday. I was suffering from a bit of brain fog, and seemed to oscillate from feeling fine one minute to having the shivers again the next. Most of the week was spent sipping cold soft drinks, taking paracetamol and nibbling at bland food, as I had no appetite for anything even remotely fancy. (Thank goodness for cheese and Marmite mini ciabattas from Starbucks — they certainly have their place.) I wondered whether the process of flushing my system the previous week had left me with weakened gastro-based defences against whatever this illness was.

This was a week in which I:

• Attended a few of the Microsoft Copilot-themed workshops that a colleague had organised for our region of the organisation. We worked with a vendor who secured the services of a trainer who is also a Microsoft MVP. He had an excellent delivery style, and undoubtedly helped to move everyone who participated along in their learning from wherever they had started the week. I resisted the urge to be a pedant about some of the things he said, such as when he anthropomorphised the AI, as it felt as though this would do a disservice to the people in the room. It’s better that they get their heads around the technology first; we can then start to examine some of the problematic aspects of it when they are on the bus.
• Learned that you can enable an ‘Excel Labs’ add-in, which then allows the AI to make direct changes to your spreadsheets. I’m not sure why this is still in ‘labs’ mode, given that files saved to Microsoft 365 include automatic version history.
• Had a good meeting with colleagues who have been working on and sponsoring a data-based initiative that we have been running. We heard some good ideas on what we should look at next, which could be extremely useful in supporting our business strategy.
• Had the weekly meeting with our audio-visual designer on the progress of our project to implement technology in the shared meeting room space in our building. The integrator is going to make a minor tweak to the aesthetics of a small component of the setup, as we requested. They have also raised a technical issue that we’ll need to address quite quickly.
• Joined a call with colleagues to talk through the booking process for the meeting rooms in this shared space once the floor reopens. There shouldn’t be any major changes to how it previously worked, but everyone is a little rusty as the floor has been closed for most of this year.
• Prepared a slide for, and attended, the Steering Committee meeting for our sister company’s office refurbishment project. We’ve got the go-ahead to proceed with our installations a few weeks ahead of the building company vacating the shared spaces.
• Met with our sister company’s Head of Workplace Services to go through a list of topics relating to the office refit and the reopening of our shared spaces. It always amazes me how many details there are that I hadn’t previously considered.
• Met with colleagues to discuss the status of a planned security change.
• Did some preparation with a colleague for a go/no-go meeting that was planned for the end of the week. The meeting itself was superb, with a well-crafted pack and excellent narrative that meant everyone seemed to have context and understanding ahead of a discussion and decision. Strategically, we asked for questions to be held back until the end of the slide deck and this worked well; our team are always very engaged, but there was a risk that we would have got stuck on an early slide. We’ve come up with an approach that everyone around the table has bought into and have a clear way forward for the project.
• Wrote my submission for the next governance committee meetings for one of our legal entities.
• Had a catch-up with an old colleague who I worked with many years ago, who left our sister firm in the pandemic and has returned. It was great to see him and hear about what he’d been up to.
• Enjoyed a lovely lunch in the office with two members of my team. Our newest member had offered to bring in homemade food for our colleague visiting from Johannesburg. I had a little bit of the vegetarian part of the meal, which was delicious. One of the best things about working for our organisation is how diverse the culture is, which offers no end of things to talk about as we break bread together.
• Met with someone from our technology research and advisory firm to talk about their product that brings together CIOs for discussions and networking in more intimate settings than the forums I’ve been to so far. I am so lucky to have been involved in the WB-40 podcast community for many years, developing real and valued friendships with technically-minded senior leaders. I think that this is the company’s way of trying something that might end up achieving similar things.
• Joined a webinar organised by BIE on The need for Transformational Leadership in 2026. Their webinars that I’ve attended in the past have been superb, particularly the one which explored the lived experience of two transgender members of the British Armed Forces. Unfortunately, after 15 minutes it felt as though this session wasn’t a good use of time — the panel were discussing high-level topics in very broad terms — so I abandoned it.
• Pondered whether the drinking water tap in our office is sentient. Half an hour after arranging the date of its annual service visit, it suddenly died. It may have been listening to us. We’ve once again had to put alternative arrangements in place for water until it gets fixed next week.
• Joined my youngest son’s parents’ evening online. He’s nearly through his first term of sixth form already. Time continues to accelerate.
• Took part in the first ‘open house’ event of the nascent Society of Hopeful Technologists. We had about 25 people attend, giving their input on the draft charter and exploring what things might look like in 2030 if the Society is doing a good job. It’s always so lovely to get in a room with people who are willing to give up their time, even for that meeting, in order to try and make a difference.

Media

Podcasts

• I caught up with Your Undivided Attention’s episode on Neil Postman, ‘the man who predicted the downfall of thinking’. I know a podcast episode is good when I pause it to write down a quote or two. They discuss Postman’s idea of ‘media ecology’, the study of media as environments. Modern democracies were created by a typographic media environment; long-form texts lend themselves to deep thought, reasoning and discussion. When the telegraph came along it sped things up, giving people less time for considered thought and reflection. Then television became the dominant mode of communication, emphasising appearance and personality. (I remember when I was younger people talking about John F Kennedy as having had a great face for television, and this continued to be important.) Social media is now dominant and it is tuned to fight for attention, so people who grab that attention win. Politicians have gone from needing to be attractive and likeable to holding attention, including through outrage. I thought the conclusion was really striking (which I have lightly edited here from what I assume is an automatically generated transcript):

Tristan Harris: So a thought I’d like to leave you with, there’s a quote from the introduction of Amusing Ourselves to Death that has always stuck with me, where Postman compares two dystopian visions for the future. The first presented by George Orwell in 1984 of surveillance, of Big Brother, and the other presented by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. Postman wrote: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books, while Huxley feared that there would be no reason to ban a book for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us, while Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture, while Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.” As Huxley remarked: “The civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” And it was Postman’s fear that it would be Huxley, not Orwell, whose prediction would come true.

• Alex Andreou makes a good case for the narrative about offenders being wrongly released from prison in the UK as a moral panic, according to sociologist Stanley Cohen’s definition. The paper-based system in the UK has contributed to prisoners being wrongly released for years, but a narrative has now suddenly sprung up about it.

Articles

• ”South Africans in financial distress are turning to gambling in their millions”. I often wonder when we will start to treat gambling like smoking. Here in the UK, I see gambling adverts everywhere, with a token nod to the person the ad is aimed at to ‘gamble responsibly’ or stop ‘when the fun stops’. I doubt these messages will make any difference to someone with an addiction.

Video

• Continued to enjoy Platonic. I’m glad one of the minor characters pointed out that Rose Byrne’s character is Australian as I was worried that she was just bad at an American accent.
• Along with seemingly everyone else, I watched the final episode of The Celebrity Traitors. I’d only started watching a couple of weeks ago and it pulled me in. The winner was superb.

Web

• Prompted by a post on social media, re-read Merlin’s Wisdom Project. There’s something for everyone.

Books

• Continued enjoying the nuggets of wisdom in Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals:

Next week: Symposium.