Substrate

I missed this when Dorian Taylor published it a year ago, but it's relevant not only to TechFreedom, but to my current situation this weekend.

After discussing some standard business risks when dealing with SaaS vendors, he says:

Most organisations I work with know something isn't quite right. The same problems keep coming back, people in different parts of the organisation describe it in ways that don't match, and nobody has the time, budget or appetite for a consultant to come in and tell them what they already half know.

The first two OrgLens notes (1, 2) asked whether AI could turn what people say about an organisation into a useful health check.

The results made me cautiously optimistic: OrgLens could produce a structured description of an organisation and a plain-language report. It did, however, need software checks to verify quotations, catch contradictions, and stop important issues disappearing during editing.

Intro

As I mentioned last week, and as you can guess from the above photo, I've been in Toronto for the past few days. I'm on my way home, overnight, via Dublin.

It's a long way to come for a couple of days of unconferencing and a bit of sightseeing either side, but it's been worth it. There's nothing quite like the Mozilla community, and the #MozAlums crew are fantastic.

Photo taken by me in Bluebell Wood, Morpeth

Intro

While I haven't got ages to write one today, I decided over the weekend that I would get back into the habit of writing weekly updates. I haven't written a weeknote since archiving my blog and spinning up Substrate.

Most organisations don't work systemically. They deal with problems one part at a time, and then are surprised when they find the same issues returning time and again.

For mission-driven organisations such as charities, co-ops or public service institutions, it can be hard to picture what working systemically would even look like. Instead of a bunch of theory, people first need a quick sense of systems practice, in terms that make sense for their own organisation.

I'm going to use the term 'affordance' in what follows, and I know from experience over the years that people misunderstand this term:

In psychology, affordance is what the environment offers the individual. In design, affordance has a narrower meaning; it refers to possible actions that an actor can readily perceive.

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I love how simple and effective this 2x2 grid is. All it's doing is showing that there are many things we can do to satisfy our brain's need for dopamine, some of which are sustainable and cheap, and others that... aren't.

There’s a sad irony when someone jettisons from social media, they’re gone from our Online worlds but I’m so happy for them. And I mourn what we don’t get to hear from them. We don’t get to hear about how wonderful they feel, how beautiful their skin is now, and how they restored their mental health. We don’t know if they make more money or less money. We don’t get further inspiration from them to leave the Online. But being able to observe the Offline from the Online might ruin the magic and mystery hidden there. It’s a door hidden in an old wardrobe that you have to pass through to fully understand.

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