Weekstarter 45/2026

In my pre-MozFest excitement, I forgot to send out a Weekstarter last week. My apologies. Check out my photo-laden What I learned at MozFest 2026 post because I had a great time! ☀️

So that I don't bury the lede, I want to note that I am available for work with immediate effect. Although FIELD STATION secured the Wildlife Trusts data in practice programme for the next three years, that doesn't start until January, and my days with INASP are dwindling. Check out the kind of things I do via my newly-revamped Dynamic Skillset website.

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Weekstarter 43/2026 featured a photo of me using the scaffolding around our house to get up on the roof to clean the gutters and tiles. We've now had solar panels and a home battery installed for a couple of weeks, and it's been transformational. According to the NetZero app and the energy dashboard I've created (which everyone loves and is now being served via a Raspberry Pi) energy is costing us on average £3.86 instead of £11.30 per day! Details of the setup we went for are in that previous Weekstarter note.

While I was writing this I received email confirmation from Boxt that the DNO have approved us for electricity export. Although we're unlikely to have surplus until at least the Spring, that's going to reduce our energy bills even further.

What's coming up

Business development! That's my focus this week: putting myself out there without being too sales-y. I'm open to doing work around digital/AI literacies, digital credentials, and programme management, with a hope that I can pivot the majority of my work towards systems thinking work. That's what I want to spend the second half of my career on.

To that end, I'm starting a new monthly newsletter:

Viable is a monthly newsletter for those who work for mission-driven organisations such as charities, funders, NGOs, universities, and public bodies.

Every month, I introduce one pattern that keeps orgs like yours stuck, and give you a 20-minute exercise to try with your team. It takes five minutes to read.

The stories included in Viable are composites, drawn from many organisations and never from one client. You're not tracked and you can leave in one click.

Sign up for Viable here.

I'll be sending out Issue #0 before the end of the year to test everything is working. It will then go out monthly from January 2027.

Relatedly, the session I'm running on November 25th, Sightlines: a practical introduction to Systems Thinking is deliberately capped at 10 with a waitlist:

Three simple, interactive tools for thinking more clearly about a complex situation. In this free, participatory one-hour Zoom session, you will use Sightlines to examine the boundary of a situation, the perspectives within it, and the connections between its parts.

​Free. Online. Limited to 10 places. Not recorded.

I've kept placed limited so that I can interact with each participant in a meaningful way; if the waitlist gets long enough I'll consider running another session.

I'm also considering running sessions introducing two other tools I've built to be useful to mission-driven orgs. The first is Watershed, which is a diagnostic tool showing the value of systems approaches:

How well does your organisation work as a system? Most organisational headaches come from patterns in how the whole organisation fits together. These patterns can be described as 33 systems laws, and I've turned each one into a plain statement you can rate. You'll see where your organisation is holding up, where it is under strain, and what I'd look at first.

The second is OrgLens, which might look similar on the surface but is much more in-depth and requires multiple perspectives and the optional uploading of files:

How is your organisation working? Describe your organisation in your own words. OrgLens writes back a short, plain-English report: what's working, what isn't, and what's worth talking about. No management jargon, and nothing you need to know first.

I'm looking forward to building out a consultancy offer around these, so get in touch if you'd like to experiment with them. They're open source and free to try, with the idea being that I add my human brain and expertise on top of this, bespoke to your organisation.

Media consumption

I'm still making my way through the The Brothers Karamazov and have also started listening to For Special Services by John Gardner. Yes, the latter's Bond novels are a little formulaic, but he's a good writer and its pure escapism.

Usually I'm not a fan of television everyone else is watching, but I did enjoy the celebrity version of The Traitors that's been on recently and had its final on Friday. Other than that, I've just been watching football.

On the audio front, last week, I made one of those decisions that feels momentous but doesn't register that way to anyone else. In 2009, when Spotify came on the scene, I could see which way the wind was blowing, and sold my huge CD collection that I'd amassed from working in HMV as a student and just being very into music. I only kept 10 of my favourites. The money from that has pretty much paid for the last 17 years of subscriptions to the service.

I haven't been happy with the way that Spotify has been going. In addition to not paying artists fairly, personally I've two concerns: they push me towards playlists (which they have algorithmic control over) instead of albums and EPs, and their surveillance (as evidenced by Spotify Wrapped) is egregious. So I've moved to a TIDAL family plan and, along with listening to my own digital music collection via Plexamp, am much happier.

Other updates

Although I'm not entirely happy with the amount that Claude has crept into my life, it's so useful it's difficult not to. My plan is to, like the home energy dashboard that's just chugging along on the Raspberry Pi, move everything to open models eventually.

Over the weekend, I worked with Claude to create a bizdev dashboard that looks for opportunities, scores them, and stores data in an LLM wiki. It's running on my Mac Mini so, with strict guardrails, it can use Claude in Chrome to access things usually blocked to automation, and cross-reference things. I'm optimistic as it's already found a bunch of things so far.

In addition, I've got scheduled tasks for:

• Daily home energy check – Claude connects to the NetZero app, which in turn is connected to the APIs for our heat pump, home battery, and EV charger, provides a report, and suggests changes to optimise the system.
• Daily post ideas – LinkedIn rewards consistency so I'm having Claude look for articles around systems thinking, digital sovereignty, and digital credentials for my consideration.
• Weekly Garmin review – Now that Garmin have enabled personal API keys, I'm getting Claude to review my health data. I'm still recovering from Overtraining Syndrome and have an inbuilt tendency to push myself too hard. This is a useful corrective.

Oh, and at some point over the last couple of weeks, I updated the avatar I use everywhere to look like this:

Hopefully it's an improvement.

Where to find me

• Social networks: Mastodon / Bluesky / LinkedIn
• Work: Dynamic Skillset / FIELD STATION
• Bookmarks: Are.na

Also, feel free to get in touch and/or book time to chat!

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Photo: taken by me on a lovely autumnal walk yesterday while my daughter was refereeing some football matches.