Quotes from 2020

Always plan for the worst, child; that way, all your surprises will be pleasant ones.

Educators are people too, subject to the same cognitive limitations and biases as everyone else. The lack of scientific literacy, combined with deep faith in the validity of personal observation, creates vulnerability to claims that are intuitively appealing but unproved or untrue.

Lord Acton said power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

The best tools enable collaboration that was previously unthinkable.

We often forget that the purpose of the tools we use at work isn’t to increase our individual productivity, but the entire team’s productivity. Companies themselves often forget this.

That’s how you measure real skill, Solveig. Reliable repeatability, not peak performance.

While the digital team is there to act as an agent of change for the organisation, that does not mean it has carte blanche to be ignorant of the current rules, much less rip up or ignore them all. If you go back to first principles, many of the most frustrating aspects of working in a bureaucracy – the paperwork, the delays, the acronyms and language – are grounded in perfectly reasonable intent. Often there are very good legal, security or moral reasons lying behind the way things are. The problem arises when wise intent is smothered by many layers of abstraction. As experienced hands within the organisation, the job of the bureaucratic hackers is to get to the bottom of the intent behind the rules, explain this to the digital incomers, and ensure that the new teams follow them to everyone’s satisfaction.

Good digital work is a million silent nods of approval, not one loud round of applause.

In the early days, it is more important to build good services that ship even if they don’t translate easily into common components. A service made of near-perfect parts that never actually sees the light of day is the most imperfect service of all.

Digital transformation saves money – lots of money. It thaws frozen markets and creates new ones. It brings clarity and beauty to a jumbled mess. It delivers rewards, applause and validation. But far more important than all of those things, it makes things simpler, cheaper and faster for citizens, businesses and users.

The digital team must avoid falling into the trap of rule-setters everywhere, which is to impose a way of doing things without providing any practical help for how to go about it. You should accompany the stick of digital standards with the best carrot you can provide, and make it easier to follow the rules than to ignore them.

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there.