I’ve found it useful to read the weeknotes from other folks (most recently Katy Beale documenting her work with Hackney Council) so I thought I’d start sharing in a similar format.
Here’s a bit more about what weeknotes are and why they’re useful.
I think I’m going to attempt the ‘X things’ format, so here we go. Here are 6 things.
New starter enthusiasm
Our new Head of Ops started this week (hi Tara!), onboarding new starters always makes me feel really excited and enthusiastic. Perhaps it’s the energy and fresh perspective of someone completely new, or perhaps it’s the chance — in explaining things to someone for the first time — to reflect on what is actually good and exciting about who we are and what we do.
I’ve been wondering how we might be able to replicate the energy boost of a new person joining the team.
Interviewing
I’ve finally managed to get things up and running again with the podcast I host, Digital Works. Just before last Christmas I interviewed Stuart Buchanan, the Head of Digital Programming at the Sydney Opera House (you can listen to the episode with Stuart here).
Stuart said some really interesting/useful things about how to work effectively in a big, complex institution (which is never easy) and how to maximise the impact & buy-in around digital activity, both things I think many of the people we work with struggle with.
Why are job titles so hard
I’ve never really worried too much about what my job title was. But when it comes to trying to attract applications from folks with specific skills and experience, job titles become an important way of reaching the people you want to reach.
We have a slightly unusual structure/approach in parts of the company so job titles that are perhaps common in other agencies aren’t always useful or applicable to the roles we create at Substrakt.
If anyone has an effective way of approaching this challenge then please let me know, until then I’ll continue trying to come up with things that don’t sound entirely fantastical.
Sector priorities
We have a lot of conversations about a lot of things with a lot of people. As a result we have some sense of what the sector are prioritising when they are thinking about digital. Here are some things that came up this week:
- Capacity and how to do more (or even just the same) with less (smaller teams, less money, etc). Conversations around automation, and operational efficiency more generally seem especially important at the moment. This feels related to how digital exists in the structure of cultural organisations, too often it is still seen as solely the responsibility of one person or one department and that is going to lead to even more burn-out, missed opportunity and inefficiency unless it’s addressed.
- Prioritisation models & workflows. The “everything is a priority and we need it now” dynamic is something that everyone who has worked in a digital role at a cultural organisation will recognise. Anecdotally it seems that this has worsened in many organisations as digital has shifted to play a bigger role in the work of more departments. We are doing a few pieces of work at the moment to help organisations develop models and processes that provide a more structured and easily/widely understood way of engaging with, prioritising, and delivering digital work that (hopefully) results in better and more impactful work, and teams feeling less stretched.
- Commercialisation. Organisations need to generate more revenue, and they need the ways that they currently generate revenue to be more effective. This opens up a whole range of conversations from optimising existing platforms and experiences to analysing deeply understand the value of what you do — on this latter point, through the pandemic we saw that often the things people were willing to pay for were not livestreams of ‘culture as usual’ but instead workshops, classes, or specifically designed digital experiences.
- Digital programming. We are working on an R&D project with Annette Mees called ‘venues of the future’ which is exploring how hybrid and digital-first models of thinking and operating could (and should) develop within the cultural sector. This project came out of the shifts we’d observed over the last decade that were accelerated by the pandemic, but is increasingly an area that people are coming to us to talk about. Inevitably the old ‘legacy’ ways of commissioning and creating work don’t work in this new context, but the opportunities are significant and exciting — reaching new audiences, working with new artists, making new forms of culture.
The benefits of not working from home & away days
I’ve been spending much more time in the office over the past couple of months. Increasingly I was finding it difficult to feel productive when working from home every day, and the boundaries between work and home life were blurring in an unhelpful way. Fortunately we kept our London office throughout the pandemic, and recently moved into a nice new office in Birmingham (more about The Jointworks).
There’s something about the physical process of moving from one place to another that puts me in the right mindset for being thoughtful and productive. I know lots of people love working from home, and I’m fortunate that I can walk or cycle with relative ease to the office so my commute is a genuine pleasure rather than an expensive/busy train, but I do wonder how much we might all be missing out on by allowing working from home to become the unthinking default for many of us.
Undoubtedly this shift has had huge benefits, but time spent together in the same space has a value too and I’m keen we don’t lose that completely. James Greenfield (founder of design agency Koto), wrote this interesting piece on why they’ve insisted on a 4-days-a-week return to the office. Related to this I’ve been properly getting back on my bike over the last week or so and my god I’d forgotten just how wonderful it is to ride a bike.
Tomorrow I will spend the day with Andy (Substrakt’s Founder) and Stu (our Technical Director). We are going to go for lunch and then for a long walk in the countryside near Woodstock just outside Oxford.
We don’t always do a good job of making proper time and space for conversations about the future so it will be good to get away for an afternoon and have some exciting conversations about the shape of Substrakt over the next 3–5 years.
I guess I feel the benefit of this sort of off-site meeting in the same way as I enjoy going into the office. A change of scenery can help put me in the right mindset to have a specific conversation. It’s also nice to be away from screens and to properly engage with the people in front of you and their ideas.
I am thinking about how we can introduce this as a more regular/structured part of the rhythm of life at Substrakt. It won’t always need to be a whole company thing and, especially as we grow, there’s a benefit for individual teams having this time/space/opportunity to have their own discussions.
Visions of the future
I got home late on Monday and turned the tv on in the middle of the Conservative party leadership debate. A couple of incredibly uninspiring candidates, with equally uninspiring visions for the country.
We are an international business, we have team members and clients from and based in different countries, in my personal life I am surrounded with people who chose to move to the UK and make it their home.
It is sad to watch just how perceptions of Britain internationally have shifted (almost all for the worse) over the past 10 years, and it’s not just how things look, the country feels like it’s in a real mess and those whose job it is to govern seem to have no idea how to fix things.
James Butler wrote a piece for the London Review of Books that summarised things with this depressing but, in my view, accurate paragraph, “Britain, after twelve years of Conservative government, is run-down, stagnant, expensive, underpaid, unequal, corrupt, socially fractured, backward-looking, hungry and fearful”.
