Week Notes 25 - 31 March 2024

Time for another set of week notes. This week it’s Easter, a blog post on my priorities, a couple of workshops, and some personal adventures. Read on!

🐣 Happy Easter!

I’m not terribly religious but I do love Easter. I love the relentlessly optimistic conviction it carries: that even in the darkest of times there is always the possibility of dramatic reinvention, renewal, and positive change. In “real life” it’s rare for a situation to magically resolve itself but there is at least the potential to gently improve it or find freedom from worldly attachment to a situation that creates suffering.

I also love Easter’s deeper even more ancient connection to the vernal equinox and various rituals and traditions marking the start of spring with all its new beginnings. It reminds me of Ecoycycle Planning, one of my favourite Liberating Structures.

I hope you find some resurrection, reinvention, or freedom this week in whatever areas of your personal or professional life need it! 😀

Work things

Half day OKR workshop

I faciliated a half-day online OKR kick-off workshop with a large nutrition & wellness company. These are always fun but a lot more work than doing it on-site. Even with plenty of interactive bits, staring intently into a screen for 4.5 hours while keeping 30+ people usefully engaged is a challenge.

I was reminded of the importance of setting OKRs in well-defined true teams and not merely a “workgroup”. It’s tough to cover OKR foundations, set real OKRs across multiple teams, and start checking in on OKRs in a single half-day session so I’m glad we have more sessions together in the coming months!

One-hour OKR session

I also hosted a shorter “OKR awareness” session with the Inter-American Development Bank. In one hour we covered the basics and got some hands-on practice setting mock OKRs. I wish I’d done more facilitation and less “training” but the session still received positive feedback and I came away with some good learnings.

Requests for Proposals (RFPs)

I don’t want to count any unhatched chickens but after a quiet start to the year it seems like things are beginning to pick up. I had three great discovery calls last week which means I’ve got three proposals to write.

I really should standardise my offer more but everyone’s situation is unique. As more organisations gain experience with OKRs there’s more variability in what they need to make OKRs work harder for them.

Personal adventures

• 🏠 The roof is almost done (see pic below)! Still lots of clean-up and repainting to do.
• 📚 Reading: Poems by Pablo Neruda & Getting to Yes.
• 📝 I published a blog post on my personal priorities.
• 😴 On Friday I met a friend for dinner in Shoreditch at Noci. We talked about the importance of sleep.
• 🚂 🚌 After several weeks of him asking, I finally took my son to ride the Romford to Upminster line. The trip also involved Great Northern, the Elizabeth Line, the C2C and the Circle Line. Phew!
• 🕰️ British Summer Time has arrived! It’s silly but I always look forward to the extra evening daylight and even enjoy the ritual of changing all the non-networked clocks in my house.

That’s it for this week! Have a great week ahead.

More week notes.