How will they know us?

The week started with a big milestone – my fourth “Start the Week” meeting. We then added a quickie on the rules for inviting people to the HoL meeting – and I have been playing with spreadsheets ever since. It doesn't feel right that every event starts the same process again – what is the opposite of a learning organisation? 

The rest of the time at Swindon was spent in performance management related meetings – including one with Ian McConaghy who seems to be having an “admin” week. It’s always scary when someone decides to clear their decks!!! Then a train ride down to London to prepare for the Board meeting. It was my fault for missing the previous couple of meetings but I felt disconnected from some of the discussions and cannot escape a growing feeling that we are still running the Technology Programme and that the Innovation Platforms are “tacked on” and not part of the core thinking. The day ended with a very nice dinner with Pat McDonald – it’s always re-assuring to remember that most of our problems have been around for a long time and that whenever a good idea got accidentally into the shared conscious, the old DTI managed to find a way to stop it before it did any good. Pat was most interesting on the SBRI, which he saw as a huge opportunity rather than the albatross most Government officials see – as they are handing over responsibility to Fearless Leader with a twinkle in their eyes! I think we need to mine his ideas a bit further – and soberly! 

The Board meeting was mostly harmless. Graham appreciated our honesty about what we could do, what was universally recognised as difficult and what was probably not worth the effort. The discussion on publishing the minutes had a feeling of deja vu – I am sure we agreed the same thing – publication of redacted minutes – back in June. 

Back to Swindon the next day for more performance management meetings. This area is prime territory for saying the same thing over and over again until people hear us. Before the Transition Group Meeting, I had a meeting with a pretty senior EPSRC person who has been totally dispirited by the recent changes and asked if I would be a reference for them. I am not sure if this is widespread, but it might give us a short term problem if our friends leave. The Transition Group was okay, with the vote for continuation being fairly obvious. 

Afterwards, I went back to trying to deal with the defrocked economist from the DTI’s rather disappointing paper on the service industries. He seems determined to give us a lot of tasks that he owns so Paul Mason, Allyson and I take turns to reply to his increasingly long-winded e-mails. I long ago learnt that the absence of supporting evidence could be overcome by quoting high level (often Ministerial) support and he is no exception to the rule – quoting Shriti and Geoffrey Norris as bogeymen (should that be bogeypersons?) who would be punishing us for our intransigence! 

The next day was the monthly Innovation Platforms Team Meeting. These are always fun – enough is learned in a month to make sure everyone has a chance to better themselves!! Steve Deeley asked to take part – as he didn’t really understand why more attention wasn’t being paid to what the Strategy says was the future in the Delivery Team. Andrew and Paul managed to confuse everyone (in a good way) on the technologies underlying their area, Rachel reported progress on the ITSS projects, Neil Carpenter has already got to terms with how vast and sprawling the Agri-Food area is (do we really want to work on apiary?), Fionnuala explained the rapidly developing LIB marketing plan and Tim managed replay our meeting with Pearson as him interviewing Ian for a supporting role! Ian McConaghy answered the usual questions on bonuses and pay review. This was followed by a meeting with Neville, Merlin, Zahid, Graham and Jackie to follow up his e-mail about His Spittleness’s interest in telemedicine. We spent a good few minutes trying to understand which definition of telemedicine His Spittleness was using. Graham explained that we were incorporating our preferred definition into Assisted Living – as part of the solution to the challenge that DoH had identified and repeated many times in White Papers. Zahid described the data mash-up work that underlies e-health but we all agreed that this fell outside the area His Spittleness was interested in. By far the best response came from Jackie in answering the question on what practitioners might think. She got quite agitated by our use of jargon and pointed out that most of the people who would be classed as end-users wouldn’t recognise what we were talking about. I guess the overall feeling was that telemedicine felt like a partial answer looking for a problem. The meeting decided that I was to write back to His Spittleness explaining why he should not be allowed near a detailed project but should stick to strategy. Great!!! :-)

I decided to work at home on Friday to catch up. I had done 2 days at Swindon, so got time off for good behaviour. As it was I spent over an hour talking to a guy writing a book on the brand spirit model – only David Way will understand that phrase. It was a fascinating trip down memory lane – first at ICI and then in the Innovation Group where we went through a process a lot more rigorous than anything we have done at the Technology Strategy Board to try to work out what we stood for and how we wanted to be perceived. In both cases the necessary long term embedment process was interrupted by outside circumstances. The more we talked, the more I remembered my fondness for the model and the cross-business interaction to agree “the path forward”!! 

I had managed to grab some time with Paul W during the week, so I spent more time re-writing the Innovation Platforms piece of the master presentation. The more I do this the more I have worries about the pilots and whether they can or should survive into the medium term. 

The best bit of the week was the unexpected announcement that the bunch of cowboys we buy our IT support from were closing the system down at 4 o’clock on Friday and probably wouldn’t open up again until Tuesday – and maybe not them because they were on holiday. If anyone is interested, I have about 25 doves (who have interbred with pigeons presumably because they like a bit of rough) to use to pass messages between us and London!!!