Month: January 2026

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A tale of two experiences

I’ve just come off a call with John Lewis customer service. Well, their finance department, actually. They were calling to organise a replacement for a faulty item that’s out of warranty – it had been ‘fixed’ during its guarantee period and that repair failed. Initially they said it couldn’t be fixed and we needed to ‘prove’ the fault was with the repair. That was a ‘nope’ from me and I escalated my complaint using my tried and tested method.

That worked. I was offered a replacement with a new dishwasher that was the same as the one that had failed twice in just over two years. I said no, could I ‘upgrade’ my option and pay the difference. Yes, they said, hence the call from a cold and rainy Motherwell in Scotland – the lovely woman had the most sunny disposition, though!

Next week a new dishwasher will arrive and the old one will be removed. All for free, except the difference between one broken dishwasher and one new one. Result: a satisfied customer.

I also received an email from a student friend of my kid. He is autistic and struggles with processing and has been having issues with Nationwide. They offered him £100 to sign up for their student account, which he did, but due to him being half Spanish and his birth certificate showing his mother’s maiden name as his ‘registered’ name, it didn’t match his UCAS application and Nationwide declined his application.

To move things forward he had to fill in a form on a website which requested he fill in his correct name. He considered this to be his full name and the form field wouldn’t allow for all the characters – yep, that Spanish name is lengthy – and it produced an error. So he called them. The customer service agent said he needed to sort out something on his UCAS side of things for it to go through, so he did. However, he missed the deadline for being able to apply for the £100 welcome bonus by a day.

Nationwide refused to honour the welcome bonus. They said the problem was his as he had missed the deadline. When presented with evidence that he was assured it would be okay and he needed to organise a change on his UCAS application and provide additional documentation they said he hadn’t filled out the web form.

Every time he needed to add to his complaint he had to write a letter. A letter – with postage costs, bear in mind. Today he was informed, by email, that Nationwide are upholding their decision to refuse him his welcome bonus. Don’t like it, speak to the financial ombudsman. I’m sure they’ve got plenty of other things to do, but I will be helping him do that.

What has happened is he is in the process of moving his entire banking away from Nationwide. As are his friends. And so are some of their friends. In fact, Nationwide will likely now lose a dozen or so customers. For ever.

I’ll also be taking it to a national newspaper who help people with idiotic customer service decisions like this. They’ve already expressed an interest as it’s hardly an inclusive way to run a customer-facing institution. I hope the publicity helps them lose some more customers, considering they did a recent rebrand with the line: ‘A Good Way to Bank’.

Turns out it’s not the best way to bank if you’re neurodivergent, young, and new to banking.

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Book shopping

Aside from music, the other thing I love to find are books to read.

Each year, I try to read the Booker Prize long list and the Pulitzer Prize finalists (and subsequent winner of both). This means that come January, I need to make sure I have those books available plus whatever else grabs my attention in the shop.

Books are something that I enjoy buying in a shop rather than online. This year, I’m lucky that my child has a part-time job at a national bookseller and so gets a whopping discount. I’ve decided to take advantage of that, so today I am in London hot-desking at a brand agency and I decided to grab some fresh reads and have a coffee and natter with the child – they’re away at university so time together has been pared back.

The challenge of buying books in a store is they are heavy (a lot of them are still in hardback) and I now need to carry these, in the torrential rain currently bashing London’s pavements, to the rail station and then home. However, the pain of carrying kilos of books certainly makes the pleasure of reading them that much more potent.

I maintain a wishlist of books I want to read on my Notes app on my phone. It’s long. It never seems to get shorter, or has it ever in the past five years disappeared entirely. I hope it never does.

All of the books I’m referencing above are fiction. I read a lot of fiction, certainly at night in bed. Non-fiction is something I read in the day, alongside email newsletters and associated online reading. At the moment I’m reading a book about how to recognise what’s happening in organisations so you can “stop looking and start seeing what makes organisations work”. It’s called Essential Balances and is linked to Systems Thinking in Practice and does its best to dispense with any academic language and to provide practical advice and ‘ways of working’.

While I’m not yet convinced that it’s got anything new, it has a really helpful set of ‘notes’ at the end of each chapter/theme. These are a goldmine of fantastic detail coupled with practical steps; in fact, I’m thinking that these could be read as standalone pieces. They are certainly the most useful part of the book, so far.

It’s a readable book, though, which isn’t something that I could say about a lot of the corporate crap I’ve encountered over the decades, much of which could have been a blog post, or in some cases a simple social media post. Thankfully, this is not one of those and, perhaps, it may be a book I come back to later. I reckon I might type out the book’s notes to look back on, in my own words, to form a set of useful tools.

You can find out more about the book Essential Balances on its dedicated website.

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The day after

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon listening to three singer songwriters play some songs in a pub in Farringdon. The Betsy Trotwood, as it happens. This is a pub I know from my days working in Clerkenwell, although it also used to be a place to avoid as it was always full of journalists from The Guardian who had their offices across the road. I noticed this is now where LinkedIn does business, however, as far as I’m aware LinkedIn employees do not frequent the pub. Certainly not on a Sunday afternoon.

I did sit next to a journalist, though. She was from Egypt and had been spending time in Gaza. We had some brief but illuminating (for me) conversations about what it is like on the ground there, how people cope, the sort of stories that don’t get told here in the UK and the stories that they want to tell (not always as negative or frightening as I had thought they would be), and much more.

It was both ear- and eye-opening as afternoons go.

Not only did I have my worldview shifted through the chat with this journalist, but also by listening to an artist I’d never heard before. Not their music nor their name. They stole the show for me, though. Pete Greenwood, for those still reading (not that I’m writing this for anyone other than myself).

Pete had that wonderful ability to tell stories in as few words as necessary, to draw out laughs from those of us listening, but also to hold us rapt and silent with the musical stories he told afterwards. Putting us at ease and then delivering something astonishing. He was all about humanity in every sense.

I’d seen this type of interaction in my professional (inverted commas probably necessary) life once or three times. Not as often as I’d like to have done, but still. Like a great new business pitch, there was the convivial opener that settles the room and makes everyone take a collective breath in, relax and wait – perhaps with some heightened anticipation – before the main event. And then they’re told a story, or taken through a narrative if that ‘s’ word is too much for you, and it really lands. There is silence, nods along with the beats, perhaps even the equivalent of polite applause.

Pete had it down to a fine art. Just by being himself. Being human. No reliance on theatrics, or any attempt to be someone other than Pete Greenwood with his own unique point of view expressed in as few words as necessary to get the point across, plus an entertaining part. All the things that make for good business meetings and, often, all the things missing from them. I’d wager the entertainment piece flowed easily because of what came before.

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Week one, done

I doubt very much that I’ll continue to post every day, as not only do I have a lot of things I have to do, or occasions when I’m not well enough to move from my sofa or bed, I also know that attempting to meet a target is a bad thing.

Hit the target, miss the point. As the saying goes.

However, to get my brain fizzing with ideas – including a few longer, proper deep dives into subjects that have come up in conversation or just popped into my head – this initial burst of enthusiasm has been just what I needed to motivate me to write.

So, one week, five posts. What have I learned?

Typing into the interface without filter has its upsides and downsides. I think I’d like to explore this more.
Not having anything planned is more difficult than it might seem and therefore having some ideas or subjects is probably going to make my life easier and my blog posts better.
I also have to remember that I do blog at least once a month over on Unspun Heroes, and I maintain a BlueSky presence for that project, too, so if I miss days here then it’s likely I’m writing and thinking about music over there.
I haven’t tried to use the phone or iPad interface for this blog, but I think that might be a useful trick to separate quick thoughts and longer, more thought-out pieces.
Not writing for an audience – and recognising that – is the best thing ever; literally no one to impress and no reason to try.

So, that’s my week. Now I have to do some life admin and house cleaning stuff before the weekend. I’m off to see a gig on Sunday, so perhaps I’ll write some thoughts about that at some point.

Oh, I thought about writing this as the first weeknotes entry, but I want to keep this as unstructured as possible and needing to post every week just feels like I’m going against my own idea. I may go back over my weeknotes from my MSc, though, as there was a whole load of thoughts that I’d at least like to revisit from a personal perspective before they get deleted (which will probably happen automatically this year).

See you, maybe, on Monday.

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Not interested, thanks

I’ve always liked the phrase ‘zero fucks to give’. It’s final. There’s no opening for discussion and negotiation. This year, I’ve decided to apply this snappy phrase to what other people think. It’s not about growing a thicker skin – critical analysis of one’s self is important, and if someone else can help you with that then that is welcomed. This is about ignoring the haters, those who seek to undermine or turn me away from doing what I want to do, and generally not getting on board with the whole ‘this is how you should be doing things’ brigade that breeds ‘best practice’ blandness and strict routines.

Nowhere is this more important to me than here. What I write here is, for the most part for me. I’m not seeking an audience. If I were I’d start a newsletter. Blogging is – aside from fodder for the AI techbros’ machine learning programs – there for me to think things through, to explore, to get stuff out of my head.

I’m using it like ‘morning pages’ (which comes from Julia Cameron’s ‘The Artist’s Way’) to throw out words and not think too hard about them. Unless… unless they spark something that feels worthwhile to follow up on. I want to break the barriers I’ve put up in the past few years, to free up parts of my brain that I have neglected.

Yesterday, as I mentioned in my previous post, I had a meeting where I had a discussion about my process. Someone I’ve worked with a little bit was telling me how interesting they found my methods for engaging with a situation, the questions I pose, how much I listen before I talk, etc. It reminded me of when I was thinking about the ‘How of Work’ stuff from my Formation London days. They mentioned that I did things in a way they’d not seen before, that it was less rigid and more in tune with whatever was required of the challenge in front of me.

In the past, others have said this is a negative of how I work, that I should have a repeatable process. Now, someone was objectively being positive about not having rigidity. At least to begin with.

And so I am not listening to the commentary. Or reading the comments. I’m just doing what I need to do for myself. I’m giving zero fucks, for the time being at least. Because this isn’t written for other people, it’s a tool to get me somewhere else.

You know what? I already feel more confident in my own abilities. I feel lighter. I feel like I want to start doing some things again. Some of the things that I used to do – the silly things, the how-does-this-work experimental things.

I want to fail more again, or not be swayed by success (or perceived success). I want to find my own path once more in the creative aspects of my life. To not be constrained by a prompting machine, or a client brief, or what other people think.

I’ll be happier for it, I reckon.

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Out of time

Today was travelling to London Bridge and then three hours at a hospital appointment to remove some tumours and go over how well (or not) some new anti-cancer medication is working. Plus blood tests. I then stupidly walked to Bloomsbury for a meeting when I should have gone on public transport and now I’m at home with sore feet and swollen toes.

However, I got to chat today about how I approach situations, which really made me think hard about my ‘process’, or more importantly about the questions I might ask in order to get to some answers.

It’s late here now and so I don’t have time to do this justice as a subject. As I stated on a LinkedIn comment, occasionally I will come to something that requires more than me tapping away and publishing via the web interface. This is one of those times and subjects that I want to delve into, and so tomorrow I hope to get some time to do just that. I mean, my feet will likely mean I need to stay off them anyway, so what better excuse for sitting in front of a screen and thinking.

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A quick thought

I’ve decided, to make sure I don’t over-think these posts, to type my thoughts straight into the interface and publish when I’m done. This isn’t because I think what I have to say is right or complete, it’s because I want to use this space as a place to think out loud. I actually want to be wrong occasionally, or at least to have be happy to be wrong later on when I’ve had more time to think things through properly.

So, that’s the premise of all these posts. I need to let go the things that are whirling around in my head – and have been for some time, if I’m honest with myself.

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I keep seeing people talking about ai as a way to speed up their thinking. I’m not convinced that’s what it can do, but I’m definitely certain that it shouldn’t be used in that way. Rather than use ai (always lower case) to speed towards making a decision on something, I’m more interested in using ai to enable humans to be able to slow down enough to think critically about what they are doing, will do, and have done.

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It’s a what?

I saw yet another discussion on LinkedIn – where else – about insights and what they are.

These would appear to be the hardest thing to define – and no, I haven’t asked AI. And yet, it’s actually quite simple.

An insight is a constraint. It’s designed to channel the thinking, creative or otherwise, and bring focus to the situation. It often, but not always, reframes an age-old challenge so that you see it from a new perspective.

If it doesn’t then it’s an observation, or an opinion.