Month: July 2026

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The case for friction

I don’t actually have time to write this out in full, so this is a ‘stub’ of an idea that I might return to. Although, based on previous suggestions that I will return to this topic, I probably won’t as I’ll simply forget and move on, filling this page with mundane crap that’s useless, even to an LLM scraper.

Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes, friction.

I recently read Martin Wiegel’s piece about why we need human artists. He makes the case that they show us a window into a place that invites us to go beyond seeing, to start looking. They are looking for us so that we may see something we’d normally gloss over in our frantic, modern lives.

Read it, it’s great. Even if you don’t come back here, it’s more than worth your time and effort to click through.

Second, I saw this piece from The Guardian, US Edition. Why does everything feel joyless?

It got me thinking about how I’ve never seen a tech leader who looked like they understood joy. They’re all about removing friction, to smooth out the edges of life that catch you in the metaphorical shins, or the weird oddness that can sometimes grab your attention when you should be doing a simple task like stepping off an escalator. Their Modus operandi is to get rid of joy. Surprise and delight, it turns out, is only surprising and delightful if it’s had all the joy sucked out of it so you can ‘transact’ quicker and get back to doomscrolling.

Anyway. Joy. It’s also inherent in Martin’s piece. We’re missing it. No digital experience gives joy in a way that, say, watching a beetle march through grassland, or playing with a dog you meet in the park for no other reason than it wants to and you have the time, or sitting thinking about a line in a book you’ve just read that stopped you in your tracks and requires you to actually think deeply about the words chosen. Or whatever it is that floats your boat. That brings you joy. Those three are activities of mine in the last 24 hours. I could think of more, but you get the point.

They’re pointless in terms of capitalism, or tech culture, or productivity. They’re about observing and thinking about what you’re observing. They’re looking (or doing) rather than getting this stuff off your agenda so you can CRUSH IT, or whatever it is that the LinkedInfluencers do these days.

Joy. Find it. Nurture it. Add the friction that makes you have to experience the things that could bring joy. Don’t seek it out, let it happen.

Start with forgetting to take your phone with you when you next leave the house. Once the jitters wear off, you might find you can start to enjoy the world again. There’s friction. And that’s joy.

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A long week

This week feels like it’s been going on forever.

There’s a lot going on work-wise, which is great. But I think I’ve not slept well and the compounding of that on my brain and body is about to come to a head. First up, a big presentation, which follows another big presentation yesterday.

I’ve been practising the art of not responding for the sake of it, which has proven to be a very powerful tool in meetings. It opens up a void that the person who is saying things that make no sense or are aggressive tries to fill. They usually undo themselves. An example of this, and how it undermines the person, or accenuates their stupidity, is the El*n interview with the Economist. Search it up, I’m not putting that muppet on my site.

I then undid all the good I’ve been learning by getting excited about cymatics in a meeting and trying to explain it to people. Afterwards they all went off to look at it and totally got why I brought it up, but I made a complete idiot of myself. At least I acknowledged it. I was tired and excited and my brain fired off a connection to something from 18 years ago.

Lesson learned: don’t reference 19th century physicists in a meeting at 5pm.

I’ve got one big presentation to do next Monday and a meeting in London on the Wednesday that I’ll need to smarten up for (no Godzilla t-shirts for this one) and then I’m done for a week or two. Judging by my faux pas in the meeting, I need the break as much as my current colleagues do.

It’s been a long week for them, too.

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Titles

Today, I got to thinking about titles.

In my current role I’ve been switched (by others) from ‘strategist’ (my label) to ‘Strategy Director’ (others’ label – and, I note, with the “title” case). When I’ve been positioned as the ‘director’ I’ve had a more positive experience with a difficult client. Like they are happier they’re dealing with someone who is at a ‘director’ level even though I’m doing the same work I had previously been doing under the guide of being a simple ‘strategist.

Do titles make a difference? Really?

I think they probably do. For me, I just think about the work I’m doing – strategy. My lined and tired face should alone let someone know that I have experience. Maybe it’s just me and that there is an expectation when someone introduces themselves as a senior level person.

Or perhaps I’ve just read more into a situation than is actually there. The client is still difficult, so aside from how they speak to me and act on my work being different they’re still harder work than they should be.

The good thing that comes from pushing myself up the hierarchy is I can say what needs to be said and it’s generally accepted.

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More Mundane Than Monday

I never really got the Sunday scaries, and I still don’t. I’ve got quite adept at switching off these days, or rather better at compartmentalising work and home. Some of this is because I’m less invested in the politics of a situation. I do the work to a high level and work with others to ensure their own work is the best it can be. Or rather, that *our* work can be the best it can be.

Today I’m doing the work that no one sees. The research and thinking that enables the best work to happen. It’s not boring but it is mundane in that the inputs are not something that people appear to care about, they only see the output and put all the value on that. The use of ai is only making that worse – the inputs are ‘ask an ai bot’ and the outputs are just a copy&paste transaction.

Tomorrow I will sit down with some humans and chat through what I’ve learned, what I think it means, and gather their inputs. I’ll use these to shift my own thinking. I’ll write it out in words and share that with everyone again and have them feedback. Finally, I’ll create some slides to show the client so that we have an agreed and shared starting point for the actual work.

That’s the process.

Now, I say that the thinking bit is mundane. It’s obviously not. What I mean is that telling people where you looked, how you put it together with a bunch of other inputs (some decades old) and how reading a blog post about sheep farmers helped you think about how to frame a question for a large, global financial institution… well, they’re not interested in that at all. Which is their loss.

To me, this part is the most interesting thing about thinking. Gathering a set of data and information and turning it into knowledge and insight. That data and information is there for everyone and anyone to gather up. The bit that cannot be replicated is the transformation of that into something novel or an angle that swiftly turns everyone’s perspective on its head and allows new paths to be opened up and explored. Or an answer that seems obvious when you see it but was hidden from view becomes crystal clear.

That’s the process.

I love the process. No way I’m outsourcing that to a prediction machine.

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Bookends

Again, I’ve failed to post every day, but I have managed to post more than once so that’s an improvement on that metric. Quality-wise, it remains as terrible as ever.

This week has been wrestling with something that I really shouldn’t be wrestling with: project management. This has come about because of a skills boundary and so I’ve been brought in to fill gaps and expand the skills on offer. This is what happens when you spend 30+ years doing a thing and applying it across different media and roles.

However, it did demonstrate to me, again, that brand exists across everything. That it’s an innate part of the modern world, and the talking about it is the PR bit. Two sides of the same coin. If you do brand well people will talk about it, or you’ll want to tell people; if you do it badly, people will talk about it but you may want to do some crisis communications or, what might be best called propaganda.

I managed to be politely rude to someone. What I would say was I put someone in their place as they were attempting to suggest that they were the expert and everyone else was an idiot when actually they aren’t the expert and the reason we’re where we are is because they’ve been unclear in their own mind what it is they want to buy. And then been unable to articulate it correctly. Oh, and they wanted a lot of things for free and there was no way I was going to do that.

I also did my ‘say nothing’ routine when faced with someone trying to be all mansplainer and macho (what I mean is go on dick-swinging duty during a call to attempt to assert authority where they have none). I find it says more to say nothing in these situations and the subsequent clutching at straws, backtracking and bluster normally settles things down. It’s something I wish I’d learned 20 years ago.

I spent a lot of time on calls this week. It’ll be the same next week. At least I can do these from home, I suppose. Imagine having to go into an office simply to spend your entire day holding meetings via Teams? One of a modern-day Dante’s Seven Circles of Hell, no doubt.

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Everything is brand

I’ve been thinking a lot about business models in the creative industries recently. Particularly in agencies where time and resource type had a fixed cost applied and you were billed for how many hours were used of each different skill. Work was determined by ‘days’ needed for each skill.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this is I’ve been back in that world and, well, day rates still hold sway. It’s a poor way to cost things and everyone loses. Do I have an answer? Yes, and no. I think it’s context-specific and nuanced.

A bit like media.

Although some years back, Faris Yakob posited that everything was becoming PR. And perhaps it was. PR, though, is the shiny way to communicate brand.

Surely, therefore, everything is brand?

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The Seven Circles (or Days) of Hell

It’s been warm in the UK.

It’s also been over 50 years since we were warned about this by Sir James Lovelock. Since then we’ve mostly sat on our hands. Some anti-science politicians are saying more oil and gas drilling will help.

This is also the week I learned that Paul Eddington, the actor known for Yes, Minister, and The Good Life, had the same lymphoma that I have. Sadly I also learned it killed him.
I suspect it’ll kill me, one day.

I’ve also been working. And getting the release of an album readied. It’s being manufactured at the moment and the last pieces of print are being designed. There’s a lot of proofreading to be done. And triple-checking of design choices. Soon it’ll all be off to print and any mistakes will have to remain.

Other than that I’ve been wearing a UX hat this week, and also fiddling about on some strategic work. Oh, and having to finally get a blue passport sorted. Bye bye maroon EU passport, I will miss you.

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Week End

It’s been more than a week since I posted. Work things keep me busy.

I’ve been in London a few times this week, in an office. The temperature was still quite warm but not heat dome temperatures. Which was better. I’m more of a 21ºC kind of person.

I facilitated a workshop this week. I’m getting better at recovering from eight hours of being the focus of the room. It’s still tiring but I am able to cope with it.

I caught up with an old friend. We talked about everything from ai to 2014 conferences and some confidential things I’d love to share but I’m not allowed to. Suffice to say that some people that are considered the ‘good guys’ are actually complete and utter c*nts. Perhaps it’s no surprise?

I managed to send some invoices. Highlight of my week.

I thought a little bit about the announcement that the NHS will ‘reward’ people for walking 30 minutes a day. It’s not hard to do, but for some people it’ll be impossible. Also, what about disabled people? Do they just not get rewarded? And as with all targets, there will be those who look for easy ways to reach it without actually putting in the effort. It might be better to make it safer to walk places without fear of being run over by a car or Lime bike user, or people who are glued to their f*cking screens and crash into you when you’re simply standing waiting to cross a road (while Lime bikes stream past a red light).

I’m really not a fan of Lime bikes, or anyone who isn’t obeying the rules of the road and therefore endangering pedestrians. Yes, I get that it’s an inconvenience to stop, but at least slow down!

Other than that I’ve been going back and forth on design changes for the next Unspun Heroes release, and being gobsmacked at the stupidity of people who have, somehow, managed to make a lot of money doing a business.

It’s been exhausting but also, on occasion, a lot of fun.

Oh, and finding people on LinkedIn who completely miss the point you’re making continues.

See you next week.