..Easy to understand difficult to do.
Quote by Nate Regier in Compassionate Accountability
Are “you” the blocker?
If life was binary. For every interaction you were either an enabler or a blocker. If YOU are the blocker I suggest reading The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.
Ashville weekly
Every week a new episode of the life and times of Daniel. I have been gripped and watched all 204 episodes to date
Good enough for now, safe enough to try
A principle to live by.
Introducing The Citizens’ Jury
Museums have been run successfully for over 100 years. However even museums need to move with the times. Being more useful to more people is a phase I say a lot here at BMT. One of my core principles is placing “user needs” at the heart of what we do.
In addition to the typical methods of asking existing visitors what they need from us we are experimenting with a Citizen Jury throughout the second half of 2024.
We have written about how The Citizens’ Jury works on our website.
In short the Citizens’ Jury are 25-30 representive people chosen from a lottery of 5000 people across the City. They will will deliberate our initial question:
“What does Birmingham need and want from its museums, now and in the future; and what should Birmingham Museums Trust do to make these things happen?”
Special thanks to NLHF for funding this activity.
I don’t have an opinion today on that
I was thinking today, what do I think about X? I turned thinking into overthinking and concluded that sometimes I’m not ready to give my opinion. I haven’t thought enough about it, I don’t have expertise in said area or just don’t even care enough to dig deeper.
I’m going to try and simply say to my inner self “I don’t have an opinion”.
ah much better.
Test your assumptions
You may well be correct in your thinking. History may repeat itself. Better to test your assumptions though than discover things have changed and you didn’t get the memo. The weather app may say it’s dry but popping outside to confirm is easy.
Art Funds 2024 Directors research
Important reading at a critical time.
Used to be a….
I used to be a:
Student.
Unemployed.
Artist.
Freelancer.
The IT guy.
The manager.
The fixer.
All previous working lives that built today’s current T-shaped skills. Whenever I’m asked how did I choose my path I say I try something and do more of it or less of it depending if I like it. I don’t know what’s next but it’s definitely more of what I like. Oh and being good at something helps me like it. So I practice. If it’s a skill it can be learned.
Using Basecamp to communicate across the organisation
I get asked from time to time how we work across nine with people scattered across the world at any given time (hey I’m writing this over the Atlantic).
Here at BMT we use a tool called Basecamp to support our communication. It is a tried and trusted tool used by thousands of people. We use it because effective communication is critical yet very hard to do at scale. We use it for both internal communication and working with partners on our products and services.
You can read about it’s tools etc on their website so I won’t repeat it here. In short the reason we don’t just use email like everyone else is because email across 150+ people is asking for trouble. Instead we choose a different path.
Basecamp is purely for communicating.
We need to share announcements, proposals, decisions and such like to group’s or globally across our organisation via our HQ group which every person is part of. Using Basecamp makes it the go to place for this.
Over time Basecamp becomes a form of corporate memory. When did we decide X? Answer check Basecamp. Why did we decide Y? Answer check Basecamp. People may leave but their comments remain. Clever huh.
Doing effective meetings is difficult and time consuming. Often times people just want to know the outcome. Share your proposal to a group(s) and get their feedback. To make it sweeter, get their feedback or approval when they are ready. Why wait for a meeting in two weeks when you can make it a simple proposal and get approval. One of our strategic aims is to support working anywhere at any time and this underpins our ability to do so.
Get it on your desktop or mobile if you choose.
We can make as many groups as we need and share with external partners.
Does Basecamp work well? Yes very much so.
However getting us all to use it effectively is a game of patience!
If I had to pick the biggest gripe people have with the tool it is confusion around managing notifications. When you normally post a message by default the setting notifies everyone in the group. It is easy to change but isn’t a behaviour most use/understand is possible.
My personal experience too is that writing with clarity is the key and that’s a skill most of us need to continually hone.