A weekly blog…. yikes

So I launched a new website at the back end of 2023 and thought I’d start the year committing to a monthly blog – of the important things that float around my head: work, life, music and politics and their various interfaces. Suggestion by Andy Winter to make it a weekly thing playing right into my competitive nature and always liking a challenge so here comes edition two.

Work: when I set up independently I always wanted to focus my energies with people that I respect and where I thought I could make a difference. Managed to largely hold this line and we still have a number of really interesting engagements underway. Whether this be trying to improve access to drug and alcohol treatment for those with co-occurring conditions, supporting the establishment and / or growth of different peer lead organisations or working on longer term strategic planning. I could never find the words really to describe the approach I try to take to strategic planning and used to get tied up in making it ‘applicable’, ‘iterative’ and ‘organic’. Then I read No Bullsh*t Strategy by Alex Smith which makes it much easier – let’s try and make a strategy “clear, simple…. and actually useful”. Will report back in a couple of weeks when we launch the first example….

Also had an interesting ‘interview’ with a potential customer about a piece of ‘impact evaluation’ work that we’ve done before and within the sector with which I am most familiar. It was pretty clear after a few minutes that we weren’t going to be the right fit so foreshortened the interview. Made me reflect on various stages of my career when I would have received this as a personal sleight or dismissed it as poor decision making. Now I see it just as what it is – we weren’t right for each other. I wish them well.

Now spending some time preparing for a presentation to the Board and Management team of the fine people at CLINKS – working through how they can best use the insight we gathered during a recent Impact Evaluation to inform their next 3 Year Strategy

Life: went away for a couple of days to celebrate my wife’s birthday. We realised that we had now been together for more of our lives than we hadn’t. Not sure if that’s a milestone or not – but it’s certainly another time marker. For those of you looking for a music recommendation we also found ourselves listening to Nadine Shah for much of the journey. If you aren’t familiar with her work you know what to do next…. and she’s going on tour in spring time.

#strategy #businessplanning