#WeekNotes – week beginning 21st June 2021

I got to spend a day with people, going for lunch with an old colleague and having coffee with the CEO of a foundation.

Real people

I started last week with Onion Collective in Watchet, North Somerset and I keep feeling guilty about it. After being normalised to think that work is only work if I do it on an MS Office product. But I find my brain working in different ways after in-person chats. I’m thinking in different directions and making different kinds of connections.

If the verbal is only a small percentage of communication, how much do we lose in Zoom/Teams/Meet etc?

This is valuable lost information when talking to other people in our world. What issues get glossed over that a Renaisi advisor would have dug a little deeper on, had they noticed the nervous hand-wringing in person?

Plans

I had a long session with the other executive directors to go through in detail all of our financial plans that fell out of the three-year plan we took to the board a few weeks ago. Starting to build up the pipeline, think about the leading indicators, ensure we have the resourcing in place. All of this is the hard work of turning ideas into strategies, strategies into plans, and plans into reality.

New projects

I kicked off two new small projects this week. The projects are financially small, but are important and quite significant steps in building up a whole new product area at Renaisi. I am constantly surprised by how long it takes to sow all the seeds and layout all of the groundwork, but also pleasantly surprised when you start to see things grow into real projects with real organisations that want to work with you.

Reading, listening and watching

I am a fan of Tortoise Media, and don’t read as many of their long pieces as I would like.

But some of their podcasts are completely phenomenal. Their three-part podcast, Left to die: Escape from the Amarula about a particular incident within the wider conflict in Northern Mozambique is many of the things that good journalism should be, in my opinion. I was shocked, moved, and completely swept along by the narrative, and also greatly informed about a conflict that I knew shamefully little about.