Wow. This is my tenth year of doing an end of year retrospective taking a look at the shape of the work which I’ve done over the past 12 months (previous years: 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021). I find it a helpful thing to do. It’s useful to take a step back and think about the mix of work, what I’ve actually spent my time doing, and what I might want to evolve or do differently. This is a good time of year to do that. So, in no particular order, here’s what I did in 2023:
- Workshops: this continues to be a big part of what I do. I think workshops are just a brilliant way to focus a team on a new strategy, a change of mindset or ways of working, coming up with new solutions or learning new techniques and approaches. During the pandemic everything pivoted to virtual of-course, and it was only really in 2022 that things seemed to regain more of a natural balance (although there’s still plenty of hangover impacts that haven’t really settled yet). 2021 was slightly bonkers in that I did 155 virtual and 3 F2F workshops that year. 2022 saw more of a reset with 60 virtual and 16 F2F workshops. 2023 saw a more even balance still, with 54 virtual and 37 F2F workshops. There were a couple of big workshop-driven programmes that I took on this year which were individually fascinating and worth calling out – a project to work with NHS leaders around getting the most out of technology and designing for better outcomes, and one with the operations leaders and teams at Astra Zeneca focusing on how they can align agile mindsets and approaches with a Lean manufacturing foundation. This latter project took me to Sweden, the US Mid-West and Macclesfield – quite the combination. And there has also been a few other trips to run workshops in Paris, the Middle East, Madrid and Singapore which I’ve really gotten a lot from – I love working in new environments with different cultures. There continues to be endless variety in organisational and sector contexts, with clients this year including BEEAH, BUPA, Shiseido, Sony Playstation, Old Mutual, Abrdn, Legal and General. Another memorable one was a workshop on growth mindset in a Shropshire school hall for leaders of an education trust.
- Google Firestarters: I’m happy to say that since pivoting from ten years of live events to a series of video conversations and a podcast Firestarters has reached a much broader audience and also continues to build some real momentum. This year the podcast entered the top 5% of all podcasts (there’s a real long-tail to the format) which had been an objective of ours from the beginning. And we also had some amazing guests over the past year including Kevin Kelly, Alison Coward, Michael Lee, Claire Hennah, Rob Estreitinho, Nick Myers, Lou Downe, Richard Shotton, Dom Boyd, Ana Andjelic, Scott Brinker, Leo Rayman, Helen Edwards, Adam Morgan, and Agathe Guerrier. It’s a real privilege to get to speak to so many brilliantly smart people. Happily Firestarters is continuing into 2024.
- Consultancy: There’s actually been less pure consulting work this year, although some of the workshop-driven work has involved some consulting alongside it. I also did a couple of short projects around agile mindsets with a couple of different FMCG clients.
- Speaking: I’ve said before that I’d like to do more speaking and I think that’s still the case. But this year I was fortunate enough to speak at the Digital Marketing Forum in Hertfordshire, the Best of Breed conference, Econsultancy Live, a Digital Guernsey innovation event, an Atlantic Grupa conference in Sarajevo, and in-company events for Dreamtek, CPPIB, and Calligo. I continued with my quarterly trends work for Econsultancy (which unbelievably I’ve now been doing for over a decade) which involved a number of webinars, and I also did a series of webinars on innovation mindsets for Lavazza in Italy.
- Writing: I probably did less writing than I’d like this year – something I want to change as this gap has been a consistent theme over the past few years. Nevertheless a second edition to my second book Agile Transformation was published this year, and this book and my first book Building The Agile Business also came out in a number of overseas markets including Italy, Korea, Portgual, Indonesia and Brazil. I also wrote a best practice report on Retail Media (such a rapidly evolving but fascinating area right now) for Econsultancy. There were also 35 editions of my weekly newsletter curating digital insights, trends and quirkiness (now 13 years old – you can subscribe via the form right at the bottom of this page). I keep promising that I’ll move it to Substack when I get the time as the Mailchimp pricing keeps on escalating. Maybe next year. I also wrote 37 blog posts this year and finally (FINALLY) moved off Typepad onto WordPress. Now I’m here I need to be more regular with my posts – must do better. There’s also some initial thoughts about writing another book next year. It’s a big maybe – it’s such a marathon to do it, particularly when you have to fit it in around everything else – but the itch is growing so we’ll see.
Overall it’s a been a fulfilling year, for which I count myself very fortunate. I like the idea of having something of a portfolio of work. Variety is one of the great benefits of working for yourself and every year the mix of what I do evolves slightly and it pushes the boundaries of what I know. Kevin Kelly talked about lifelong learning in his Firestarters episode and it matters to me that I’m still learning with every project and every year that goes by. I often find that there is useful intersections between the different types of work that I do, which helps me bring different thinking and new ideas in all the time. I pride myself on never doing the same talk twice, and every workshop is different. As it should be. The challenge in this is the constant context switching, but I really can’t complain. It’s great to be doing work that I enjoy, to be learning, and paying the bills at the same time.
(Picture courtesy of me, and a rather snazzy example of #corporatecarpets).
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