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Colchester Army Day
Today was mostly spent in Colchester at the Army Day organised by none other than the British Army (with a little help from our friend Howard Giles in Eventplan). Apart from a late start here (because Alexander was a bit restless during the night and didn't properly get to sleep until after 01:00 and then we all slept a bit longer) and the hour spent going through the middle of Colchester to get into the event it wasn't a bad day. What was very good was catching up with a number of people and just hanging about in the shade under the trees. We didn't make it for the battle at noon because of the traffic, so all we had was the drill display in the mid afternoon and the finale where the massed bands (Army Air Corps, Parachute Regt,…
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Thursday
Another day of quality time with Alexander. He stayed awake for most of the day (only slept twice both for about half an hour) so we played a lot. Currently his favourite thing to do is to climb to standing on the furniture and then walk along it. he's also a big fan of chasing after balls by crawling after them.
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Not News!
We're not in the news! Huzzah! OK, I know lots of people and things are not in the news but usually that's because nothing has happened that the media would even be aware of. We've had a busy couple of days at work (Monday afternoon and all day yesterday) because of the publication of a Select Committee report. There have been a few press notices about this embargoed until 00:01 today and we have been doing our side of the story to be ready in case of press enquiries. However not a thing on the news or the websites for BBC News or the Guardian that I've searched on, even Google News doesn't have anything on it other than ePolitix. So far so good, although no doubt it will be picked up at some point. Then the deluge of enquiries will start.
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Quality Street Fair
Earlier today Alexander went to the Quality Street Fair, we walked from home with Alexander in the buggy. Quality Street was shut off to traffic for the fair and it was quite busy with a two way flow of people up and down the various stalls on the pavement on both sides of the road. The first thing that really grabbed Alexander's attention was the local council's recycling stand, but not because he is particularly green. What fired his enthusiasm were the helium filled balloons that they were giving away. As I walked past slowly Alexander's head turned until he was leaning out of the buggy looking behind us. We turned back to get a balloon and a young woman was taken by Alexander. She gushed about how nice he was and got him a balloon without me asking. She…
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McKinsey Invented Matrix Games
Most of today I spent on a training course called "Top Down Thinking" being run by a nice chap from PA Consulting who is the project's workstream leader for technology. What was most interesting for me was the way it boiled the presentation of just about anything down to a 'Governing Thought' and some key lines that summarised your arguments (no more than five of those). The general style of it was very similar to the Matrix Game format where you say I think x will happen because ... and give three arguments to support your case. Apparently the basis for this approach was a book called Pyramid Thinking written in the 1970s by a woman called Barbara Minto who was the first female partner than McKinsey had. So on that basis I think it is fair to say that…