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notes from JK

Booklog: Public Servant, Private Woman; Politics on the Edge; My Lives

Public Servant, Private Woman – Dame Alix Meynell

Reading the history of women entering the UK civil service on Martin Stanley’s excellent website civilservant.org.uk led me to looking up this book. I couldn’t get it through my library, so found a copy for £3 online, and to my delight it turned out to be signed by the author!

Along with Dame Evelyn Sharp, the author passed the civil service exams in 1925 - the first year women were allowed to sit them. Unmarried women had been allowed to work as secretaries and typists but not in the ‘officer class’ as Alix explains it. The sections in the book on how Alix, Evelyn and others campaigned for fair treatment, equal pay and more are fascinating and awful – to my mind it’s just so dire that they had to make their case before committees of men determining whether women were capable of ‘being a wife and working’ and so on. Thankfully we’ve come a long way, but a way more to go, including on fair pay.

Alix had an extraordinary life and is admirably open and reflective. She lived by ‘Bloomsbury values’ which we might call consensual non-monogamy these days, with added focus on the arts. Her openness regarding sex, difficulties seeking contraception, how having children might have affected her career and navigating social expectations regarding marriage versus the values she wanted to live by are ever so powerful.

In terms of the actual daily work, her civil service experiences in the Board of Trade, war rationing aside, didn’t sound too different from my own in the very department which now includes the Board of Trade. Though I am very glad that Saturday morning working has since been ditched!

I was left admiring someone who clearly valued public service, lived life to the full and always tried to do what they felt was right. Her social life sounds exhausting to me but it does make for a fun read.

Politics on the Edge – Rory Stewart

As a civil servant I won’t be commenting on the politics in this excellent read, except to say that Rory does not hold back in this book, so any political reconciliation with his former party seems unlikely. As with Alix Meynell’s book, the reader is all the better for his openness.

The sections on his experiences as a minister and working with the civil service are fascinating. As a former civil servant himself, it’s interesting to observe him try a variety of techniques to achieve the outcomes he seeks. It is with prisons one gets the sense he made the most progress and had the greatest satisfaction. It was also one that resonated with me, it read like the best officer-member partnerships I’d experienced in local government. There is something hard to define, but incredibly effective, when the political and official parts of a public organisation align with mutual respect and common goals.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin

A wonderfully written novel which focusses on the story of a boy and a girl who, through their own difficult experiences, bond while playing video games together. As they grow up, they drift in and out of each other’s lives while writing ever more ambitious, and sometimes successful games.

This is a story about friendship and gaming as well as growing up belonging to multiple identities. For example Sam, the lead male character is half Korean-half American; while the lead female Sadie is Jewish from a wealthy part of LA but more comfortable in the world of MIT and Harvard in Massachusetts. These tensions lead to some wonderful observations. And lots of nice gaming nostalgia, connections to Shakespeare (the title is a quote from Macbeth) and fun East coast vs West coast references.

I can’t remember why I put this book on my list, but I’m so glad I did. Brilliantly written with a really heartfelt narrative. Bravo.

My Lives – Sir Francis Meynell

My curiosity was piqued by Alix Meynell’s autobiography, so I managed to track down her late husband’s own autobiography thanks to the wonder that is inter-library loans. Thank you Buckinghamshire County Library for your copy which arrived in Tunbridge Wells still carrying its musty smell of old paper and memories.

Francis Meynell was not nearly as open in his book, published 17 years before his wife’s. He was dead by the time she wrote hers, which may have meant she felt free to be as frank and open as she was. Or it may have been his style. On divorcing his first two wives he is quite curt, while admitting failings, he really fails to offer the reader much insight into himself or those relationships let alone the other romantic entanglements he alludes to.

So one isn’t going to get huge insight into the emotional life of Francis Meynell, other than his obvious adoration for Alix Meynell. Still, my goodness there are good stories to be had. He isn’t shy of some name dropping as he regales us of his “many lives”:

A staunch pacifist and conscientious objector in the First World War, a CND supporter in later life but a strong advocate of Winston Churchill and the Allies in World War Two who played a fascinating role in food rationing and other elements of the war effort.

A radical socialist and erstwhile communist who ended up with a Knighthood. A poet and journalist who also smuggled jewellery from Denmark to Britain to support early socialist groups. Someone who helped market films for the biggest studios of the day. A key player in the creation of the left-wing Daily Record which would eventually become known as The Sun. A renown typographer and designer who created the Nonesuch Press and partied with radicals, yet helped with the design of the stationery for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.

His was a life full of stories, adventures and lucky breaks. As he tells it, there is no sense of hypocrisy or a loss of values, it’s a natural journey into the establishment as he keeps learning and finding new opportunities. He was a man of his time, not aware of all his privilege, yet passionate about women’s rights, social justice and creating a welfare state. I certainly got more out of the book having read Public Servant, Private Woman first. A reminder of how many interesting paths our lives can take.

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notes from JK

Booklog: Four Thousand Weeks, Normal People and Our Man in Havana

Four Thousands Weeks – Oliver Burkeman

This is good, really good but I think you need to be in the right headspace to read it. I can imagine having read this a few years ago and not getting half what I got from it now, with six years of therapy under my belt.

It’s written with a beautiful kindness and gentleness whilst exploring mortality, the meaning of work, why productivity hacks fail and how to be kinder to oneself. I found it very powerful. In particular a chapter called ‘Cosmic Insignificance Therapy’ which argues for a modestly meaningful life rather than the ‘great person’ theory.

Normal People – Sally Rooney

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book and watched a screen adaptation that were both so good, so similar and yet complementary. Perhaps Sally Rooney’s involvement in the screen adaptation is why they seem so consistent with each other. A lovely coming of age story following an on/off/on romance in a small Irish town as they leave school and move to Dublin for university. Amazingly written dialogue and an engaging narrative style.

Our Man In Havana – Graham Greene

I feel I am long overdue in trying some Greene, who is often referenced as an inspiration for Le Carré. This satire of intelligence services (particularly the British) takes a while to get going. But once it hits its rhythm the pacing, story and characters are brilliantly brought to a scathing conclusion.

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notes from JK

Booklog: The Red Sparrow Trilogy by Jason Matthews

I watched the Red Sparrow movie back when it came out and something niggled me about it. It was ok but felt like it could have been more. I then learnt it was based on a novel by a genuine CIA veteran. The first book in the trilogy lingered on my list for a while, but as I began to exhaust Le Carre’s to read, I thought I would give it a go.

Well, wow, this was so much better than the movie. (Aren’t they always?!) Other than all the necessary narrative trimming for film, I think the key element the script-writers left out for Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal of Dominika Egorova was her synesthesia. In the books Egorova can see people’s emotions as coloured halos, giving her an advantage whilst also adding a fascinating twist to how the books can portray key moments of tension.

Ultimately the trilogy is a love story, an incredible portrayal of a female double agent operating in Putin’s Russia and a passionate defence of human intelligence operatives aka spies. Matthews knows of what he writes, and it shows with so many details of techniques and locations that clearly aren’t just pulled together from a quick visit via Google.

As a 30 year CIA veteran, it’s no surprise he plays the Americans as the good guys, but this is no Tom Clancy black v white: FBI agents fumble and fail, as do SVB ones. The CIA’s upper echelons are filled with incompetent bureaucrats as much as the Kremlin has kleptocrats.

The horrible trade-offs the characters have to make for the greater good, the knife-edge risks they carry to survive whilst trying to live and love were compelling and moving. It took real skill from the author to portray sex being used as a weapon of spy craft, yet at other times being genuinely loving without ever becoming cringeworthy.

This is a rich, powerful series of books that had me stunned and sleepless by the time I finished the final instalment. Sadly Jason Matthews is no longer with us, so we will read no more of the incredible Agent Egorova aka Red Sparrow.

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technology

AI + LLM reading list for public servants

It’s clear to me we are in the midst of an AI hype-cycle and I’m skeptical of claims companies are making which directly serve their valuations. Throwing tech into our problems will not solve them.

But this isn’t to say that there isn’t something interesting going on, there is. Machine learning, data science techniques, large language models and all the other stuff being labelled as ‘AI’ are something public servants need to keep a watching brief on, and carefully experiment with. To that end I’ve been sharing some reading I’ve found helpful with colleagues, and I’ve brought all that into one place here.

Benedict Evans is, to my mind, one of the best commentators and analysts out there and his latest essay is extremely helpful for thinking things through: AI and the automation of work.

I really enjoyed a session on Large Language Models (LLMs) at our away day. So many great discussions delving into the philosophy of knowledge. Two recent articles fed into my thinking for the event. Firstly this one in MIT Technology Review exploring why asking an LLM to complete a test like the legal bar exam, is a flawed approach to understanding LLM’s capabilities. Secondly Simon Willinson posted the transcript of his recent sort of ‘year in LLMs’ talk which really helps to focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the current state of the art.

Innovation professor Ethan Mollick writes of his concerns about what the “write this for me” button powered by LLMs means for productivity and meaning. I don’t know if I agree but it’s thought provoking. I have heard that HMRC are already receiving LLM-created letters seeking to reduce people’s taxes with false understandings of tax law. But it still adds to their workload.

Here’s a report of a prototype powered by GPT-4 that lets you draw software that then gets coded for you. What the quality of that code is, I don’t know. But an interesting possible future for our work?

I’m sceptical of the productivity claims being made for Large Language Models (LLMs), but constantly searching for new analysis and insight into this field. Manchester University’s Professor Richard Jones has written a fascinating blog post on this topic, featuring a really interesting example on the use of AI in protein folding for pharmaceuticals. Definitely worth a read.

Large Language Models like GPT are all the hype rage at the moment, so if you want to really understand how they work then Stephen Wolfram has written an epic explanation. Or the simpler version I’ve seen online is “it’s just spicy autocorrect.” Whatever you think of the hype, here’s NCSC’s guidance on their use in government.

How the natural language interface of LLMs makes securing them so hard, enter the world of ‘prompt engineering’.

Max Roser is one of the lead members of “Our World in Data” a wonderful online data resource. I recently read his article from December 2020 Artificial intelligence is transforming our world — it is on all of us to make sure that it goes well and it’s as timely as ever.

Milton Mueller, a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, The Basic Fallacy Underlying the AI Panic, is a punchy argument against fears that “AI will take over”.

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notes from JK

Booklog: Taste, Agent Sonya and How Westminster Works

For some reason I haven’t much felt like doing these reading notes this year, in fact it’s almost exactly a year to the day since my last one. Interesting.

I’ve read more John Le Carré (no surprises there) as I seek whatever I haven’t yet read of his. I thoroughly enjoyed Jason Matthews’ Red Sparrow trilogy, far better than the film of the first book, FAR better. Elizabeth Day’s Magpie was wonderful. Charles Arthur’s Social Warming was a stand-out piece of non-fiction I’ve read. Read it and follow his emails.

Taste – Stanley Tucci

I was utterly besotted with Tucci’s Searching for Italy TV series. He is so charming and endearingly passionate about food in the land of his ancestors. Taste is a memoir which weaves together drinks, food, showbiz eating and rather touching family stories as well as a hilarious snapshot of his family life in lockdown and a tough read on his cancer treatment. Brilliant stuff, and some lovely recipes in there too.

Agent Sonya – Ben Macintyre

Even if you’ve never read Macintyre’s wonderful books, you’ve probably watched an adaptation of them, he’s everywhere these days. And it’s easy to tell way – he researches great historical tales with dedication and writes them up with gusto. He’s really having a great time telling us about them, and it’s catchy. This story of Soviet agent Sonya, a German Jewish communist from a wealthy background is just riveting and astonishing on so many levels. How a woman came to be a top spy in a man’s world. How she raised three children whilst undertaking extraordinary missions and travels. And how she managed to evade detection for so long. Another great Macintyre read.

How Westminster Works… and Why It Doesn’t — Ian Dunt

I think pretty much every section of this book is broadly right in its analysis. It’s also a fun read. Everyone should read it. Indeed much of what it suggests as positive steps forward have been recommendations in recent reports by numerous reviews. Let’s hope some get taken forward.

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technology

Perhaps we’ve been wrong to frame public service digital as a way to save money

I write this post with some trepidation. Let me begin with the incantation that this is my personal view and not government policy in any way. So why trepidation? Because I fear I may be treading on some dearly held assumptions that have been core to much work and countless business cases over many years.

Still, let me give this an airing because I know many colleagues feel frustrated when their work in public service digital (or DDaT, or tech or data science, you get the idea) is seen as a cost rather than an investment. They risk becoming relegated to ‘back office services’, or ‘overhead’ in business planning conversations.

When that happens I fear this is a category error – confusing digital work with the likes of estates and audit, with no disrespect for those important professions intended! It is perfectly rational to have a conversation about estates as a cost centre, an organisation could have smaller, cheaper offices or change its desk ratio to reduce their spend on estates. Doing so doesn’t however fundamentally change the core business.

With digital, by coming in hard on the “we can save money through channel shift/reducing paper use/improving accuracy” type arguments we have pigeon-holed ourselves in the same boat.

Do we really think that since the 1950s the public sector has actually saved money through the introduction of digital technologies? Billions are spent running and building these systems. In an alternative world, with no transistors, what would those billions be spent on? I suspect the money would be spent on delivering and administering core public services and the cost of non-digital administration would not have hugely grown. In our reality our spend on digital services, support and all the associated stuff is a major and growing part of public spending. Is that a bad thing? No, because I would argue it is enabling ways of serving the public that were never previously possible. But they aren’t necessarily cheaper.

To put it another way, as Benedict Evans does eloquently in his recent essay on automation, the introduction of spreadsheets did not reduce the amount of accounting or analysis done. Indeed we have more accountants and analysts than ever before, and the spend on them is consequently greater. Similarly in collecting more structured data in public services, whatever we’ve saved on clipboards and pencils, is dwarfed by the growth in data scientists and tools to support them. I would happily argue this is a great investment to better inform decision-making and continuous improvement, but it is undoubtedly costing more money.

I’ve sat on drafts of this post for quite some time, because in some ways it feels heretical to say this when so much of the narrative has been “faster, better, cheaper” and I’ve previously leaned on that rhetoric too, don’t get me wrong. Sometimes there are savings to be made in a tactical sense – with some channel shift here or on-demand printing there. But zoom out and I feel we’re missing a trick if we don’t move away from “efficiency” to the more vital question, what can we do today for the public benefit which wasn’t possible before?

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notes from JK

AEG oven error F113

I hope this will help those searching the web for this error message which doesn’t, at time of writing, appear in any online documentation.

Having had an engineer out this week for my new oven, he confirmed only basic errors are published with explanations online. Not helpful!

Error F113 is a logic board error with the oscillator, according to the engineer. The solution is a “software update” delivered by replacing the logic board. So if you get this error, you will need a service engineer to help. Sorry!

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technology

The hard work of change, hype cycles and why LLMs aren’t a quick fix

There has been a tsunami of hype recently about Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Bard and so on. To me it has felt quite similar to previous hype cycles, such as with blockchain – “the end of banks” vs “the end for programmers”. For a long time I would get frustrated with people leaping into the latest ‘hot’ technology because I felt they weren’t understanding the hype cycle nor the complexities of how technology really works. However, now I think something more fundamental is going on: In essence, people are consciously or subconsciously, trying to find ways around the long slow hard work of delivering fundamental change (and for me this is specific to work in public services).

Just chucking in some extra technology doesn’t deliver genuine change. Through decades of hard-won experience we know that technology-led change just does not work. It’s only through multidisciplinary teams working in a user-centred way iterating on user feedback that genuine, lasting improvement happens — it is culture change working in step with technology. This is the way set out in the UK service standard, through which we have been able to fundamentally reimagine (some) services and make a positive difference.

I very much know there’s still such a long way to go on the change journey. It is hard yards and we are at the very beginning. It can’t be led by technology, it’s about people and making a difference. When there is so much legacy tech, with poor data models around, I do really understand the wishful thinking that something new could skip the pain of sorting it all out. I know, I feel the pain. But actually doing the hard yards of building the right culture, the right data structures and the right services is what needs to come first.

The tools, technologies and the connectivity of the Internet (a la Loosemore) have allowed us to do public services in fundamentally different ways with a very different cost model, but that alone is not enough. So adding the newest hype technology will never leapfrog lasting change of our culture, behaviours, and imaginations. Indeed, I think the most important shift technological change has delivered is how it has opened our minds to genuinely re-imagining public services for the better. And that is the work. Let’s go.

For further reading on how LLMs work, and how to think about them, I recommend ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web and the lengthy What is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? followed by this UK government guidance.

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Uncategorized

Booklog: The Little Drummer Girl, Silverview & The Whitehall Effect

John Le Carré was an author of widely acknowledged talent and impact. Personally I far prefer his writings to the screen adaptations, though perhaps ‘The Constant Gardener’ was the most faithful adaptation in my (very) amateur opinion.

Most authors I can enjoy reading (or not) but with Le Carré I enjoy, admire and feel a deep frustration at how incredibly good he is at writing. Almost to the point of wanting to never write a word again. There is total mastery in the way he captures moral ambiguity in the little moments which uncover deeper truths whilst highlighting the deceit so fundamental to statecraft.

So I am on a completist drive to read everything he has written, but not read everything about him as a swathe of new memoirs on him and his love life have begun to emerge. To that end, my thoughts on two of his works I had yet to encounter until Kent Libraries came good:

The Little Drummer Girl – John Le Carré

A remarkably finely balanced piece which somehow manages to expose the hypocrisies and moral relativism of the British, Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East. It also is a deep look into the psychology of recruiting and training ‘civilians’ to espionage, with his female lead providing, to my mind at least, a compelling narrative of her divided loyalties and motivations.

There are dream-like qualities to elements of the book as it flits between the female protagonist’s perspective and those of the agents working for each side. It delivers a satisfying ending yet one closes the book not sure who ‘won’ and if anyone really deserved to win.

Utterly astonishing and global in scope, though of course with good dollops of Germany and England as we come to expect.

Silverview – John Le Carré

At the time of writing, this was his last book, published posthumously from an essentially complete manuscript. In an afterword his son suggests that the manuscript had stayed in a drawer for some time not due to concerns over its quality, but because Le Carré feared it was ‘too close to the bone’ in its critique of his former colleagues in the British intelligence services. Personally I didn’t think it took a major detour from his usual critiques.

The usual quality is there, and many common themes are used from his previous works – the English seaside town, retired spies, the sense of British decline. Still, this is undoubtedly a new story, one told with care and grace as he delivers a final rebuke for the failings of international diplomacy as well as of ‘the Service’.

The scale is smaller than other of his tales, but this does not in any way diminish the emotional impact of its conclusion. He was just an amazing talent.

The Whitehall Effect – John Seddon

In many ways what John Seddon wrote in 2014 is well trodden ground for those of us steeped in the ways of system leadership and agile working. But he brings interesting examples and a helpful perspective to the question of why so many government programmes fail to deliver on their promises.

His argument is that the programmes are often poorly defined and led by people without the right skills who aren’t focussing on the right things. Harsh but often fair! He then shows examples of teams doing ‘study’ as he calls it, or discoveries in my world, which then roots teams into the lived experience of service users and staff before iterative work begins. To many that may seem obvious, yet others still aren’t sold so another strong book making the case can’t hurt!

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notes from JK

Booklog: Three Women, Daniel, To Kill a Mockingbird & The Cat Who Liked Rain

As with many friends and acquaintances I found reading hard at the start of lockdown. After a couple of months I seemed to regain my appetite so here’s what I’ve got through. I’m missing libraries now…

Three Women – Lisa Taddeo

Powerful, brave, searing, brutal. This really is a masterpiece. Written with such beauty and clarity. Some of the sentences took my breath away. 

Nobody is normal. Nothing is ordinary. These are easily said but by delving into three women’s lives in crystalline detail we learn something essential about the American woman’s experience in the 2010s. About desire, about expectation, how men and women treat each other. About the guilt and doubt imposed through one’s own thoughts of what being a good parent or partner or friend should be. 

Some may balk at the very explicit details shared from each woman’s sexual experience in this book. But as a frank expose of love and desire it only works with that level of detail. 

Truly a masterful piece of work. 

Daniel – Henning Mankell

Beautiful, heart breaking. Perspective on how we are so easily drawn into exceptionalism for our culture, language, race and way of life. And how good intentions can cause harm if we don’t respect the agency of individuals. 

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

It’s a classic, and rightfully so. I had never read it. Now I have, and I’m glad. Powerful and beautiful. Still so relevant.

The Cat Who Liked Rain – Henning Mankell

In my obsession with Henning Mankell I’m now even reading this story he wrote for children. It’s a beautiful piece on childhood and loss – about a treasured cat going missing. I really loved it. It’s beautiful, sensitive and comforting in how it’s set in a very normal family.