2025 Weeknote 31 : Halloween in July

July 28 – August 3

My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, often focused on work, but with personal stuff, too. Learn more about weeknotes.

Professional weeknotes

• Work on the ADA digital accessibility compliance effort continued this week, though we didn’t get too terribly far yet. We’re reaching out to our networks, looking for consultants and advice and about all we know is that everyone is struggling with this challenge. We did find one firm that may be able to help, so we’ll continue those talks. But stuff coming up next week is going to get in the way of this effort. My hope, though, is that we can:
  • Find a consulting firm to provide overall guidance and to start an assessment and triage program.
  • Create 2 new ADA-focused positions internally and hire them, to receive the results of the assessment and triage and take everything to the next level.
  • Create 2 more positions to assist with the drive to pull more agencies into our One Franklin County website offering. That work doesn’t happen super-fast, but it is a kill-three-birds-with-one-stone kind of solution.
• We met with our USDR volunteer team this week and got some very good intro advice and recommendations about turning strategic goals into an OKR framework. None of our team has worked inside an OKR model before, so we needed the intro. It looks pretty good, but it also looks like developing the actual OKRs can be difficult or time-consuming or both. I think our GX Foundry team is up for it, but we’ll have to make time to build out the OKR infrastructure.
• This week we held the first high-level talks about how to fully digitize our county permanent records processes and technologies. Microfilm is a robust archival tech (developed in the 1930s, if you can believe it), but one of our key suppliers is killing off microfilm production, and advancements in the field have made a fully digital process do-able and attractive. This involves state laws, county policies, lawyers, scanning hardware, software, metadata models, cloud services, public services, paper… it’s everything. We’ll be doing more work on this in the months ahead, hopefully hiring a professional archivist to advise us on best practices.
• I attended my first interview in quite a while, which was great. We do sooooo well with hiring in this organization—the best I’ve experienced anywhere. We should be teaching other organizations (even inside the county) how to do this. It’s not hard, but it does require clarity of mission, attention to detail, and a thoughtful approach that may feel unconventional to some.
• Meanwhile, next week is a bunch of leadership work. I’ll be working on the business rather than in the business. We will have two all-day meetings (Monday and Wednesday) that merge the entire leadership and management groups. This came out of a session earlier in the summer when managers expressed an interest in hearing more from leadership. Well… be careful what you wish for! LOL
  • I will be presenting on our use of “Atlas” (or what Atlassian now calls “Atlassian Home Projects and Goals”), as we pull more parts of the organization into our executive-work-visibility model. The general idea is all work happens in Jira (which is also being overhauled right now), but work that needs political, financial, or stakeholder visibility has to be listed in the “Projects” section of the Atlassian ecosystem, and it has to be updated weekly with a brief status statement.
  • I will be very interested to see what comes out of these 2 days of talks. Will we increase the contact between leadership and management? Will it spur some cultural improvements? Not sure. But open to the possibilities.

Professional links

Not much to share this week, except this one HBR article that surprised me: 5 Ways Leaders Can Communicate Power

For the last several years virtually all HBR content has been pretty “soft” in the way it talks about leadership, management, collaboration, psychological safety and… well… it’s been pretty “woke” for a while, at least in management terms. And management probably needed to develop these soft skills, since so many leaders think “being the boss” is just telling other people what to do.

So this article was a bit of a return to “classic” leadership, which I found surprising but also refreshing. A lot of management / leadership is using your voice and your position to get work done through others, so knowing how to effectively wield that power is important. Key advice:

• Don’t list “options” for action, actually state your choice for action so folks know (a) you thought it through, and (b) you’ve made a decision.
• Think beyond the metrics and talk abstractly about the goals or mission. Remind folks of the overall direction, then give them space to get after the details.
• Always take the blame when something goes wrong; demonstrate accountability. And this quote is devastating: “Blame and deflection signal weakness because they convey incapability to influence a situation.” Yikes. So true.
• Be curious and discriminating. Ask questions that assess the situation clearly and fairly. Strong leaders demonstrate their value by getting at vital truths quickly.
• Use the power of your position to guide conversation, not just talk the most. Don’t dominate the discussion, make it better.

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Personal weeknotes

• I should build a timeline for all the twists-and-turns this senior-living-saga with my parents has taken over the past few months. This week my father generated three whipsaw changes.
  • First, he ended up in the hospital briefly, with what was later diagnosed as dehydration. This freaked him out and the rest of us, too. Odds are the stress of what’s happening is driving a variety of imbalances, which at 87 are precarious on a good day.
  • Second, in the wake of the ER visit and the fears that generated, he let me know the prior termination of the move to Tennessee was back on — he simply rescheduled the move, pushing it back 2 weeks. So I re-booked hotels and pet sitter and so forth so we could assist.
  • Then on Friday we noticed he was visiting an assisted living facility in the Toledo, Ohio area (near where they live now). He calls up later that day and says he’s really been struggling with this life change (believe me, I know), and now he’s thinking about going to this local place rather than relocating to Tennessee. Okay… so… that’s fine, but… is this happening or what?
  • By late Saturday he said was going to cancel the Tennessee contract and move and was still considering all his options. This has been and continues to be a major distraction for me and my siblings. We’re just hoping they end up somewhere with appropriate services and support soon, before the next crisis.
• Meanwhile, we’re just 51 days from the departure to go to Northern California for our hike from Half Moon Bay to San Francisco, and the wife and I continue to assemble our gear. Now we really need to start some modest training, to be ready for the long walks and wearing (relatively light) backpacks. I was able to dial-in a no-water pack weight of about 12 pounds, which is pretty darn good! We also picked up some trail running shoes for my wife over the weekend. So very ready to leave, but the prep is almost as much fun as the walk.
• And finally, Fat Cat is still doing well…

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