2025 Weeknote 43 : Reaping the whirlwind

October 20 – 26

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.

My weeknotes will be limited this week. It was a weekend away in Kentucky with family, so I’ve had limited time to write and I’m catching up on some other commitments, too.

Professional weeknotes

• Jira on the rise. Nearly 6 years ago, at the outset of the pandemic in early 2020, I introduced the Kanban work management model to our organization and later introduced what was originally called LeanKit, later called AgilePlace. We asked all teams to visualize their work and we created a “big board” of all the notable projects across the organization so we could discuss priorities. That effort wavered once I handed it off to others to lead, and it’s wavered ever since. We decided nearly 2 years ago to move the entire organization to Jira and unify all work streams under that banner. Our antiquated procurement procedures delayed the launch nearly the full 2 years, but this past summer we finally secured the licenses we need, and we’re now on the way. A unified Jira view is starting to take shape as each team across our 100-person organization joins the fray. We’re not done yet, and we have years of optimization ahead of us. But we are, finally, on the way to unification. It’s an exciting time, and I’m just happy to be part of it.
• GX+ Season 11 Finale. This week saw the end of the GX Foundry’s “Season 11” and we gathered to share updates from the past 8 weeks. We heard about our first full-blown research project with the public, apps being launched to retire an outdated platform, vital system upgrades, and more. And we’re gearing up for a busy conclusion to 2025 with Season 12, right through the holiday season.
• Forensic Science Center. The aforementioned Season Finale was held, for the first time, away from our HQ offices, in this case at the new (2020) Forensic Science Center, aka Coroner’s Office. They were gracious enough to let us use their nice conference room and then provided a tour of the facility, with background info on their teams and what they do—which is far more than autopsies and medical examiner reports. They also work with the community to help prevent unnecessary deaths from drug overdoses and/or mental health concerns, both of which remain stubbornly too common. And yeah… we did see into one of the chilled morgue areas with… bagged decedents on gurneys. They provide tons of tours and educational opportunities tied to local high schools and colleges. A great visit.
• “Topology 2026” project announced. The culmination of a few months of intermittent research has finally turned into a team project. What started as a “squad model” investigation has shifted toward Team Topologies, and I’ve invited a crew of 9 to join me in the exploration. We will start soon. But this week we announced the team of 10 at the GX+ Season 11 Finale and I laid out the road ahead:
  • Assess current environment; identify problems to solve
  • Learn about Team Topologies and related conceptual models
  • Discuss what elements—if any—could apply to our needs
  • Develop sample models for further discussion

Professional links

• HBR: What is Psychological Safety? I’m gathering a ton of resources and links for the Topology 2026 team to have as a base of resources, and this is a key early resource. To engage the conversations to come, we will need to ensure our group has the “safety” to talk openly and honestly. That’s hard to create. But if we create it together—with help from a ground rules exercise at the opening—it should be more meaningful and binding.

Personal weeknotes

Family matters

This weekend marked the first time my full nuclear family gathered in one place since back in August, when we moved my parents (we thought) to Tennessee. We gathered in Louisville this time, with my elderly parents coming down from Toledo so all 3 kids (and spouses) could check in and talk about how we all move forward in this new “assisted living” era for my folks. There were a lot of feelings that came out of the Tennessee move and rebound to Ohio, so we had to get past some of that, then talk about where we go next. I’ve arrived at the conclusion that it’s time for my mother to enter a memory care program 24×7, which is a gut-wrenching decision for everyone involved. But vascular dementia progresses in only one direction, so a positive early intervention should provide a better “glide path” to the unavoidable conclusion. (As Scott Galloway has observed, biology remains undefeated across the whole of human history, so wishful thinking won’t actually make things better.)

What will actually happen next is unknown. But I will keep pressing the case for memory care and hope we can get my father to allow it before the end of the year. The sooner, the better.

Dentist

In the midst of everything else this week I also made a trip to the dentist. It was a cleaning, but pressure and temperature sensitivity in two molars that had crowns installed over the summer got some adjustment as well. I think I might like root canals better, since there are no nerves left when that’s all done. In this case they took the drill to my crowns to buzz them down slightly for a better fit with less tapping contact. It is remarkable how sensitive teeth can be, and how each fraction of a millimeter can make such a difference.

Record-setting blood donation goal for 2026

As a kind of self-distraction over the weekend I mapped out a plan to make 2026 a record-setting blood donation year. With the rules stating you can only donate blood every 8 weeks, that means you can only donate 6 times in a single year (52 weeks / 8 weeks = 6.5 donations). However, if you start right at January 1 (or really January 2, since everyone is closed on the first), and you go right out to December 31 of the same year, you can squeeze in 7 donations. So that’s the plan. I will start the year with a January 2 donation. There’s a gap in May due to my trip overseas, but I pick it up as soon as I’m back and the final donation should be on December 29.

I donate again this coming week, on Halloween. (Dracula jokes welcome.) That will end 2025 with just 4 donations. My total after Friday will be 18 units donated since early 2022, or about 4.5 donations per year. So 7 in a single year will be almost double my average.

Classical YouTube

Something I’ve never mentioned on my #weeknotes is how often I will play classical music concerts on the big TV while catching up on email, blogging, or doing other work at home. YouTube has a large and growing collection of classical concerts from around the world. Most of them are from publicly-funded orchestras in Europe and parts of Asia. American orchestras don’t do a lot of this because they aren’t funded sufficiently to give away their content as a public service. (Or some, like our own Columbus Symphony, are not worth sharing online because their performances are so often sub-par.)

Here’s one I was watching this evening while completing this very weeknote. Fans of the 1984 Oscar-winning film Amadeus will recognize the third movement (Adagio) as the one Salieri describes as starting like a squeaky old music box and then turning sublime in the hands of the master composer Mozart.

I hope the Europeans, in particular, can keep this art form going.

About this week’s header photo