This taught me the value of approaching my client's organisation like a functioning ecosystem. People will find ways to make things work - depending on their incentives. In this view, data governance's role is to empower, rather than police.

My user-centred design colleagues are more fluent in these principles - but my take away messaging here is that human value systems need to be made explicit when designing systems. This often means designing for "trade-offs", and making these explicit.

I believe the study of futurism is an exciting field, and would love to one day qualify as a futurist. I believe the methods Amy Webb advocates for can be useful for any organisation looking at preparing for the future.

I read this book at the recommondation of one of my mentors - Suhail - when I was trying to understand the world of strategy consulting. It gave me a solid grounding on the ecosystem a "strategy" exists within, what it is meant for, and what it should contain.

I listened to a lecture given by Mr Pope, and found his approach to how the civil service should build things quite impressive (he did play a role in the founding of GDS after all). I like the modularity of his ideas, including how each "module" of citizen-state interaction should be designed to optmise for things like privacy and convenience. 

This was a long read - I was curious about how "strategy" came to be as storied and prestigious as it was. The majority of the book was devoted to strategy's military roots - which was itself quite interesting, and has applications for business strategy as well.

I started watching "House of Lies" some time ago, but couldn't make it past the first few episodes. Their version of consulting was not something I recognised at all - and made me wonder if my clients really saw me the way the show portrayed. Reading this was a similar experience - I tried to keep my mind open, but found it quite hard to agree with the findings as it described a form of consulting I did not recognise

Given I spent many years in the consulting industry, I wanted an external view of how it all worked. I devoured this book - it made explicit many of the lessons I had learned about how power works when everyone is a "partner". It taught me about how one navigates both hard and soft power, and how these structures are maintained.

I did Doug's Infonomics course on Coursera some years ago (both 1 and 2), and happily found that many of the principles I learned as a data strategist were also common to the study of infonomics. But there were also many good lessons in here on ascribing value to data, nebulous as it might be.