Weeknote 09/2026

“Um, you know, I think it would be nice to make something that I just think is absolutely brilliant, and I find it very hard to think anything I do is absolutely brilliant.”

– Faithless, Champion Sound: Side 3 Book of Hours

I'm writing this on the above laptop in our 'spare lounge' after accompanying my daughter to her refereeing engagements this morning. FYI, the first match was interesting, the second could have been filmed for use by chronic insomnia sufferers.

Our son, Ben, is currently on a flight back from Iceland after what seems to have been a wonderful experience. He went on a couple of full-day tours and also explored Reykjavík a bit more than we did when we visited as a family in December 2019.

It's weird to be writing this after only yesterday publishing my February retrospective. But that's what happens when you actually have a writing schedule.

Writing

Here, I published:

I needed a scheduling tool that respects privacy. So I built one.

CalAnywhere exists because I needed it and could build it. Maybe you’ve been thinking “someone should make a tool that does X.” Maybe that person is you?

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

The next chapter

For the past decade, I’ve been a founding member of a worker-owned cooperative. In a couple of months, we’re closing it down to focus on other things.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

The (AI) lottery is already running

I work with organisations that are trying to make the world a better place. Their starting point is and should be the following simple diagnostic question: Where do your decisions end and the algorithm’s begin? Can you tell?

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

February 2026: cooperation, complexity, and code

Looking back at the last month.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

Meanwhile, over at Thought Shrapnel, I published:

Reimagining everyday urban details on a micro scale

Well these, by Michael Pederson, are delightful. Source: Colossal

Thought Shrapnel

Units of attention

Good stuff from Jay Springett, who also links to a 60-page PDF called Paying Attention that I… haven’t paid attention to (yet!) The attention economy rewards the same behaviours regardless of whether the content being spread is a coordinated disinformation campaign or a genuinely interesting essay. The platform does not distinguish between the two. It just measures the engagement. There is a practical implication buried somewhere in the above though I think.

Thought Shrapnel

Who am I, and what does someone like me do with their time?

Truth. Source: Alex McCann

Thought Shrapnel

Agentic commerce is a catastrophe for every business whose moat is made of friction

I’m too young for memories of the original game on the Commodore 64, but I do remember the SEGA Master System version of Spy vs. Spy. While I wasn’t allowed to have a console myself, I would play on friends’ devices. The thing I really remember, though, is my parents leaving me to play for a while which was on a demo unit in Fenwick’s toy department in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It was a game in which you, as either the ‘black’ or ‘white’ spy had to outwit the other spy.

Thought Shrapnel

WAO is closing

I know some people only read Thought Shrapnel and not the rest of my work, so I’m just going to give a quick update to say that the co-op I helped set up 10 years ago, and which has been a source of creative and collaborative inspiration, will be closing on 1st May 2026. We’re all still friends. I’m going to be working through my consultancy business, Dynamic Skillset so get in touch if I can help you or your organisation!

Thought Shrapnel

Super Mario World Map

I don’t know the original source of this, but I think it’s quite old. A reverse image search led to 118 pages of results… Source: Klaus Zimmerman

Thought Shrapnel

Enough is enough

Today, the pedo-authoritarian US and genocidal Israel attacked Iran to distract from respective domestic problems. At the time of writing, reports are that 85 people have died after strikes hit a girls school. So, to put that in perspective, innocent girls have died in attempt to cover up a president’s obvious involvement in a sex trafficking ring, and another leader’s issues caused by starving a neighbouring country to death. Source: Bluesky

Thought Shrapnel

Building a news canary

I’ve been toying with the idea of a new website, (because obviously what I need to do is own more domains and produce more content…) Anyway, what do you think of the following? It’s something I’ve been refining since the start of the year, so that every Sunday I (personally) get an email focused on what’s happened, and what happens next. I’ve been refining a (looooong) prompt to find interesting news stories, press releases, viral posts, etc.

Thought Shrapnel

Reading & Listening

I'm a couple of essays away from finishing Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths. I would have finished it earlier this week, but my sleep schedule has been so messed up – probably due to the change of the season. I'm still re-reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile which feels even more relevant than when I read it the first time around.

My Dad recommended what turned out to be a fantastic episode of a podcast I hadn't come across before. Radical with Amol Rajan was in discussion with Joe Seddon, a straight-talking Yorkshireman, Oxford graduate, and founder of Zero Gravity. He's very likely to go into politics, and I hope he does.

Have a listen to both the episode itself and the listener Q&A. As I discussed in Your mental models are out of date, the world has changed for young people and we need to help them think differently about themselves, society, and the world.

Other than that, I've been listening to Champion Sound: Side 3 Book of Hours by Faithless. I'm not sure who speaks the words right at the start but I've included them at the top of this blog post, because I feel this in my very soul at the moment.

Working

It's a weird time at the moment. We've announced that WAO is closing, and we've only got a few days left on the Amnesty UK community platform project. So I didn't do much on that project apart from collating some links and attending a Pilot check-in meeting.

INASP haven't given us the go-ahead to start working on that project yet, and the client kickoff meeting for the Skills Development Scotland digital badges project I'm doing through Dynamic Skillset is next week.

So I've been working on updating the TechFreedom website while Tom has been on holiday. He's been responding to some of my Signal messages, just as I did when I was in Barcelona and Madrid. We'll work on it more tomorrow as I've had some great feedback from my wife, Hannah, as well as Richard Edwards from Outlandish (who I talked to about it on Friday).

I've also been working on the cloud version of CalAnywhere, and am pretty happy with the progress:

Other than that, I had an internal kick-off meeting with Nate about the Scottish digital badges project and set up the project on GitHub. There are many forms of working openly. In addition to the chat with Richard mentioned above, I also enjoyed speaking (separately) with Oliver Budworth, Matt Lambert, and Alex Defroand about various things.

I updated my consultancyDynamic Skillset website to be a bit more explanatory and have a subtle 'network' style graphic moving around in the background.

Dynamic Skillset Ltd

Strategy, systems thinking, digital credentials, AI literacies, facilitation, and coaching from Dr Doug Belshaw.

Consultancy from Dr Doug Belshaw

Personal

As I mentioned above, my sleep has been a bit all over the place this week. Hannah's got what I suspect is 'flu, but everyone else has had their jab. We travelled to Huddersfield for Grace, my daughter's football match yesterday.

I got a migraine on Monday after running so slowly on Sunday. And I got the worst migraine I've had for ages on Thursday after doing the same on Wednesday. So I just did some light upper body stuff at the gym yesterday.

[5 minute interruption while I taught my daughter the Pomodoro technique]

I'm fine. I'm going to write something about 'agency', I think, as it's the differentiating factor in our times. It used to be capacity, but now that we've got 'intelligence' on demand, the game has changed.

Next week

Laura is away so I'll be keeping an eye on the AIUK stuff and in case INASP come back ready to start the new project. Otherwise, I'll be cracking on with the SDS work, collaborating with Tom on TechFreedom, and building out CalAnywhere.

I suppose I should do some more business development. But, as I was explaining to Alex (mentioned above) historically that's looked like “sharing what I'm working on and people approaching me to collaborate.” So do let me know if you or someone you know is interested in something Doug-shaped 🙂