This week has been fairly intense. On Tuesday I had a workshop down in Cornwall for the whisky brand I’ve been working on. It went really well, and I think we’ve got some good creative territories to work on.

On Wednesday I had another quarterly off-site, the third I’ve done for the same client since February. I’m feeling much more confident with the group dynamic now, and feel like I can anticipate where people will need encouragement or where conversations might dive into rabbit holes.

One of the things that’s tricky is that I, for obvious reasons, don’t have any way to know what things were like before the sessions I started running. So I have to rely on participant feedback to understand whether things are working. But the feedback is good, we’re setting ambitious goals across the quarters, and we’re achieving them; that feels like success to me.

The off-sites make me even more certain that the most important thing in understanding an organisation is understanding how information flows within it. That’s the theme of Dan Davies’s latest book, The Unaccountability Machine, which I finished recently, is brilliant, and will take some chewing over.

If there’s a single lesson you can take from it¹ then it’s the “principle of requisite variety”: a system can only be stable if the thing regulating it can absorb at least as much information as the operations of the system can generate.

These off-sites have the whole management team present, people who are hands-on in the business every day; their information-absorbing capacity is huge. So they function as extremely effective regulators, and we’re not stuck dealing with a dangerously simplified model of what the business is doing.

A couple of weeks ago was my first anniversary of being solo! I was, pleasingly, a combination of “too busy” and “too on holiday in Rome” to write weeknotes that week, so I’ll mark it here.

My first year has been quite wonderful. There have been highs and lows, but thankfully much more of the former than the latter. I’ve worked on projects I never could have in full-time employment, and I’ve managed to kick off several exciting side projects.

Once you net out taxes and expenses, I’ve probably earned roughly the same as I did in employment, but I’ve done so while working fewer hours, having more fun, and being more in control. I wrote on LinkedIn recently about how a lack of control at work is a significant predictor of stress levels, poor health, and early death; I don’t think it’s implausible to say that taking control of my work has added years to my life.

Many thanks to all the clients and pals who’ve helped me get off the ground and continue flying. Here’s to year two.