After last week's post a correspondent sent me this splendidly comprehensive piece about Crossrail. It included a fantastic observation about organisations and the 'thermocline of truth'.
"One of the questions that will need to be asked of TfL is the timeline that led up to the decision to delay. We will tackle the validity of that decision shortly, but its timing – and suddenness – suggests that they may have been some element of the ‘thermocline of truth’ in play. This is something to which large rail projects – most notably GTR’s new timetable rollout – have repeatedly shown they are susceptible to. It is the principle that bad news tends to accrue at a lower management level, because no one wants to be the person who moves a project risk marker from ‘yellow’ to ‘red’ on a RAG chart. As a result, pessimism and a belief that the project will overrun ‘bubbles up’ to a certain decision-making level but never beyond, as if hitting the thermal layer that exists in the ocean. Eventually, the issues reach critical mass and force their way through, leaving senior management wonder why everything ‘suddenly’ went wrong, when in fact the signs that the project was troubled existed at a lower level for some time."
The YouTube algos threw this Gail Anne Dorsey interview at me. She's extraordinary. And somewhere in there she mentions Well Red, which gave me a joyous burst of nostalgia. They were great and I guess, now, pretty obscure.
This week's episode of 41256 includes a bit about deja vu. Apparently it declines as you age. I'm now well past peak deja vu. That's a shame. I used to like that.
I love the sound of sport. I used to love driving around the States listening to baseball. I didn't understand a word of it but the rhythms, textures and syntax were hypnotic. I'm the same with poker. I don't understand a word these people are saying, but I could listen to them say it all day:
And then there's the Whistle of the North. Gorgeous.
And that's all I've got.