Monday October 5th, marks the formal launch of Foundry4. Arthurly, Disruption and Notbinary will become Foundry4 and Human+ will join after Christmas. Further organisations will be joining in the coming months too so watch this space. Existing clients will continue to receive the high quality services and support that they’ve come to expect from each Foundry4 company but under the new brand of Foundry4. Added to this they’ll now benefit from our 400 strong network of experts to help drive growth and deliver sustainable change through the Foundry4 Services division specialising across:

• Cloud Platforms
• Product Management
• Software Engineering
• Intelligent Automation
• Data Analytics
• Digital Experiences

“We dare not look under the hood into the big deep problems, we build digital garnish to distract from the problems.” Tom Goodwin.

It’s clear that the Pandemic is going to re-shape the economy and society in general for years to come. Sadly, Covid-19 looks like it will further embed inequality across many important areas of life — education, health, and social mobility to name a few. As a society we are going to have to work very hard and think more clearly than ever before to repair the damage just to get back to where we were, never mind doing even better.

In the professional world that I inhabit — broadly speaking, digital transformation — Covid has already exposed a big inequality. The gap between those organisations who had already mastered modern ways of working, smart use of data and intelligent exploitation of cloud technology have found the last 6 months easier to cope with than those that haven’t. This point may sound trivial or even flippant compared to the social inequalities referenced above, but it’s not, it’s very serious and directly linked.

In order to repair the damage caused by Covid-19 the UK needs a thriving economy with companies not only starting up but also scaling up to generate the tax revenues and job opportunities so desperately needed in the coming years. We will also need public services that are efficient, responsive and data driven. Both sectors will need to solve the productivity puzzle that the UK has struggled with for so long now.

In truth, this widening organisational inequality has been taking place for some time. Covid, in common with so many other things, has merely accelerated a trend that was already happening. I found this post by Tom Godwin on Linkedin the other day — I always enjoy his observations on the modern corporate world but I wanted to share this as a perfect description of where digital transformation has stalled:

“We have prioritization in Digital Transformation wrong.

We rightly start with projects that are easy and make a big difference, but then move to easy, but pointless, rather than transformative, but hard.

This explains why your bank is building on code from the 1950’s but has a Pepper Robot in one branch, while changing your flight on BA takes a phone call and 10 mins with the repricing department, but you can order food on an app in the lounge. It explains why retailers have no idea where their inventory is in real time, but there is a new AR app to try on sunglasses.”

The next phase of digital transformation has to be, in Tom’s words, “transformative but hard.” The rewards on the other side are our best shot of supporting the rebound needed to heal our social and economic scars.

With all this in mind we’ve been working with the founders and leaders of companies across The Panoply Group to develop a new proposition, bringing together some of our combined delivery capabilities into one entity. An entity that relishes and is well equipped to deliver “Transformative but Hard.”

So with that slightly scary but also exciting backdrop I am hugely excited to be launching our new business — Foundry4. We are creating a foundry for the digital age combining the research and insights of DisruptionHub, the consulting and delivery expertise of Arthurly (Cloud and Engineering), the automation specialism of Human+ and the product delivery and build nous of Notbinary (Data, Cloud, and Engineering). This great collection of businesses are all supported by the elegant scaled engineering team model of Questers.

This is just the most talented group of people that I could have hoped to work with in these circumstances… Founders, entrepreneurs, automation specialists, the highest quality software engineers, hard core product professionals and more. Remarkable not only for their technical and professional skills but also for their mindset — people who have been agitating for digitally driven change for over a decade with an appetite to tackle the difficult but important. Experts that love to learn and to share those learnings generously. Those who are sincerely excited by the opportunity of modern technology for society but who are pragmatic enough to know how genuinely difficult this huge shift is for many of our most important institutions.

We have brought together people and specialisms that can create or cast the tools, platforms, product and services upon which our ambitious clients can own their change and create sustainable futures for themselves.

Thank You

I want to thank all the clients, partners and team members of Arthurly, Disruption, Human+, and Notbinary. These are all successful businesses in their own right. It takes courage for a client to bet on a new, small or little known business to deliver critical services and at some point in the past, clients of all these businesses have done so. In many cases they bet big and we have taken that backing and created a number of highly successful UK based technology companies.

Foundry4 marks the next chapter in that success story and we are looking forward to repaying the faith of our early backers with even more comprehensive, broad and deep services.

Let’s move on from the garnish and start to tuck into the main course.

See you on the other side.

James Herbert
Chief Executive Officer, Notbinary
Chief Executive Officer Designate, Foundry4

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Launching Foundry4 — forging a new future was originally published in Notbinary on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are a bunch of heroes in the digital world that are held up as aspirational examples in conversations about digital business, technology and ways of working. Netflix, Spotify, Uber, Amazon and a host of our favourite characters, but these myths can become damaging fictions.

Admired and respected as towering giants of our digital world, our hero companies emanate an almost mythical quality. The scale, power and inspiration they command are the stuff of legend. Glib statements about “business” distort their stories into gaudy two-dimensional caricatures whilst organisations seeking Digital Transformation aspire to emulate what they see in this theatre. Paradoxically our heroes would be the first to point out they wouldn’t be able to build themselves as they stand today.

Gall’s law has been on my mind lately. So much so that my partner has quoted it back to me — and she doesn’t work in tech, she works in the woods. Hopefully it’s that I communicated it well, but more likely it’s that she’s a very smart woman. For me it’s a statement that goes to the heart of why so many institutional IT projects cost a fortune and deliver little, with alarming regularity:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. — John Gall (1975, p.71)

If you work with technology and your role includes the word “architect” (as mine sometimes does) your ears may well be burning.

The paradox of scale

I spend plenty of my time in conversations about microservices. API design, infrastructure, operations, architecture. If you’ve been there, you’ll have heard phrases like scheduling, circuit breakers, service discovery, distributed tracing, health checks, cenralised logging, mutual authentication, rolling deployments, traffic splitting, the list goes on.

When you consider that each of those can easily balloon into a couple of months of work, especially when they come “for free out-of-the-box”, a spot of arithmetic will tell you you could be looking at two years of peripheral work before you even think about the thing you’re actually trying to build.

Do you have a million users and a billion transactions? And do you have them today? Or are you just starting out with a new product? It’s easy to assume this stuff is critical to running production-quality systems and, you know what, it might be, but more likely it isn’t right now.

The question is not “whether”, but “when” these things are useful

Paradoxically, trying to build it all — to emulate our heroes on day one — is more likely to be disastrous. In Malcolm Gladwell’s re-examining of the story of David and Goliath, David refuses to put on the heavy battle armour of professional soldiers, preferring to fight with only a shepherd’s sling. David knew he couldn’t bear the weight of the armour and wouldn’t be at his best, potentially putting himself in even greater danger. As Malcolm Gladwell paraphrases it, "I've never worn armor before. You've got to be crazy."

The rise of the titans

Google is 20 years old, yet Google Cloud is only just starting to challenge AWS. Google boasts impressive infrastructure, tens of billions invested, including undersea cables and a global network estimated to carry 25% of the world’s Internet traffic. Only now are they offering this through Google Cloud. It’s been a long road. This is a far cry from the humble beginnings of 1998, when Google was an underdog search-engine beloved of 90s hipster-equivalents.

One does not simply build Google

20 years is a long time. Long enough to accumulate extraordinary experience, infrastructure and legacy. A long road with plenty of twists and turns along the way. I don’t know specifics, but I do know what life is like. Success is a messy business, exploratory, trying, failing, scratching your head, learning something new, trying to think different.

And so it’s been, I’ll bet, for all our heroes. They thought big, acted small, found a foothold and started journeying. For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sunshine and in rain, wax on, wax off, they fixed the plumbing and built the roof, they put one foot in front of the other until today they stand towering in the world they helped to create. Where they stand now is (and continues to be) their journey, rather than their first port of call.

On becoming a hero

The thing no one ever tells us about standing on the shoulders of giants is that we first have to get up onto those shoulders. Looking at what our heroes do today and trying to copy it is a highly effective way to fail. First because it’s going to be expensive and take years, second because they are on their journeys and will keep moving in their own directions.

By the time we ever get there, they’ll be long gone

But if we shift our perspective and look, not at where they are today, but at how they got started and the way that they move, there’s a beautiful release. Now we don’t need to be dazzled by their scale, wondering how we could possibly be like that. Instead we can look at where we’re starting from, face the direction we want to go (which will be unique to each of us) and start putting one foot in front of the other.

It’s disheartening to look up and feel small. Our efforts feel tiny, embarrassing even, if we compare ourselves to where our heroes stand today. If we can remember that they too came from humble beginnings, focus our attention on comparing ourselves only to where we stood yesterday and keep putting one foot in front of the other, pretty soon we’ll be able to look back and stand taller.

The Paradox of Scale was originally published in Notbinary on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve been thinking hard about what I do, how I do it and why. I’ve always found it tricky to explain the power of holding technology, culture and transformation in creative tension, but there’s insight in that combination.

I’m lucky to have been introduced to technology at a young age, in particular coding. I’m older than I look, so this was long before the Raspberry Pi was a twinkle in its maker’s eye. I like to joke that Mozart started young too, but believe me when I say that I never expected it to turn into a career.

“So, what exactly is it you do?” The question foxes me now more than ever.

Usually “I’m in IT” is enough to encourage the conversation to move along. Nothing to see here. It’s a good question, but I don’t have the elevator-pitch answer I’d need to graciously accept the dance of get-to-know-you small-talk the asker is offering. It’s more of a late-night, after-hours debate, the kind that leaves you with a big smile and a warm heart.

I do technology — in all its forms. From creative, intentional design ideas to coaching and questioning industry orthodoxy to rolling up my sleeves and building systems. There’s nothing I love more than the luxury and privilege of getting stuck in, working shoulder to shoulder with good people, sculpting in that virtually invisible medium: code. I believe that those who do, can, and that’s why I’ve never stopped doing.

I love working in tech, and yet, this is only part of my picture. Like Adam without Eve (or Steve) something’s missing. There are deeper notes to this song.

Missing the mark

A colleague recently referred to me as a “developer”. I was stunned and wondered how such a fractional picture could have formed. There’s actually nothing incorrect about the statement. I develop. I also write, travel and enjoy an bottle of wine. These are all part of life’s rich tapestry, woven between the light and dark strands of my story.

It’s a part of me, but it’s like saying Amazon runs a website, or that Beyoncé is “that lassie who does a wee shoogle at the disco”.

Amazon is one of the most powerful and pervasive organisations on the planet, which happens to run a website. Beyoncé speaks powerfully to thousands of people around the world about what it means to be a woman, she also tends to dance while doing it.

Nailing it

We’re seeing the automation of information (code, robots and AI) releasing value on a scale last seen by the automation of physical processes in the industrial revolution. As manual farm labourers were largely replaced by tractors, so filing clerks have been largely replaced by databases.

Today’s tech entrepreneurs are the equivalent of the industrial revolution’s mechanisation entrepreneurs — the aspirational, admired and sometimes wealthy superstars who brought with them massive change and bewildering array of moral implications for society.

I do technology because I believe we’re living through an information revolution.

Digital technology is the defining theme of the information age, but what it says about how we think, work and organise ourselves is deeper and more powerful. It expresses a change in the collective way we think and it’s going to be disruptive until we’re through the transformation.

For me, technology is a lens, a metaphor, a window in to human systems. I have a ringside seat, watching it unfold and listening to what those changes say about us, about the way we’re evolving. As art reflects the artist, so the technology we create and choose reflects our collective journey.

Technology isn’t the point

The best way to describe my outlook on technology is that it’s not the show. Steam engines, railways, factories and machines were non-negotiable innovations. Absolute necessities for the industrial revolution yet, incredible as they were, they weren’t the point. The point was what could be done with them, and in a fraction of the time it would have taken before.

When it comes to Digital Transformation, technology is a given. It’s the fabric and firmament of the information age and any organisation that intends to live on will need to embrace it. There was a time we built houses out of wood, wattle and daub but you won’t find a surviving construction company whose leaders say “we don’t really do bricks”. If your leaders are saying “we don’t really do digital”, then ask not for whom the Digital bell tolls.

Deeper change

So let’s look at how changes expressed in technology are reflected in our organisations. I’m riffing here, so go with me.

In a manual, agrarian society, a collective, village philosophy mirrored a collective, village approach to work: many people getting the harvest done together for example. The advent of mechanisation brought with it a new worldview of work and we see it firmly imprinted in the design of our organisations today.

A single operator could now control a large, complex machine, ensuring all the cogs and processes worked together to achieve the desired result: a prototype of command-and-control industrial management. This mindset continues to be applied today, but now we tend to do knowledge-work, not industrial labour. This has dire consequences for productivity, engagement and ultimately the health of individuals, families and society.

I see genuine pain and friction burgeoning in today’s organisations as we straddle the gap between the industrial and the information ages.

The incompatibility of the underlying mindsets, the paradigms, is tearing the fabric of the familiar: the ways of working that those near the top of our organisations have grown up feeling safe with. The industrial revolution upended agrarian ways of working and the information revolution is now upending industrial ways of working.

Like the industrial age, the information age expresses a new evolution in our way of thinking. The design of the Internet is a fascinating expression of the idea that “the centre cannot hold”. Beyond a certain level of complexity and interconnection, command-and-control simply will not scale. A single operator can only manage a machine of a certain size.

The only way to go further is to decentralise. The Internet is not only the largest system ever built by humanity, it also epitomises decentralisation, autonomy and, simultaneously, independence and interdependence — qualities antithetical to industrial management — yet it is also the most resilient and reliable system ever created. Decentralisation means parts can fail without bringing down the whole. These are qualities we absolutely want in the design of our organisations.

The pyramid

In the early days of the pyramid world, say, in a textile mill, expertise sat at the top of the organisation. Situationally aware, close to customers, reacting to market and customer needs, orchestrating the enterprise and passing commands into the machine for execution. You basically hired peasants and beat them with sticks. As more of us moved to knowledge work, this pattern reversed. Most organisations now hire expertise at the front line and place employees rather than exec teams closest to customers.

But in our pyramid world, we see and experience the grinding slowness and mass inefficiencies of large top-down organisations. Individual enthusiasm and genuine goodwill at the front line get stifled, people feel they’re doing what they can in spite of, not because of, the support of the organisation. Leaders do their best to tune, manage and reorganise the machine in a effort to get it running smoothly, but we seem to have reached the limits of incremental improvement with this model.

A pyramid design can’t react and adapt quickly enough in a complex, fast-changing world.

A pyramid design no longer makes sense because it’s the “edge” of the organisation has the greatest situational awareness and can react most swiftly and accurately to the needs of users and customers. Channelling authority via the centre is a surefire recipe for slowness and for decisions and approvals to lack context. The centre finds itself confusingly distant from what the organisation is doing, yet still feels responsible.

The dandelion

The information age speaks to decentralisation as a better solution for managing next-level complexity and adapting to continuous change. Redesigning our organisation from pyramids to dandelions, previously unthinkable, is fast becoming imperative for relevance and survival. Uncomfortable as it might feel, decentralisation is proven at massive scale. Frederic Laloux makes the striking point that the global economy doesn’t operate as a hierarchy.

Billions of people and no central authority. Structure, yes, rules of engagement, yes, control, no.

In a dandelion world, the role of the centre is no longer control, but facilitation and coordination. Creating a conducive environment, structurally, culturally and emotionally, in which the edge is able to operate with both autonomy and accountability, whilst keeping everyone informed of what other parts of the organisation are doing. It’s a fundamental design change but, as the tech world has discovered, independent, autonomous microservices enable a system to scale beyond the limitations of a top-down monolithic design.

The digital age is built on technology, but it’s not about technology, it’s about the message. Letting go of what feels safe, yet has become dangerous and embracing what at first feels dangerous, but actually allows us to move forward, grow and thrive in an increasingly complex world.

(Shortly after publishing this story, I was reading The Innovation Trends Report 2019 and spotted this quote: “Our research tells us that organizations must be willing to adapt their culture and organizational structures if they hope to generate the innovation required to sustain relevance in today’s marketplace. Failure to adapt has predictable results in an otherwise unpredictable world.”)

Pyramids and Dandelions was originally published in Notbinary on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Enterprise has become one of those over-used words that mean anything and nothing to everyone. What does it actually mean and what does that mean for our organisations?

Back in the noughties I worked for a mid-sized technology consultancy called Detica. It was made up of around 500 people when I joined, steadily grew to a thousand or more and was eventually swallowed into BAE Systems. I learned something that’s stuck with me on that journey:

Scale is not quantitative, it’s qualitative

It might seem contradictory at first glance, but I had a series of experiences that led me to this insight. The first was then CEO Tom Black saying that, up until shortly before I joined, he knew every person in the company by name. The small-company quality had already shifted a notch and changed into something different by the time I arrived.

Another anecdote came from the project I worked on. The company worked on a series of software products for HMRC which, when they had started out as what we’d now call “two-pizza-sized teams” worked well but which, as they scaled beyond that size, began to encounter friction and started to reach for process and structure to remedy that. Whether it worked was as open to debate then as it is now, but the quality — the nature of the thing — changed with scale.

Heavy armour

In Malcolm Gladwell’s TED talk re-exploring the story of David and Goliath, he explains how the heavy armour offered to the shepherd boy David as he went to face the giant would not only have been a hindrance, but could have cost him his life.

Malcolm points out that David’s approach to the situation was completely at odds with what Goliath and even his own people expected. In short, being smaller and more nimble, David’s approach had a different quality.

Overscale

I’ve seen teams bogged down with enterprise-class process and technology long before they and their mission have reached the scale or maturity to bear the burden. Taking up heavy armour when the situation needed agility.

I don’t believe I’ve encountered an instance where that didn’t grind progress to a crawl, leaving everyone, from the board to the keyboard, frustrated and defensive. There’s constant effort and an exhausting low-level cortisol-fuelled strain that wears trust and tempers thin, fracturing vital lines of mutual support.

It’s hard to come back from overscale

The longer this goes on, the more people become nervously and ideologically entrenched. It takes brave (or new) leadership to take an axe to that monolith with both personal care and direct challenge. It feels a lot like an episode of 24, having to decide whether to cut the red wire or the blue wire as the seconds tick down to project detonation. It’s either going to fix the problem or create a right mess.

There’s a rare and much-needed kind of egoless ambition that will grasp that nettle and take a potentially career-limiting risk. Fearful cries of “best practice” point at the the giants of the tech industry. The myths of their achievements tower over us with fierce intransigence, yet that’s probably a far cry from the nuanced real stories that built them — stories that aren’t so different from where we’re standing now. But the whispers say “this is how grown-ups win battles” and it takes courage to refuse their offer of armour.

Enterprise is scale

It seems obvious, a truism, that enterprise is scale, but let’s go a step further. The way the word is used, attached to certain activities, technologies and architectures, it not only is scale, it requires scale. You have to be a giant to wear it.

I’ve been around software long enough to know that “enterprise” is not a synonym for “good”. There’s a maxim I use that says “the more it costs, the worse it gets”. There may be exceptions, but proverbs exist for a reason. I’ve suffered enough projects to know there’s a time, a place and a scale for enterprise.

It’s not that it’s intrinsically good or bad, it just might not be a good fit for you

One thing’s for sure, enterprise is slow. If you find the words “enterprise” and “easy” on the same web page, your bullshit detector should register off the scale. Some of us have become numb to this reality, desensitised and demoralised by years of death-march projects, but it’s no less true.

If I can give you a spark of remembering, remember this: enterprise is designed for complicatedness and, in the cases it’s good for, that’s the right design. It’s meant to do all, to be all, to encompass all and to require a legion of believers to carry the weight.

Enterprise exhaustion

With this kind of weight, speed is not of the essence and a two-pizza-sized team will not be able to lift it. They may drag it a few feet through the mud, perhaps a few determined steps beyond a “hello, world” demo, but it will exhaust them — and if the software doesn’t get them, the practicalities of the daily fight to keep it running will. If you’re taking on “enterprise debt”, you’ll need deep pockets: money, time, and people, in perpetuity.

That’s why enterprise means scale. Scale is like gears. When you’re small and light, you need a low gear to gain momentum, something simple, improvised, humble. When you’re bigger and have built up momentum, you can shift up a gear, one gear. Go for top gear when you’re starting off and you’ll stall. Even if you don’t stall, it’s going to be a long, slow crawl to build pace — and you may never reach a scale that matches that gear.

For an organisation of tens of thousands, with big budgets, where sizeable teams of people can be dedicated to servicing internal, structural needs without ever needing to come into contact with users or customers, this makes sense. But this isn’t most organisations. It’s not where they are today and it’s not where they will be tomorrow. Barely a handful will ever reach this scale. Trees do not grow to the sky and giants are rare creatures.

The nimble advantage

And here we have the enterprise paradox: relatively small organisations reach for enterprise tools — the heavy armour of giants — and find they struggle to make progress. Sacrificing agility by overscaling when agility is in fact your advantage could cost you dearly.

For David it was being nimble, not being massive, that won the day. Don’t worry too much what the giants are up to. Chances are it’s not relevant to you anyway — your strength is that you’re not in fact a giant.

Playing to your advantage, knowing your scale and finding your unique quality, takes clarity and courage.

What Does Enterprise Mean? was originally published in Notbinary on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the great pleasures I’ve had since my move to the supplier side of things is that it provides me an opportunity to directly give back to the network I have benefited so much from over the last decade or more. Now I’ll admit this isn’t totally altruistic — I have commercial responsibilities these days so I have to demonstrate to my colleagues some potential benefits to my choices but they have been supportive since day one.

I’ve always been impressed by the approach dxw, Futuregov, Delib, Helpful and a few others have taken — they always felt like they were integral parts of the wider community rather than coming at it with any kind of overt sales agenda (I am sure they all have some of the same pressures as me to evidence the worth but it never seems the motivation.)

So anyway the approach I have been pushing is to back grassroots and community events rather than blowing piles of money on glossy, corporate events that boast how many ‘C’ level attendees they have. That isn’t to say that I might not find myself at some of those events — or even explicitly contributing to them — but it would have to be right and I’d need to understand better where I (and we as a company) fitted in with that kind of audience…whereas for good or ill I know that instinctively with these community events….because I was that audience and I’m hopefully still part of that community — just will a slightly different role.

These are some of the events we’ve supported — or are soon to support — I’m always open to conversations about other similar events out there — especially as these days I can outsource the real work to Sara — our Marketing lead ;) — so get in touch if you think I/we might be interested.

Giving back #loyaltothenetwork was originally published in Notbinary on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I design and build systems. Sometimes those systems are made of technology and sometimes they’re made of people. I’ve learned, and keep learning, that doing less is invariably greater than doing more.

The phrase keeps coming to me: “it’s an engineering solution to a design problem”. I’m giving a name to our very human tendency to come up with more layers of complication to solve a problem, when a better answer is likely to take away something we’re already doing. We, more often than is comfortable, are the architect of our own problem.

Clutter

Complicatedness kills. It creeps up on you, it hides under your bed, it seeps in through the cracks in your attention and energy, and it throws a party all over your front lawn when there’s uncertainty and unwillingness to make choices.

Relentless as a quietly rising tide, it will flow around you and cut you off from the land.

Kipple abhors a vacuum. Don’t go looking for it, it’s already breeding in the corners of your world. It’ll grow to ride heavy on your back, like a monkey that won’t climb down, and then it’ll invite its friends. And yet we love it. Oh how we love clutter. One more thing to organise the other things. We don’t clear out and clean up. Life sticks to us like burs.

Solving problems with problems

When the IT industry was straining under the weight of our large, complicated systems we built to solve business problems, we invented Microservices. These were a solution to partition up that complicatedness into smaller Jigsaw pieces.

The problem was, those Jigsaw pieces soon became a tangled mass, so we invented Containers. Neat, stackable little boxes to keep our jigsaw pieces in. But before we knew it, we had hundreds and thousands of little boxes. We couldn’t really see what was inside them any more and our stacks kept falling over.

So we invented ships and cranes and fleets and admirals and emperors to organise them all and to rule over this stack of problem-solutions we created.

Each of these layers of solution is fascinating, and time consuming, and expensive to implement. Plus, tomorrow there’ll be another new technology to spend the next couple of years of our organisational lives working on for the promise of a promised land.

What was the question again?

The real problem we had in the first place was complicatedness. Ironic. It seems the cure is worse than the disease. In the words of Stan Laurel, “Well, that’s another fine mess you gotten me into”.

Solving a problem with the thinking that created it rarely works. Practising your piano skills until you become exquisitely talented at violin doesn’t make a lot of sense. Engineering one more layer of stuff doesn’t solve the problem of too many layers of stuff.

Designing a problem out of the picture is hard, compared to the relative ease of engineering in more problems.

I feel safe in teasing techies because I am one. I empathise with our fascination with complexity. Intricate, interesting, fantastical wind up toys. Delightful mechanical creations, art made from science. It’s amazing what you can build when you’re blessed with a watchmaker’s toolkit.

A colleague told me a story of a room full of engineers, tasked with designing a door for bathrooms in public buildings. Every shade of automatic-opening, no-touch, camera-operated, AI-and-blockchain-infused cleverness was discussed, until the quiet, experienced engineer at the back said “why don’t we just let people kick the door open?”. Look, no hands, no germs.

Ironically, it’s still not the simplest answer. When I walk into the bathroom in an airport, shopping centre or a service station, there is, quite simply, no door. A design solution.

The life-changing magic of simplicity

But ask not for whom the complicatedness bell tolls. Knowing you have a problem is the first step to your first steps. I recognise this in myself and I invite you to notice it in yourself too. The more you simplify, the more sensitive you become to your complexity.

The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

If you’ve had the pleasure of reading or watching the work of Marie Kondo, you’ll empathise with how we all gently sink under our waters of clutter and complication. If you haven’t experienced the quiet force of nature that is Marie Kondo, I’d recommend you take a look. If only to have your eyes gently but firmly opened to your own mess.

In her Netflix series, she’s invited into the homes of ordinary people who are drowning in the chaos and clutter of ordinary life: clothes, dishes, energetic children, busy lives, unable to get on a level with their home, much less enjoy the space. Without so much as a flicker of judgement or condescension, Marie Kondo invites the frazzled family to simplify their home.

Trying harder to engineer a more peaceful space hasn’t worked, but a simpler design — less — does the trick.

I’ve seen the process first-hand and tried a little myself. It’s remarkably powerful, and the sense of release and clarity that careful pruning and conscious choices bring to a space make it well worth the effort.

As in life, so in tech

And so this is how I approach my work. Being invited to be part of the life of an organisation for a time, I seek first to understand, then to ask questions about things that seem complicated.

Sometimes I’m reviving dormant elephants in the room, sometimes I’m amplifying voices already advocating for less and sometimes I’m asking people whether they really want to keep on engineering another layer.

I hope that, at my best, it’s an invitation to question defaults and that my words come with the kind of genuine care and consideration that disarms fear and makes it clear this is about a common good.

As in tech, so in teams

Sometimes the question is less about the technology system and more about the people system. These are some of my favourite questions, but the answers don’t always look like what you’d expect. You’re unlikely to find me overtly driving a team forward, perhaps engineering urgency or motivation, “putting the pedal to the metal”.

Sometimes I have my head under the bonnet, quietly looking for friction.

The kind of stuff where, if you do too much driving, something or someone will break down. Sometimes the handbrake is on, that’s usually pretty clear. Other times it takes a while, listening to squeaks and rattles before you see where something’s stuck. Then it’s about easing it out. Things just get smoother.

It doesn’t always look glamorous, it’s often not headline-grabbing work. More often than not it’s a design solution to an engineering problem. Sometimes it’s about setting things up to not go wrong, more than it is about making them go right. Which brings me to another of my favourite phrases: “a crowd will applaud a firework, but not a sunrise”. We need regular sunrises.

If I could give only one piece of advice, it would be this: do less — and keep doing that. The power of even a little simplicity can be transformative.

An engineering solution to a design problem was originally published in Notbinary on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I find myself in an interesting position at the moment. A client has just significantly rebooted their portfolio of DDaT activity — leading to a big shake-up of their governance and that opened up an interesting opportunity — they needed an approach to strengthen the Verify aspect of Trust/Verify for digital deliveries and I saw a chance to reimagine the idea of service assessments locally.

This client is Government-adjacent and has close ties to the wider digital gov community but it is exempt from GDS controls — as such it has somewhat gone its own way in its evolution towards becoming an internet-era organisation. While this does create some challenges at times it also opens up these golden opportunities as well.

I am on the record as believing that GDS Service Standard Assessments are a ‘necessary evil’ — in fact I was quoted in this brilliant presentation by Sam, Steve and Clara at Service Design in Government.

Despite some recent struggles with the process that point of view remains solid — assessments — alongside spend controls, the service manual and the design principles — are the most important legacy of GDS.

That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do it differently though :)

There are lots of things I love about assessments but let me list some of the things that have always bothered me — the things I’d like to avoid in any kind of reimagining:

• They reinforce the unfortunate waterfall-esque linear nature of the Discovery > Alpha > Beta > Live model (hell they formalise the addition of Private & Public Beta) with the reality that funding decisions rest of results…which leads to..
• Despite all the efforts to avoid it they are just too confrontational — it can feel a bit like you are joint defendants at a trial on some US legal show — with a team of prosecutors trying to trip you up (I don’t think anybody intends it to be like this — it is just the reality!) Because…
• People. There is a LOT of room for personal interpretation in the process — and people have their own bugbears and agendas — that is just human nature. It is unreasonable to expect that not to be a factor.
• The whole approach favours story-tellers. The assessments are a performance — including rehearsals and props — and the better the MC the better the chance of success.

For balance here are some things I love (and yes some of these seem to contradict what I wrote above — I am a complicated man)

• The Service Standard — a common, sensible, evidenced, open set of guidelines that just make sense for the delivery of better services. The fact that this artefact underpins every assessment is brilliant.
• The fact that there are consequences — assessments have teeth. The stick is what makes people take the Service Standard seriously by verifying people have followed the approach (spend controls enforce do the right thing — assessments enforce do the thing right)
• As I said above people might be a problem but also peer review is incredibly powerful. Independent peer review even more so. There is so much opportunity for learning when you are able to have an open and frank conversation with people with the knowledge to ask hard — but sensible — questions.
• The very existence of the assessments is a lever for teams to push to be given the space and the support to do things right. It short-circuits a certain amount of internal politics and pressure plays from senior people (not all of it — but it helps!)

So what would something that built on the strengths but avoided the weaknesses look like for me?

• Less rigid milestones maybe? I think the reality is continuous assessments would be best but are simply not sustainable and god knows the Ofsted model of drop-in inspections isn’t the way forward! Maybe a more ad-hoc, lighter touch set of meetings throughout the lifecycle? With a single go/no-go at a mid point agreed between all parties and then another before anything goes Live?

As a side note I think the Discovery > Alpha > Beta > Live model was incredibly important when we started using it but the language and the interpretation feel like a but of a milestone these days — it was never perceived as such a linear flow but that is what it has become.

• They still need to have plenty of stick to go with whatever carrots are built in. Assessments should be able to send teams back to the drawing board and in extreme cases just stop them dead. That means assessors need to be trusted and empowered by the powers that be.
• Like I said earlier I think independent peer review is something special. I’m pondering how you do that though if you are not part of a national network of teams following the same standards coordinated by a central body. Tricky. I think it is worth investigating though. It might be a case of a quid pro quo arrangement with other similar organisations.
• Which would mean whatever local standards — and there will 100% need to be agreed and well articulated local standards — would need to map to either the Service Standard itself or a.n.other broadly understood standards — else how can anyone from outside the host organisation be expected to really assess the work.

Anyway it is an interesting thought experiment — and as usual this blogpost is mainly me making a bit of sense of all the things rattling around in my head!

Again to reiterate — I believe Service Standard Assessments are a GOOD THING.

I am just wondering if working at a smaller scale there is more room to iterate.

It’s Notbinary.

:)

Trust but verify: reimagining service assessments was originally published in Notbinary on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

a combining form meaning “many,” “much,” “multiple,” “many times,” “more than two,” “composed of many like parts,” “in many respects,” used in the formation of compound words

One of the truisms of modern, agile ways of working is the importance of the multidisciplinary team. It goes back to the original principles from the Agile Manifesto →

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

..and the Government Service Standard is even more forthright about it with the third standard→

Have a multidisciplinary team

Put in place a sustainable multidisciplinary team that can design, build and operate the service, led by a suitably skilled and senior service owner with decision-making responsibility.

On a personal level the most successful teams I have been involved in have been truly multidisciplinary — comprising of engineers, researchers, designers, analysts, delivery managers (statisticians) and more — coming together to deliver complex outcomes. It was the blend of skills and perspectives that made it possible to succeed — we needed every skill (and many more — without realising it at the time we had implemented Emily’s Team Onion).

As I said this is a commonly held opinion and when I came to write this blogpost I assumed it would be straightforward to pepper it with references to studies that point to the improvements it brings to project delivery (since reading ‘Lab Rats’ by Dan Lyons I am hyper aware of checking my sources for some of the agile/lean core ideas — as he basically blames agile for the decline of the workplace). As it turns out there is very little on the topic when it comes to the digital, data and technology worlds. There is a lot of opinion (who knew there were so many opinionated product people eh?!) but there is a bit of a lack of evidence based stuff.

Thankfully the general theory is well evidenced in the health space with many papers demonstrating the importance of multidisciplinary team in improving all manner of outcomes across that sphere — another reason to love the NHS(!).

One of the things I have become aware of in the last couple of years is something more akin to a dual-discipline team masquerading as multi-discipline. Often this is a sign that this is a ‘technology transformation’ rather than somewhere with a ‘product development’ mindset.

There are some common elements to these teams. Usually primarily software engineers perhaps supported by some testing or ops capability as well as some kind of (w)agile role going through the Scrum ceremonies while working to specific (and tight) deadlines. They are often held at a distance from the end user and lack clarity as to how they fit in to the wider vision as they are one piece of a much larger puzzle.

There may well be user researchers and designers in the mix but they operate in isolation — often with their outputs translated by Business Analysts into user stories (or tasks) that are handed over to be actioned.

What I have come to terms with is that actually this is often quite an efficient approach in certain circumstances. Just as I have learned that agile isn’t always the right approach (I mean I wish it was but it really isn’t..) I have also come to terms with the idea that while having a multidisciplinary team is absolutely vital if you are to succeed in any kind of product/service design scenario when you are re-imagining the offering or starting from scratch. The problem is sometimes these days the reality is that some teams need to keep the lights on — or maybe it is more that they need to rewire the lighting but not remodel the whole house.

There is a LOT of legacy technology out there — some is burning, some is creaking, some is held together by sticky tape and string but some is still doing its job.

When the question is ‘how should we meet this user need?’ then call in a skilled multidisciplinary team and give them space to explore the problem space, test their hypotheses and follow through to an answer. For the record this is where I am happiest.

If the question is how do we make this platform sustainable for another five years while we wait for it to become a priority for our service designers? Then perhaps you need a dual-discipline (or maybe tri) team who can take a focused approach to re-platforming to give you time and space for that broader transformation down the line.

In a perfect world we’d be redesigning all the services all the time but we are far from there.

It is possible to be principled and pragmatic.

It’s Notbinary.

;)

When the multi is missing from multi-disciplinary was originally published in Notbinary on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Notbinary are really excited to be sponsoring OneTeamGov Global in beautiful (well so everybody tells me — I’ve never been!) Victoria, BC in May. So excited in fact that James (our CEO) and I have turned it in to a bit of a North American tour with visits to Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver booked as well as Victoria. In fact I am taking it one step further and attending the International Design in Government Day and the Code for America Summit in Oakland, CA as well!

Thanks to the power of Twitter we have made connections with the digital government, civic tech and service design communities all over Canada (and gosh that county is LARGE!) and we are hoping to meet as many people as possible to find out about how things are shaping up over there in this race for public service institutions to embrace the internet-era and to share a few war stories.

Our itinerary is below and if you find yourself in the same city at the same time and fancy meeting up just drop me an email and we can sort something out.

11/05/2019 Land in Toronto
12/05/2019 Train → Ottawa
13/05/2019 Ottawa
14/05/2019 Ottawa
15/05/2019 Toronto
16/05/2019 Toronto
17/05/2019 Toronto
18/05/2019 Fly to Victoria
19/05/2019 Victoria
20/05/2019 Victoria
21/05/2019 OneTeamGov Global
22/05/2019 Ferry to Vancouver
23/05/2019 Vancouver
24/05/2019 Vancouver
25/05/2019 Fly to San Francisco
26/05/2019 Oakland
27/05/2019 Oakland
28/05/2019 Oakland
29/05/2019 International Design in Government — Oakland
30/05/2019 Code for America Summit — Oakland
31/05/2019 Code for America Summit — Oakland
01/06/2019 Fly home from SF

The Notbinary North American Tour was originally published in Notbinary on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Way way back at the beginning of my career I ran UKOLN’s 6th and 7th Institutional Web Managers Workshop (IWMW), they are now on their 23rd! More recently (in 2018) I was a senior member of the team that delivered Jisc’s Annual Conference Digifest, each year it attracts more and more people who are leading technological change in universities and colleges. My highlight last year was meeting Shakira Martin, president of the National Union of Students (NUS) and the incredible LOLA Presentation which showed the power of LOLA and the Janet Network.

Over the last few weeks since starting my job at Notbinary I’ve enjoyed being in an environment whilst new, also feels familiar and welcoming. I’m just trying not to get too distracted reading articles about Squad Models and Kubernetes, One Team Gov, unconferencing and Robotic Process Automation (RPA)!

What cheers you up?
My 8-year-old daughter has a great sense of humour and she can really make me laugh.

Having the opportunity to see life through her eyes each day provides a little perspective, cheers me up and reminds me how lucky I am to have her as part of my life.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned recently?
I’ve often put training at the bottom of the priority list, but I recently completed a 10-week Adobe Creative Cloud software course (InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator) at my local university. I’ve loved learning to do something different, that I’m also able to use in my work. Plus photoshopping pictures of myself has been great fun 😊

What are you looking forward to right now?
I’m really looking forward to a family trip we have planned to Ethiopia over Easter. I spent two years there, working through VSO in a town called Assosa in the west of the country which borders Sudan. I worked with the local Education Bureau and a small number of grassroots community groups who represented indigenous communities in the region. Whilst I was there I had the opportunity to visit and survey some of the schools throughout the region, often in very hard to reach areas. I also helped colleagues in the community groups to secure substantial European funding to run workshops related to Conflict Resolution. We’ve tried to visit every few years since we left in 2010. The trips are a great opportunity to reconnect with some of the amazing friends we met there and a reminder of what’s really important to us as a family.

What’s your favourite emoji?
Can I have three? I really over use these:
😊 😃
And usually when I’m laughing at my own jokes:
😂

What TV show/book/ podcast would you recommend?
At the moment I’m really into the Guilty Feminist, I love the podcast and I’ve almost finished reading Deborah Francis-Whites book. Both are very funny and interesting, I laugh and cry out loud. Her book has really inspired me. It’s inspired me to get more actively involved in things I believe in, to be a bit braver, and to get out there and do some things I don’t usually do.

Whom in the world would you most like to share a meal with?
Right now, see my answer above. Deborah Francis-White is currently part of the Comic Relief Prizeathon and I’d love to go out for lunch with her.

Introducing Sara Hassen, Marketing Lead at Notbinary….. was originally published in Notbinary on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.