“What will we choose to change to make room for change?”
That was a provocation I heard at work this week. It goes further than the usual stop, start, continue exercise because it also asks what we are prepared to consciously compromise. My response to my own team has been another provocation: we can go 100 times faster.
I don't mean that literally and I definitely don't have a spreadsheet proving a hundredfold productivity gain. The point is that something has changed quite dramatically in how quickly some work can now be done, while much of the organisation around that work hasn't.
I had a fairly uncomfortable example of this recently. I lost a DevOps engineer who had been working for a long time on the scaffold for a piece of work. There were still actions left to complete when he went, so I took what he'd built, added the context I already had and used coding agents to work through the rest. I completed it in one evening.
There is an important distinction there. The scaffold mattered. The knowledge, decisions and skilled work that had gone into it mattered. This wasn't AI replacing months of engineering with an evening of prompting. What it did show me was what can happen when decent foundations already exist and the cost of the execution on top of them suddenly collapses. It raises some quite uncomfortable questions that I don't think we're particularly ready to confront.
Local government has spent most of my career saying we have to do more with less. Well, perhaps now we actually can, at least for some kinds of work. I'm just not sure that doing more is the interesting bit.
If I can safely hand over some of the mechanical work, with supervision, what I want back is time for the things we routinely say matter but struggle to make room for: strategy, shared knowledge, communication, vision, judgement and, most importantly, delivery. If the machinery of the business runs better, people should be able to spend more time on the business itself.
There is an obvious trap here, including for me. I like building things, improving things and getting on with it. Give me faster tools and I can quite happily use the capacity to build more things. Organisations can do the same. Make one process quicker and another request fills the gap. Give somebody better tools while keeping every existing meeting, approval, information silo, manual reconciliation and organisational boundary around them and you may just end up with a more productive person who is still incredibly busy.
I've thought about this comfort of being busy before. Reactive work is familiar and quite satisfying in its own way: something comes in, you deal with it, another thing comes in. You can have a very full week doing useful work without ever getting near the question of why so much of that work exists in the first place.
I think a lot of our wasted effort sits around data, information and shared knowledge. We spend time finding things, rebuilding context, working out who knows something, reconciling different versions of the truth and working around systems that don't join up. That is partly why I've become less convinced that an org chart tells you very much about how an organisation actually works. It tells you who reports to whom; the data might tell you where the work, demand, knowledge and dependencies really are.
Of course, that creates another problem.
I've written before about the Data Werewolf: the point where better data and transparency stop being universally comfortable because they make things visible. If you can see where work waits, where effort is duplicated, where everything depends on one person or where an old decision is still consuming resource, you haven't just created insight. You've created the possibility of accountability.
That matters when organisations can be protective. Surfacing a problem can reopen an historic decision, challenge an established boundary or make somebody ask the most ordinary incentive question there is: what's in it for me? I don't think this requires some grand theory about people resisting change. Individually sensible behaviour can still preserve something that is collectively inefficient.
I heard another provocation recently, linked to performance management: “Think like a resident and act like a taxpayer.” I like it because it shifts the point of view. Am I optimising my bit of the organisation, or are we making the whole thing work better for the people who use it and ultimately pay for it? In a protective culture that is much easier to say than to practise, particularly when the answer might surface something we would rather not see.
Then there is restructuring. Government constantly restructures, pauses, then restructures again. The latest round of local government reorganisation felt to me surprisingly unsurprising. We seem very comfortable redrawing the boxes while the infrastructure, data, information, processes and organisational knowledge underneath them can remain much harder to change.
I'm increasingly interested in doing that the other way round. Modernise the infrastructure and the data. Put shared knowledge in better order. Understand how demand and work actually move through the organisation. Remove effort that doesn't need to be there and make the important dependencies visible. If that genuinely changes how the organisation works, perhaps the org chart should eventually change to represent it.
We use the word transformation a lot. That would feel rather more transformational to me than starting with the boxes.
Which brings me back to the original provocation. If technology really can release meaningful amounts of capacity, the technical problem may turn out to be the easier half. The harder part is deciding what we stop doing, what we do differently and whether we are prepared to look properly at what the released capacity tells us about the system we already have.
Nobody is coming to save us. If this kind of transformation is going to happen, it probably has to come from within.
The bit I haven't resolved is where the incentive to do that comes from.