“What contribution are you most proud of in advancing analytics within an organisation?”
It was a fair question.
I had applied for the Head of Performance and Intelligence role at Peterborough City Council. The job brought together performance, business intelligence, risk and other functions that help an organisation understand what is happening, what might happen next and whether its plans are producing the intended results.
I knew the organisation. I knew much of the context. I had spent years working across some of the same systems, relationships and problems.
I also had a good answer.
Unfortunately, it was not the answer I gave.
I talked about retiring a piece of legacy reporting software.
I am proud of that work. Old systems rarely disappear simply because something better exists. They accumulate reports, processes, dependencies and people who know exactly which sequence of clicks will produce the number they need. Removing one safely requires persistence, technical work, persuasion and a willingness to stay with the final awkward cases after most of the organisation has moved on.
It was a legitimate achievement.
It was also one of the smaller stories available to me.
The larger answer was that I had helped move an organisation from fragmented and ageing reporting towards a more coherent analytics capability.
There had been the first data strategy.
There had been the transition from legacy reporting tools into Power BI.
There had been the work to make analytics more accessible and useful beyond a small group of specialists.
Most recently, there had been the implementation of a modern data platform intended to support more joined-up and ambitious use of information.
That was the answer.
Not because I had done all of it alone. I had not. Each stage depended upon talented people, organisational support and years of work across several teams.
But I had helped establish the direction. I had played a significant role in turning it into something real. I had led parts of the journey and remained with it long enough to see separate projects begin to resemble an organisational capability.
When the question came, however, I reached for the safer example.
Interviews have an irritating ability to improve shortly after they end.
The call closes. The pressure disappears. Then the answers begin turning up.
A better example appears while making a cup of tea. A clearer sentence arrives in the car. The connection that seemed unavailable beneath the panel’s attention becomes obvious once nobody is asking for it.
I left the interview feeling that it had gone about as well as I could reasonably have hoped. The presentation had landed. I had explained how I would approach the role and what I believed the function was there to do.
Protect what must not fail.
Help leaders see clearly.
Build joined-up capability.
I had tried to avoid arriving with the familiar promise to spend months discovering that an organisation is complicated. Peterborough was complicated, but it was not unknowable. I knew enough of the place to believe that listening and acting did not have to be sequential activities.
My intended stance was fairly simple:
Safe on day one. Better from day two.
The question-and-answer section was less controlled.
That is partly what it is for.
A presentation allows time to shape the story. Questions test whether the thinking survives once somebody else chooses the route through it.
I answered them. None was catastrophic. But afterwards I could see places where the examples had not matched the level of the role I was asking to undertake.
The analytics question stayed with me because the problem was not a shortage of evidence.
I had lived the stronger answer.
I had simply failed to make it available at the moment when it mattered.
There are reasons the software-retirement example came more easily.
It was concrete.
It had a beginning and an end.
There was a clear problem, a piece of work and an observable result.
It was also relatively easy to claim without sounding as though I was taking credit for an entire organisation’s progress.
The bigger story was messier.
Strategies do not implement themselves, but neither do they belong to one person.
A reporting transformation is produced by analysts, developers, service experts, managers, suppliers and users who gradually alter how work gets done.
A modern data platform may have visible technical components, but its value depends upon sponsorship, trust, governance and whether anybody outside the delivery team chooses to use it.
Describing my role accurately would have required me to occupy an uncomfortable space between two distortions.
One was claiming too much.
The other was claiming so little that the leadership disappeared from the account.
I have generally found the second error easier to make.
There is something culturally reassuring about understatement. It feels more decent to describe work as collective, emphasise the team and avoid behaving as though every achievement began with one person’s brilliance.
That instinct is healthy.
But it can become a form of concealment.
Collaborative work still has direction. Somebody helps define the destination, keeps the argument alive, joins separate efforts together and takes responsibility when progress becomes difficult.
Acknowledging that role does not diminish everybody else.
Sometimes it is simply an accurate description of what happened.
I wanted the panel to see me as somebody ready to lead a broad intelligence function.
When they invited me to explain why, I made my own contribution smaller.
The application also forced me to admit something else.
I wanted the title.
That sentence is less comfortable than saying I wanted to contribute at a higher level.
I did want that.
The role offered a wider remit, greater corporate influence and the chance to bring together areas that can too easily become separate reporting, assurance and analytical activities.
I believed I could do it well.
But I also wanted the words Head of Service attached to my name.
Titles are easy to dismiss as status.
They are also not meaningless.
A title affects how somebody is understood before they enter the room. It can change the authority with which they operate, the salary attached to their work and the opportunities that become available later.
It gives an organisation’s formal answer to a question that informal responsibility can leave unresolved:
At what level do we believe this person operates?
Over time, my own remit had grown. I had responsibility for applications, data, geographic information and DevOps. I sat within a leadership team. I helped shape strategies, services and technology decisions that reached beyond the boundaries of my job description.
I was proud of the role.
I also felt that the title had not quite caught up with the work.
Applying elsewhere was therefore partly a test.
Would another organisation look at my experience and reach the conclusion I had already reached myself?
Would somebody else say that I was ready?
That is not the purest account of public-service motivation.
It is probably a more honest one.
I did not get it.
The successful candidate was already within the organisation and was, from the outside at least, the natural successor. They knew the service from within and represented continuity during a period when there was already enough uncertainty elsewhere.
That softened the disappointment.
The feedback was good. I had competed credibly. There was no dramatic injustice to process or story to tell about being overlooked by people who could not recognise brilliance when it was placed in front of them.
The decision made sense.
Then came a reaction I had not entirely expected.
Relief.
I genuinely enjoy my current role.
The remit is broad. The work matters. I am trusted. I have good people around me and enough space to influence things beyond the immediate demands of keeping services running.
I was not applying because I needed rescuing from something intolerable.
Had the offer arrived, the decision would have cost me something.
That made me wonder whether I had wanted the job or wanted to know that I could get it.
The truthful answer is probably both.
I wanted the opportunity enough to prepare seriously, imagine myself doing it and feel disappointed when it went elsewhere.
I also wanted confirmation.
The absence of an offer meant I did not have to choose between formal progression and a role I still valued.
Relief did not prove that the application was insincere.
It proved that the choice would have been real.
We often describe career decisions as though each is driven by one respectable motive.
A new role offers more impact.
A promotion creates a greater opportunity to serve.
A change of organisation enables personal growth.
All of these things can be true.
So can the less polished motives.
We want more money.
We want more influence.
We want our family and colleagues to see that we have progressed.
We want the authority to do things we have become tired of recommending from one level below.
We want somebody credible to confirm that the version of ourselves we have been privately carrying is visible from the outside.
Motives do not have to be pure to be legitimate.
Wanting recognition does not mean the contribution is false.
Wanting a better salary does not make the work meaningless.
Wanting authority can be ego, but it can also come from repeatedly seeing what happens when responsibility and decision-making are separated.
The danger lies less in having mixed motives than in pretending that we do not.
The interview made some of mine harder to avoid.
The question I answered badly also exposed a practical problem.
Experience does not organise itself for retrieval.
After two decades in local-government technology and data, I have accumulated plenty of examples. Some are technical. Some are organisational. Some involve leadership, delivery, failure, recovery or difficult relationships.
Possessing them is not the same as being able to select the right one while somebody waits.
The interview was not testing whether I had ever done anything relevant.
It was testing whether I could recognise what the question required, retrieve the strongest evidence and explain its significance in a few minutes.
I did not fail completely.
But I did not do it as well as I could have.
That matters because there will be other rooms.
Local government reorganisation will create new structures, new leadership questions and new decisions about who should be trusted to shape what comes next.
Some of those judgements will take place through formal recruitment. Others will happen through meetings, presentations, conversations and moments when somebody asks a deceptively simple question.
What have you built?
Why does it matter?
What part did you play?
What does it demonstrate about what you can do next?
In those moments, humility cannot mean vagueness.
Nor can I assume that the significance of the work will be obvious simply because I have been close to it for years.
If I believe I am ready for greater responsibility, I need to be able to explain why without making the claim either grander or smaller than the evidence supports.
I did not leave the process with the title I had applied for.
I did leave with something useful.
I learned that I could compete for that kind of role.
I learned that I could shape a credible argument about how I would lead it.
I also learned that my preparation had concentrated more heavily on what I thought than on the examples through which a panel could test whether I had done it.
Most importantly, I had to admit that the title mattered to me.
I had spent years taking on broader responsibility while telling myself that the work was more important than what the role was called.
That remains partly true.
Good work does not become better because a job title has changed.
But titles are one of the ways organisations distribute recognition, authority and opportunity. Pretending not to care about them does not make their effects disappear.
The useful question is not whether I should want recognition.
It is whether I am willing to describe my contribution honestly enough to seek it.
When the panel asked what I was most proud of in advancing analytics, I told them about retiring an old system.
It was a good piece of work.
It was not the whole story.
The fuller story involved setting direction, replacing what no longer served, building something new and helping an organisation become more capable than it had been before.
Next time somebody asks, I need to be ready to say that.
Not because I did it alone.
Not because the title is owed to me.
Because ambition is not only being prepared to take on greater responsibility.
It is being prepared to explain, accurately and without apology, why you believe you are ready.