The request was for laptops.
When Natasha McCabe arrived as CIO at a regulator a few years back, she found an organisation that had a difficult relationship with technology. Her remit was two words long: fix it.
That kind of request is more common than it sounds. Most technology requests that land on a leader’s desk aren’t really technology requests. They’re the only language people have been given to say that the work isn’t working. The laptops are slow. The system doesn’t do what we need. We need a new platform. Underneath, it might be a broken handoff, two teams doing the same job, a process nobody owns, or people who have simply stopped believing anything will change.
And we fulfil the order. An order is measurable. It has a budget line, a supplier and a go live date. You can stand up at the steering committee and say it’s done. Asking what the request is covering is slower and messier, and nobody signed off a budget for it.
I’ve spent thirty years on the buying side of technology decisions, and I’ve been part of this. For a long time we took on platforms and adopted the processes that came inside them, rather than asking how the work should run and finding a system to match. The technology was the answer before anyone had asked the question.
Natasha’s laptops were exactly this kind of order, and she chose not to simply fulfil it.
“The expectation was just buy a bunch of laptops, stick them in, job done.”
That’s how she described it to me on Whatever Next? Unplugged. With no budget of her own, she borrowed the in house user research team and sent them to find out what “it doesn’t work” actually meant.
What they found had very little to do with laptops. Roughly a fifth of people’s productivity was being lost just to getting things connected, set up and working. That’s close to a day a week gone before the real work started. Alongside it were duplicate teams and confusion about who did what, problems no amount of new kit would ever touch. The laptop refresh became a programme that reached across the whole organisation, pulling in HR, culture and the operating model.
She was honest about the price. Delivery was slower, there was contention across teams, and she had to keep proving the worth of an approach nobody had asked for.
What stays with me is that the one activity that found the real problem was the one with no budget. Talking to Natasha, I realised that across the programmes I’ve worked on, I rarely saw user researchers in the resource plan. Developers, yes. Architects, testers, project managers, change leads. But people whose job was to sit with the people doing the work and find out what was really going on? Almost never.
That says something about what we believe transformation is. If we budget for the build and borrow the listening, we’re saying the technology is the work and understanding people is optional. Then we’re surprised when the new thing lands and people quietly work around it.
Natasha was just as clear about the risk in her own approach, and it matters. A consultative culture can fall in love with talking, and spend so long in design and analysis that nothing changes. Listening isn’t a virtue on its own. Engaging the people doing the work only counts if it changes what you do. The point of asking isn’t to consult. It’s to stop fixing the wrong thing.
So the next time a technology request lands on your desk, what will you ask before you sign the order? What do people actually mean when they say it doesn’t work?
You might find, as Natasha did, that the laptops were never the problem.
Whatever next?
You can hear the full conversation with Natasha on Whatever Next? Unplugged.
