Good conductors required
Towards the end of last year I delivered a presentation at Digital Scotland, the annual conference for public sector technology professionals.
I was part of a panel discussing Digital Transformation – quite a broad, woolly topic.
Whenever I’m asked to present I (try to) build in the time and headspace to get the content and flow right.
If I haven’t properly prepped, the end product can feel disjointed; flying by the seat of my pants is not my happy place.
To counter that, I like to centre presentations around a particular story, or a pertinent example, which helps provide the glue and/or a useful base from which to offer tangible takeaways.
For my recent presentation I got quite taken with an analogy about musical conductors and the delivery of digital programmes, and fleshed out a structure around it.
This post delves into that analogy in more depth.
Presentation building blocks
In the grand scheme of things I don’t think much of what I was saying from the stage would have been a great surprise to people who’ve been in and around the weeds of digital delivery:
I put some context around what I think digital transformation means, mostly from a public and third sector point of view
I quoted some sensible, no-nonsense points from people like Richard Pope, Nesta, and Public Digital
I harked back to some evergreen wisdom from the early days of the UK Government Digital Service
I talked about how we’ve been applying good practice in the work we do at Research Data Scotland, as part of my day job
While I was prepping my slides this humongously-popular post from Sarah Drummond popped up on LinkedIn.
She highlights the divide between service design aspirations and reality, and why the actual ‘design’ part is often a fragment of the greater whole.
I rely a lot on the wisdom of others when I’m trying to put a narrative around a presentation, and Sarah’s post helped spur on my thinking and bind some of the part-formed ideas in my head.
So where do conductors come in?
Conductors (the musical kind)
I won’t pretend to know very much about conducting an orchestra.
I played the trombone between the ages of 10 and 15, and gave up on the grounds my already limited street cred wasn’t exactly reaching new heights by carrying a black bazooka-shaped case to school every day.
When I first started working on my presentation I had a few other metaphors in mind, but the musical one stuck.
I came across this rather poetic description in an old BBC Culture article:
“The conductor is there to bring a musical score to life, communicating their own highly refined sense of the work through an individual language of gestures, which might sculpt the musical line, tease out nuances, emphasise certain musical elements while controlling others, and essentially re-imagine an old piece anew.”
On the surface this jaunty paragraph probably bears little or no resemblance to most day jobs in the public sector, but stick with me.
I suspect the majority of people don’t muse too much about what a conductor does, other than standing in front of a group of talented musicians, arms raised.
But consider the words above again: they sculpt, they tease out nuances, they emphasise, they control, they re-imagine, they bring a score to life.
No conductor, no music.
Conductors (the digital kind)
I probably spend way too much time mulling the way public sector digital delivery gets done in Scotland, and noting differences I see from programmes I’m aware of at a UK level*.
From my particular pedestal (since I returned to Scotland 16 years ago I’ve worked for a non-departmental public body, the Scottish Government, and now for a charity that interfaces with various parts of the public sector) it’s the sporadic pockets of excellence that have tended to catch my eye.
In my experience, I haven’t seen consistent adoption of in-house multidisciplinary teams, where you bring together the people and expertise to help unfurl problems, prototype solutions, and develop services incrementally.
A lot of development relies on hybrid models with teams made up of suppliers, contractors and public-sector employees.
This works to a point, but I’ve been around situations where getting the balance wrong can be problematic.
Important service-level decisions get ceded to people outside of an organisation; design and build isn’t harmonious with governance processes; knowledge walks out of the door when a specific phase comes to an end.
One of my main observations is just how critical certain types of individual – with an intuitive sense of what makes a digital programme tick – are to the success or failure or a project.
Digital conductors for the win.
Good conductors required
When I talk about conductors, I mean people who know:
enough about user-centred design
enough about technology
enough about how to shape a product roadmap
enough about supplier and contract management and how to work in and around procurement rules
enough about the flow of data
enough about the cadence of a project
enough about the world around them and where to look for applicable examples elsewhere
enough about the combination of people and skills required to bring a project to fruition
and have enough confidence to make difficult calls
They sculpt, they tease out nuances, they emphasise, they control, they re-imagine, they bring a digital programme to life.
This isn’t a hero narrative, it’s about team players who know the who, how, what and why of rooting out a problem.
In your world, maybe that sounds a bit like a Product Manager or Service Owner?
This may be the case, but I’d argue those roles only work well in the context of a well-grounded agile culture, or where digital and data disciplines are evenly balanced and properly supported.
If that culture, and those people, aren’t close at hand, or break the budget, or represent a worldview miles away from the reality on the ground (and the further you move away from central government I promise you this is frequently the case) then a good conductor can pay dividends.
At the end of the day, shit still needs to get done. Good conductors can cut through the noise – “No, we can’t solve that with AI.”, “Yes we do need to think about long-term operations now.” – and find pragmatic ways of fulfilling a brief.
Otherwise, weird notions of perfection get in the way of good.
Building a delivery team can become a tickbox exercise rather than a clearheaded take on what’s actually required to get the job done.
At its worst I’ve seen this lead to vast agile-in-name-only programmes, lacking the coordination and discipline good conductors bring.
On the other end of the scale, I’ve watched projects flounder as they struggle to assemble the component skillsets, without thinking about how it all hangs together.
I sometimes feel there’s too much focus on getting people trained in one-size-fits-all agile skills, rather than exposing them to the nuts and bolts at the heart of most digital endeavours.
Understanding the subtleties of the score is all important.
A good conductor is for life, not just for Christmas
There are encouraging signs afoot that new life is being blown into how the state delivers services.
The value of test and learn approaches are once again making it into government lexicon.
Growing recognition that structural problems need to be tackled, and ‘digital’ can’t just be a byword for whatever distracting shiny trinkets get paraded in front of us.
If you’re lucky enough to be recruiting this year and want to swim with the prevailing tide, I’d implore you to think about people who provide the glue, join the dots, conduct as well as code.
And if you can already pinpoint a conductor, nurture their skills and help create the space for them to get the job done or, ummmm, finesse their symphonies.
To round off, here’s a quote from an interview with conductor Oliver Holt. It has a nice synergy with some of the more positive rhetoric I’ve seen over the last couple of months.
“That’s our mission, to always strive to touch people, not only with Bach through all the rest, to delight the musicians and the audiences, to provoke curiosity, joy and sharing.”
Keep on provoking curiosity and joy, conductor folk!
🎻 Thank you for reading.
*not saying the grass is always greener, but I’ve not really seen the same comprehensive approach modelled by GDS or some larger councils and charities. Shout/reply/comment if you disagree.