Transcript of "Toxic technology, with Dave Rogers"

[Intro Music]

Clare: Hello and welcome to Making Tech Better, Made Tech’s fortnightly podcast bringing you content from all over the world, on how to improve your software delivery. For us, that means empowering your teams to collaborate compassionately on creating high-quality software that delivers value quickly, to the people that really matter, the users.

My name is Clare Sudbery, and my pronouns are, ‘she’ and ‘her’. I’ve been a software engineer for 21 years. I do a lot of speaking and writing on the topic of software delivery and I’m a Lead Engineer with Made Tech.

The public, that is to say the not-for-profit sector in the UK has been hit by repeated funding cuts for years. The secret weapon that it has is the government digital service, which has led to ongoing digital transformations across the public sector. It’s more important than ever to understand how public digital services are organised and funded. So, on 17th February 2021, I spoke to Dave Rogers. He’s now an independent consultant, but he originally worked with the iconic digital services team, so it’s great to have Dave on the podcast. He knows a lot about digital services, and he has passionate opinions, all of which are wrapped under what Dave refers to as toxic technology.

Clare: Hello Dave.

Dave: Hi, thanks for having me on.

Clare: It’s a pleasure. Dave, I had a few sources for a bio for you. I’m just going to ask you about the headline elements. I gather from Twitter that your pronouns are he and him, is that correct?

Dave: That’s right.

Clare: Fantastic. You are an independent consultant, part of the public digital HQ network. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Dave: Yeah, sure. I operate as an independent consultant. I work directly with some clients providing a range of different services, usually advice, coaching or I might run workshops or training, that kind of thing. Then the public digital HQ is an organisation I work with called Public Digital. They are a new consultancy; we work across the world.
The kind of consultancy I do is trying to be something that focuses on my own lived experience. The kind of work I do with my clients is, I talk to them about what they are trying to achieve and then I draw upon that experience to try and advise them about ways in which they might be able to improve, different approaches or techniques they might use, areas where they might want to link up with other people in the network. I help join them up with other organisations, whether it’s peers… I do a lot of work in the public sector, that’s linking up people in the public sector.

Then also getting into the ideas space. I do a lot of writing and I try to capture those ideas in writing and then use those ideas when I work with different organisations.

Clare: Okay. Dave, you were previously CTO/Head of Digital at the Ministry of Justice and also a member of the Government Digital Service, the GDS transformation team, which I think is fascinating. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Dave: Sure, yes. In 2013 I joined GDS. GDS was pretty young then, but it had already found its feet. Gov.uk was a thing and they were starting to look more outward across government and think what can we do with what we’ve done with really powerful, impactful products like Gov.uk? Take the same principles, ways of thinking, ways of working and get that to have a bigger impact right across government.

I got sent over to the Ministry of Justice and they said, right, you’re going to work on four initiatives over there, four digital services touching on different parts of justice, whether it’s legal aid, Office of the Public Guardian, the court service. We were doing that with multi-disciplinary teams. We were making software; we were using user-centred design. A lot of this stuff was pretty new at the Ministry of Justice and pretty new in government. Over several years there we built a team that got bigger and bigger and is the modern justice digital team that you see today. So, it’s quite an interesting journey.

Clare: Okay, thank you. So, the first question that I ask everybody after we’ve talked about who they are, is who in this industry are you inspired by?

Dave: I had a bit of a think about this and I’m going to slightly cheat by choosing a category rather than an individual person because I’m inspired by lots and lots of people at different times. As you’ll find out in the rest of the podcast, I’m really interested in systems. I’m really inspired by people who are able to talk about systems that run a bit deeper than what I talk about, like systemic racism or systemic sexism, transphobia, those kinds of topics. They talk eloquently about them and they can take those systems apart and talk about them in our industry. Those are the people I am really inspired by at the moment.

To give you an example of it, there is an ex-colleague called Abisọla Fátókun, who is somebody who Tweets about this every now and again. Also Tweets about technology and a number of other things. He is very eloquent and gets me to really think about this stuff.

Clare: Fantastic, thank you. Okay, so we’re going to be talking about toxic technology. I know that you’ve been writing a lot about it, you’ve written a lot about it on your website. So, what do you mean by toxic technology?

Dave: I came up with the term because I was a little bit frustrated with another term that lots of people will be familiar with, which is legacy technology. I wanted a term that was intentionally negative. It was saying, right, there is this thing about technology that is quite toxic, that we don’t want. It’s unequivocal. You can’t argue we’ve inherited it from the past because you are specifically describing the things you don’t want. I summarise it as a characterisation of technology by its unintended flaws. Which actually means it’s not just legacy technology that has all those negative characteristics, it’s also technology that you may have literally just created. It just so happens to have all these flaws that you did not intend, whether that’s bad design, bad architecture etc.

Clare: Okay. Can you give me some examples of some toxic technology?

Dave: Yes. A good example – probably one of the most important ones, I think – is technology that is very hard to change. If you work in an organisation that has been around for a few years, you will inevitably come across a piece of technology that has become notoriously hard to change. You might go in and you want to add a new feature and it just takes a very long time. As you work on that system, you get all these unintended consequences. You try to add the feature and something else breaks, or you try to add the feature and the architecture is not designed for it. If you walk into a typical hundred-year-old organisation, whether that’s a government department or a bank that’s been around for a really long time or a retailer or something like that, you will see huge numbers of these systems. And you will see that the organisation is really struggling to change as a result of the technology that it has. That’s that toxic effect through the lens of change.

Clare: The impact of that is time and cost when you are trying to improve things and when you are trying to add new functionality, presumably?

Dave: It’s all the unintended flaws and all the consequences of those unintended flaws. Through that example I just gave, yes, it would be time and cost of change. But if you expand it out, it can start to touch upon reputation of an organisation. If you are a commercial organisation, it starts to hit your bottom line. If you are a public institution, then it starts to undermine trust in that institution. You can see examples across the world, where if the trust is undermined and that’s caused by that toxic technology, it can actually have a really powerful impact.

Clare: Yes. One of the phrases that really leapt out at me in one of your blog posts was you talked about there being a crisis in the sustainability of software. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Dave: This is me taking the smallish idea of toxic technology, and trying to explore is there something really big going on as a result of this effect that we can all see? If you speak to your average software engineer, network engineer, architect or even people who work higher, they’ve seen this stuff and they’ve almost normalised it. The rubbishness of technology is something we kind of take for granted. If you start pushing it out into a bigger picture, then I do think there is potential for a crisis, if not a crisis already.

One of the examples I would give is, and we can add some links in maybe at the end of the podcast if needed, but there’s this video I saw last year. It’s a piece of hospital software. A video was produced by the hospital that had used this product, it’s a commercial product. That video was basically training people to accept how rubbish this technology was. It was saying, we are about to roll out product x, it’s going to be really hard to use, you’re going to find it annoying. What you need to do is accept that this is a natural part of introducing this product. I found this fascinating, that it actually became easier to produce a video that probably cost several thousand pounds to make, if you look at the production values, it was more cost-effective to produce a video telling people to accept the bad technology than to find the good technology. Hospitals are a really good example of where – if you walk into the average hospital in probably almost any country, and you ask to look at the technology systems that are used by doctors and nurses and hospital administrators, it’s awful. It’s almost all awful. It’s outdated, it’s poorly designed, it’s probably insecure in lots of different ways, it’s extremely hard to maintain and change and yet that’s normalised. It’s normalised within the healthcare industry.

Whereas our baseline, and the thing that we presume is normal, but which absolutely is not, is the kind of technology that we get from where the money is. Our smart phones, our music services and our TV services, there’s a lot of money in those industries. That’s why that technology can appear quite so modern and advanced. But if you look at areas where they are struggling for money like healthcare and justice, the technology is awful.

Clare: Yes, it’s interesting. I feel like it could be a bit of a tangent, but it does make me think about how software change is painful for people. Often people find it very difficult to move from old clunky software to new software.

Dave: Absolutely. I think you are describing an impact of toxic technology, which is if the technology is poor, then you do start to see the increasing of work arounds and adaptations in users. In worst cases, you actually see an inevitable increase in the workforce itself. So, you’ve actually got a co-dependency between a very bad piece of digital technology and a workforce that is considerably larger than it needs to be. Which means that digital transformation becomes not just a passive modernisation process where everything improves. That’s where people start to lose their jobs because of something that is a net improvement for the organisation but could have been avoided.

Clare: That is interesting. How can we make software more sustainable?

Dave: Making software more sustainable is going to be very hard because the things that are causing software to be unsustainable are a series of quite complex systemic causes. So, you’ve got issues with organisational culture and management culture, you’ve got financial causes, you’ve got a lot of human bias. The way that people think about things like delivery estimation. So, you’ve got this series of systemic causes.

Part of the problem that I face is that I struggle to convince leaders consistently that there is even a problem to be solved. We are in a situation where it’s so normalised that you do certain things. If you’re procuring a digital service, you go through a certain set of stages. Partly because of the law, probably because of presumed rules and constraints. It becomes very tricky. People don’t want to buy people; they want to buy an outcome. People get in a real pickle through that, yet they go through that process time and time again and don’t try to change it.

The same is true of writing very large business cases or announcing large amounts of money for outputs. It happens time and time again, leaders accept it, they normalise it and they just fight through, often, these horrific kinds of programme structures that don’t achieve what they set out to. It surprises me how hard it is to convince people that this systemic problem exists, and they should maybe have a go at fixing it. I’m really, really interested in the culture side that’s driving this and I’ve got really into the financial side of this. These may be the two most important systemic causes.

Clare: Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about the culture side then. What do you see as being the problems with culture and what can be done about them?

Dave: On the culture side I think there’s a style of management which creates a really effective engine for creating more toxic technology. It’s called command and control. It’s where leaders try to exert a very direct influence on what people and teams, they are responsible for do. A lot of people might be familiar with that term. They will certainly be familiar with things like micromanagement. So as an individual or a team, you are optimised in terms of; what are the incentives within your organisation? If they are towards following the plan, then you are probably in a command-and-control situation. If you are incentivised towards outcomes and value, then you are probably in a more supportive culture. It’s that idea that leaders are there to serve the needs of the teams and the individuals that work in their area. That’s a real flip of thinking.

Then I think the additional part of it is a real shift towards outcomes over outputs. The language of leaders will focus on the outcomes they want to see. Sometimes that’s described as a mission-based approach. A leader might say to a team, “Your mission is this.” They are not really concerned with how they achieve that mission, but they clearly signal what kind of outcomes are going to be positive for the wider organisation.

Clare: Something that I’ve struggled with in the past is when you are talking about outcomes versus outputs, I kind of go a bit word blind. Those two words are really similar, what is the difference? When is it an outcome and when is it an output? I often need an example to latch on to it and go yes, of course, I do know the difference. Can you give me an example of an outcome versus an output?

Dave: Yeah, I think an example I would use is one that’s inside quite a complex system, which is the criminal justice system. I was involved at some point in a project where the intuition and the assumption of leaders was that they wanted to deliver a website that would help people go through the court process that they would face as the result of a speeding offence, more effectively and more efficiently, to reduce the pressure on the court system. Effectively, to make the court system a bit cheaper and a bit more efficient.

The thing they really wanted to achieve was to reduce pressure on the court system – that is the outcome. They had moved into the output space by suggesting that would be achieved through a website that would navigate people through that process quicker. In the process of researching that domain, we actually discovered that something that was upstream in the system, which was signposting better access to speed awareness courses, would have a downstream effect on the course. I found that a really interesting example of where a simple content tweak on a letter could almost eliminate the need for a digital service downstream.

Clare: Right, yes.

Dave: That’s what that outcome-based leadership can get you. It gets you the creativity to say we don’t really know what the solution to this problem is, but we are absolutely clear that what we are trying to achieve is the end goal.

Clare: Yes. That’s something that I have seen in many different contexts, that it can really help to ask people, “What are you actually trying to achieve?”. It also reminds me, there’s a thing called the x,y problem, which is where somebody comes to you and says, “Please will you help me do this thing?”. You’ll spend a long time helping them do this thing and it’s quite a complicated thing. Maybe you even fail because it’s so hard. Then at the end of it you say, “Why did you want me to help you do that thing?”, and they say, “Because I was trying to achieve this.” And you go, “Oh, but you could have achieved that by doing this other very simple thing, and you’ve asked me to solve x when you were really trying to solve y.” If you had told me you were trying to reach y, I would have given you a much easier way of doing it.

Dave: Absolutely. I think the reason why that culture produces so much toxic technology is you’ve got a lot of people pursuing these very specific outputs and having to deal with the contradiction of what they are learning, and how it exposes the fact that maybe that technology should never have been built. Maybe that technology doesn’t actually solve the problem. It’s almost like it creates a situation where an organisation exhausts its very limited resources on the pursuit of the outputs it doesn’t really need.

Clare: Yes.

Dave: You get half-finished technology; you get bad technology.

[Music sting]

Clare: While I’ve got your attention, let me tell you a bit about Made Tech. After 21 years in the industry, I am pretty choosy about who I’ll work for, but there’s lots to love about Made Tech. We’re software delivery experts with high technical standards. We work exclusively with the public sector. We have an open-source employee handbook on GitHub, which I love. We have unlimited annual leave. What I love most about Made Tech is the people. There is a real passion to make a difference and they really care for each other.
Our Twitter handle is Made Tech, M-A-D-E-T-E-C-H. If you go to madetech.com/resources/books, you’ll find that we have a couple of free books available; Modernising Legacy Applications in the Public Sector, and Building High Performance Agile Teams. We are currently recruiting in London, Bristol, South Wales, and the North of England via our Manchester Office. You can find out more about that if you go to madetech.com/careers.

If you join our mailing list, you’ll get extra podcast content as well as finding out more about Made Tech. You’ll find a link in the description.

[Music sting]

Clare: Before the break, Dave and I were talking about the x,y problem, which is where you can find yourself trying to solve y, when what you should really be doing is finding the solution to x. Another way of describing this is when you focus only on output, sometimes this means you can move blindly towards a pre-defined end point without questioning why.

Clare: What are the financial causes of toxic technology?

Dave: This is the thread I’ve been pulling on in this overall topic that’s really interested me. I’ve realised that perhaps this is where a lot of the easier solutions lie. Probably where it starts is, I think people have a completely broken model of the relationship between money and technology.

It’s very typical for a financial professional, say an accountant or a CFO, to perceive technology in the same way that they might perceive other capital assets that they can buy. So that would be your tables and chairs, your office furniture, the buildings that you might buy to host your offices. They put technology into that category. Which is a false categorisation because technology is much more like a service, it’s more like a flow of money. It kind of mirrors what is sometimes referred to as CAPEX and OPEX, which is Capital Expenditure and Operational Expenditure in terms of accountancy.

Those are perceived to be almost two different flavours of money. The first flavour of money is intended to result in things that have value that you can then point at that value, like buying a car or even building a car. Then the OPEX is the service money.

What has happened in our industry is we are seeing this wave of a shift from CAPEX to OPEX. Back in the 1990s, almost everything would have been about buying the laptops, buying the data centres, installing the networks, and producing these seemingly fixed kinds of software. Large scale software construction projects where you create the large thing, and it is perceived to have enormous value.

What we are shifting to now, with effects like cloud, micro services, agile software development, the massive growth of the SAS market, Software as a Service, almost everything is starting to look like something that you rent, like SAS, or something that you have to continuously improve and service and maintain and sustain.

There’s this really interesting problem emerging, where the mainstream of financial thinking I don’t think has got its head around this huge shift to a rental and flow-based economy that has been ushered in. Software is right at the vanguard of that shift.

Clare: What it’s making me think of is the thing that you see a lot in all organisations, but in the public sector the example is that – actually, I’ve seen it potentially be a problem with the GDS paradigm – that there’s this idea that you’ve got alpha and beta and then eventually you move to live. Each phase is funded. Somebody has a budget and says, “Here’s the money for this bit.” And what it can result in is that people never move to live. Not because they are not ready to be live, but because they can see that if they go to live, the money will dry up.

When you’re building a new thing, yes, there probably is an intensity of funding required. Software needs maintenance. It’s a living beast that needs to be fed and watered and looked after. You have to clip its toenails and do all sorts of things. My analogies are all over the place now!

Dave: My favourite one is gardening. Toenails, if you like, but I quite like gardening. If you’re in an organisation that’s got a lot of software, you’ve basically got a big garden. If all the software developers just packed up and went home for six months, the garden will become hideously overgrown, just through the passage of time. I think people perceive software and digital technology as being much more engineering like, that there is a solidity to it. Whereas I think its organic nature is a much better capturing of what it is. If you connect the dots between some of the things we’ve been talking about, which is the culture of empowerment, the need to do ongoing tending of software and the power of that flow of money, you can see that you’ve got this sliding scale. At one extreme, you’ve just got the absolute baseline of funding. It’s sometimes called Keep the Lights On or BAU. That will likely mean that the services just degrade, and everything becomes toxic.

As you go up that sliding scale, you create more autonomy for the team, but you actually create less autonomy for strategic decision makers.

Clare: When you talk about there being more autonomy, are you saying that typically the more money is being made available, the more autonomy people have in how they spend that money?

Dave: Yes, I think the easiest way to think about this dynamic is through the lens of teams. With a lot of organisations I work with, one of the first observations I have for them is that you don’t really have any teams. Teams only pop into existence when you provide some money and you get the emergence of this organisational structure that is only there because the money is there.

Correspondingly, when the money runs out, that all disappears and there are a few people left holding whatever got created by that programme. So, if you start to stabilise that and say actually, let’s think differently, let’s assume that we are going to constantly want to change things. Why don’t we have a larger core of teams? Why don’t we have five teams for whatever it is that we’re trying to do? Now, we can still decide what those teams do and what their priorities are and what their missions are, but what we don’t question each year or political cycle or spending cycle, is we don’t question their existence. We allow them to thrive as teams and create a culture where there’s the autonomy of existence. They’ve got the autonomy to know that they are not going to lose their jobs, they are just there to do whatever is the most important priority for the organisation.

Clare: And part of their job in that case could be deciding what their priorities are and what needs to be focused on and how they are going to focus their efforts and their time.

Dave: Absolutely, yes. That’s always a fascinating dynamic, that you hire talented, multi-disciplinary people into institutions that are used to command and control. They start having ideas, they’re like, “We could do this really awesome thing.” It’s actually very unnatural, particularly in – I mostly work with the UK civil service – it’s very unnatural for a big idea to emerge from a multi-disciplinary team and go up and catch the attention of a minister. The flow is designed to go almost exclusively the other way.

Clare: Yes. I was actually watching a fascinating talk by Janet Hughes the other day about that, about policy and about how historically, the way policy is managed within the UK public sector – and I’m guessing in a lot of other countries as well – is that policy just becomes a hand grenade that’s just lobbed over a wall to a team of people who then have to deliver that policy. It’s not a two-way street, there’s no communication, it’s just here we go, we’ve come up with a new thing, now you make it happen, rather than there being a dialogue. Like you say, the people on the other side of the wall being able to come up with good ideas, which they are bound to have. They are at the coal face, they are interacting with the users, they are actually seeing the impact of policy.

Dave: Yes, definitely. It’s that inspect/adapt loop that is just an intrinsic part of agile, expanded out to government. If you inspect and adapt, that means you get a feedback loop and you don’t necessarily end up delivering the policy that you might have expected to have delivered in the first place.

Clare: Yes. Another pattern that we see in the public sector in particular, is this idea that somebody decides a new thing is needed and a pot of money is made available. So, there’s a budget that is put out to tender and people bid and say yes, we can build this website for you. Already, you have a problem because you have decided how much money you want to spend. Just as we were talking about before, you’ve basically created an output rather than an outcome. Now you’re encouraging people to say yes, we can do that thing for you and we will make it cost however much money it is that you think you’ve got to spend. Rather than saying well, we don’t really know at this point – not if we’re working in an agile sense – exactly what you were talking about, having that feedback cycle. By going through this process of saying this is the thing we want, and this is the money we have available, you are already causing yourself problems, because you are creating an environment that won’t allow that flexibility.

My question is actually, because the public sector is so wedded to that way of working, it’s just the way it’s done, how do you effect change?

Dave: I think there are some interesting precedents about how that might be solved. There’s a minister in New South Wales in Australia, a guy called Victor Dominello. He has led this thing called the Digital Restart Fund. Basically, it’s going to be an especially designed vehicle for distributing money in much smaller amounts, targeted towards digital interventions. What we’re going to do is we’re going to create a proxy treasury that’s much closer to digital strategy.

This was created and then people were able to draw down money in the order of tens of thousands of AUS dollars, or hundreds of thousands of dollars, to do individual initiatives. It breaks it down into smaller chunks and gets the decision-making of where those chunks get spent closer to digital strategy.

Where that would usually fall apart is in the process of agreeing the size of that digital restart fund in the process. The Treasury usually say you need to provide enough evidence to say that money is going to get spent effectively. It will take political will from political leaders, to believe more deeply in a style of intervention or an outcome than they do in specific outputs. To gain the money for achieving that, that’s a really macro scale example of it.

What you see with the emergence of digital units in large organisations, is the alternative version of that where in effect, staff become a bulkhead of predictable spend. So, if an organisation starts to employ five then ten then twenty teams of multi-disciplinary people, and they are full-time salaried people, that gives you a change capacity that will cost you the same amount of money every year but gives you incredibly flexibility about where the focus of those teams goes.

Clare: Yes.

Dave: That model is completely normal in big tech. I think you start to see the clues if you piece it together, but in any given environment, it is going to be a bit of a fight. It will take political will or the will of leadership, aligned to lots of different incentives, to actually create a situation where that new model emerges.

Clare: Do you see it as part of your role, to just keep chipping away and helping people to see that funding models are fundamentally broken?

Dave: I do, yes. It’s definitely a bit of a personal mission to chip away at this problem and see what I can do. Part of it is really valuable as a consultant. If I go in to speak to someone and I’m in the middle of this massive programme, everything is going wrong, nothing seems to make sense, if I just go in and with some degree of authority, explain to them that the entire system is rigged against them, they really like that. Because for their own mental health, it’s so relieving to know that the madness isn’t just them doing a bad job.

Now, getting them to actually do something about that is a whole different thing, but getting people into a place where they feel better about the fact that everything is a bit broken is a really good icebreaker, as a consultant.

Clare: I guess it’s related to a fundamental principle of how to help your friends, which people often miss out on. Sometimes your friend will come to you and complain about something or be upset about something. For some people – and I used to be one of these people, I still have to curb this tendency – you feel like your role is to suggest solutions and say, “Have you tried doing this? How about this? What about this?” Sometimes people really don’t want that, they just want you to go, “That sounds awful, poor you, have a hug.” Now, as a consultant you can’t just stop there but recognising when to give people sympathy and allow them to feel seen, without feeling like they have to instantly do something, can be really useful.

Dave: Definitely.

Clare: Something that I ask everybody is to tell me one thing about you that is true, and one thing that is untrue. Then what we’ll do is we will allow subscribers to find out which one was the true one and which one was the untrue one. Do you have something for me?

Dave: Yes. The first thing is that I’m the former world record holder for mattress dominoes. The second one is that I’m the former world record holder for mattress Jenga.

Clare: No way! I have seen a video of mattress dominoes. I think it might have been in Japan, I’m not sure, it was somewhere in the far East. I think each mattress had a person attached. I think there were people and mattresses that were domino-ing. It was a very, very funny thing to watch. Mattress Jenga is not something that I can – I’m just trying to imagine it now. Given that I also love to play Jenga, I’m also trying to imagine trying to remove a mattress from a pile of mattresses. (Laughing) Are they full sized mattresses? Just physically, removing a mattress from a large pile of mattresses sounds like an extremely difficult thing.

Dave: You might be onto some clues here as to which one is true, and which one is false.

Clare: The idea that you could be a former record holder in either of those things is mind boggling. Brilliant.

Let’s end on a high. What is the best thing that has happened to you in the last month or so? It can be either work-related or non-work related.

Dave: I think it’s when I found out that my dad got vaccinated because he volunteers with Help the Aged. It was such a nice feeling that my dad got vaccinated.

Clare: Yes, my parents got vaccinated a couple of weeks ago and it was very good news. Okay, so Dave, where can people find you? Do you have anything coming up that you would like to plug?

Dave: They are kind of both the same thing. @daverog.com is my website. Another thing I want to plug is that I am always writing on there. There is a sign-up link on the front page, and you can get on my Mailchimp distribution list and see everything, all the new things that I’m writing.

Last year, I wrote a book and then didn’t have the guts to publish it, so I am effectively now serialising it as a bunch of blog posts, which actually makes the task of editing it a whole lot more manageable.

Clare: Interesting. Thank you so much for speaking to me today, Dave. I’m sure we will meet again at some public sector related event at some point. Thank you.

Dave: Thanks for having me on, it’s been awesome.

As always, to help you digest what you’ve just heard, I’m going to attempt to summarise it. We’ve been talking about toxic technology, which is Dave’s deliberately negative term to describe the bad bits of legacy technology. Not even just legacy technology but also technology you’ve only just created.

What he is trying to describe here are the unintentional flaws such as outdated technology, poorly designed, insecure, and the consequences of those flaws. For instance, software that’s hard to change which results in having to spend extra time and extra money. Which can hit your reputation, can hit trust, and can hit the bottom line of your organisations and have a powerful negative impact.

We talked about a crisis in the sustainability of software and what happens when people start taking rubbish technology for granted. We talked about the complex systemic causes of this, about issues with organisational culture and management culture. For instance, when human bias creeps into processes via things like delivery estimation, and when top-down command and control management styles prevent innovation, when instead you could be focusing on and incentivising towards outcomes and value.

We talked about the financial causes of toxic technology and about the completely broken model – in the UK public sector, at any rate – of the relationship between money and technology. There has been a shift in software from a model of capital expenditure to one of operational expenditure. There has been a huge shift to a rental and flow-based economy.

Software maintenance is like gardening. It needs constant funding and attention. So, instead of teams popping in and out of existence when funding appears, it would be better if we could leave core teams in place. And instead of those teams only ever being told what to do by policy makers in a one-way stream, allow them some agency in deciding what needs to be done.

We talked about finding different funding models in the public sector, for instance, the Digital Restart Fund in New South Wales in Australia.

If you want to know more about all of this, please do look Dave up. There will be links in the description.

It was great to speak to Dave, but the podcast isn’t over yet. Stick around for some extra content.

Every other episode, this last, short segment will be devoted to story time. Story telling is useful for teaching, for unlocking empathy and for creating a sense of shared connection and trust in your teams. I love telling stories to both children and adults. I am actually a lapsed member of the UK Society for Storytelling. The plan is that I am going to be using stories to illustrate various points about effective software development.

For this episode, I thought I would tell the story of the Millennium. Not the Y2K bug, but the New Year’s Eve party. To set the scene, I live in Manchester, close to the city centre. New Year’s Eve in the city can be fun but it can also be a pain. Nobody can agree on where they are going to go, you can’t get home afterwards because there are no buses, and you can’t find a taxi. This was going to be the big one, this was the Millennium. So, we thought, why don’t we host a party? Then instantly thought no, that’s a crazy idea. Nobody will turn up, we’ll end up in a house, on our own, on New Year’s Eve at the Millennium. Then we thought okay, how about if we send invites out in advance. So, six months in advance we encouraged people to commit and to give us money to seal the deal. Not that we were trying to make a profit, just to fund the party. Then there was the anxious wait for replies.

It worked, people did reply, and they did send us money and they did promise to turn up, which was great. But then, everybody wanted to get involved. Everybody wanted to take control over particular rooms and help with the music. Of course, you would think that would be a good thing, but I am a bit of a control freak and it’s my house. And to be honest, there was a bit of discomfort there. But then, there was the joy of letting go and allowing this to happen. People took over particular rooms and took charge of the décor, people arranged music and food and drink and loads of extra little special details just to really make it a special occasion.

That was the plan, but what actually happened? Did anybody even actually turn up? New Year’s Eve, there we were, in an empty house, with all of this amazing décor and all of this amazing food and drink lined up, but not at all sure, knowing our friends, that they wouldn’t suddenly decide to do something else at the last minute. So, we waited, and we waited and then the doorbell went, and then the doorbell went.

It was amazing. And it wasn’t just our party, it was everybody’s party. There were happy faces everywhere. There were so many people thanking us for having put it on. People didn’t want to leave; it lasted a lot longer than we thought it would. A group of friends became a community. We all kept reminding each other about how much we cared about each other. The best thing was that it wasn’t stressful because quite often when you post a party, you don’t get to enjoy it like you do when you attend a party. But because it wasn’t just me putting it together, it wasn’t stressful, I could relax, I could enjoy it.

So, what’s the moral of this? I learned a really strong lesson from that, which is that shared ownership makes a massive difference to an outcome. If you allow and encourage your teams to seize control of their ways of working, of their outcomes and their outputs, then everybody cares, and the result is so much better. Everybody is energetic, everybody is motivated and instead of having to be in control, it’s much less stressful and you can relax.

Working in the public sector means that at Made Tech we really care about making a difference. So, for this final Making Life Better segment, myself and my colleagues will be making suggestions for small things we can do to make the world a better place.

For this episode, I am returning to the book Change the World for a Fiver, which was created as part of the Community Links Project We are What we Do, and was recommended by my Colleague Adam Friday. I’m going to read directly from the book.

This item is titled Learning First Aid is Child’s Play:

“It only takes two hours to save a life. What else are you going to do in that time that’s going to make such a difference? Watch Stars in their Eyes twice over? Let’s face it, saving someone’s life is cool. In fact, it’s about as cool as you can possibly get. If you do learn this skill, you might like to know that the person you help is statistically unlikely to be a stranger. They are more likely to be a friend or relative. Imagine saving your best friend’s life.

In the UK there is a fantastic organisation called St John’s Ambulance. There will be a link in the description. They run really great courses  in how to do first aid.

And that’s the end of another episode. You can find me on Twitter, @claresudbery, which might not be spelled the way that you think. There’s no ‘I’ in Clare, and ‘Sudbery’ is spelled the same way as surgery, with E-R-Y at the end.

You can find the podcast on Twitter @makingtechbett2. That’s; making, T-E-C-H-B-E-T-T-2. You can say hello, give us your feedback, give us any contributions you have for future episodes, or just have a chat with us.

Thank you to Rose for editing and thanks to Richard Murray for the music. You will find a link in the description. Also in the description is a link for subscribing for extra content. We will be releasing new episodes every fortnight. Thank you for listening and goodbye.

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