[Beeps]
[Pause]
>> Shaun Gomm: Okay.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Good afternoon.
Welcome back.
Hope you enjoyed your lunch.
A pretty good -- pretty good hot pot, I thought.
So, yeah, I hope you've refreshed yourselves.
This is the wakeup hour,
so don't -- no falling asleep.
The afternoon session is going to get much more practical
and tangible and kind of there'll be lots of takeaways
and all that kind of stuff.
So I hope you enjoy the afternoon session,
whichever set of, you know,
combined set of sessions you go into.
So let's crack on.
Shall we?
Without further ado, this is Matt.
He sounds like a pirate, not a farmer.
[Laughter]
>> Matt Jukes: That's very important.
If any of you tweet,
I'll find you if you say I sounded like a farmer.
[Laughter]
>> Matt: Okay.
So this picture will not be mentioned again,
but this is my beloved
Bristol Rovers beating Grimsby
in the playoff final a couple of years ago.
And this is literally just here
because there's a Grimsby fan,
another Grimsby fan speaking,
and it's just to troll him.
[Laughter]
>> Matt: So it's never been used in this talk before,
but I just couldn't miss out on the opportunity.
So -- so yeah.
So I'm jukesie.
So until really quite recently,
I was a civil servant, a public servant.
This is the first general election in 15 years
where I've been allowed to have an opinion,
which is a weird experience.
I'm trying.
I find it quite hard to get out of neutral.
Currently I work for a really small charity
that does digital democracy stuff.
We're a fully remote team,
so that's changed a lot of the opinions
I'm going to talk about in this talk,
so I can kind of go on that a little bit as well.
I am a serial leaper from frying pans into fire.
I've had loads of jobs
to the extent that shown for I was a contractor.
I've never been a contractor in my career.
I just get bored.
I take permanent jobs, then get bored,
and then move on to other permanent jobs.
I'd have none of the advantages of being a contractor,
so I earn no extra money,
except I have no job security
because I just move all of the time.
And I always move somewhere
that looks good and turns out to be a nightmare.
[Laughter]
>> Matt: That's basically been my entire career to date.
An important thing to say about this as well
is these are my lessons learned.
This isn't as important as it used to be
when I did this talk while I was still a civil servant.
There are certain people in places I've worked
who would either not recognize or not approve
of some of the lessons I've taken
out of my 15 years in the civil service.
But I stand by them for the most part.
Yeah, so this is kind of what we'll talk about:
digital, a little bit on hiring.
I've got a whole other talk
that I sometimes give
just on how to be better at hiring
because anyone who has gone for a new job
knows that everyone is really, really dreadful at it
and that the whole process is painful on both sides.
A little bit about --
well, quite a lot about actually how to create
a culture that keeps people,
keeps technical digital people,
in places, particularly quite difficult places
like the civil service in Newport, South Wales,
a state in the middle of nowhere,
which wasn't exactly attracting
the best of the U.K.'s talent when we joined.
Then hopefully they'll be time for some questions.
Digital.
[Pause]
Digital is the kind of buzzword du jour these days.
This talk was originally digital transformation,
but I can't even bear to talk about that any more.
This is just about digital.
And when I talk about digital,
this is a definition that I use for digital.
It was done by a guy called Tom Loosemore
when he was at the Government Digital Service.
Actually Tom now works in Manchester,
so he works for Co-Op Digital.
He's the person who hired Emer,
who gave that amazing talk earlier.
This is what, when I talk about digital, I mean this.
Okay?
It can mean a load of things
for other people and that sort of stuff.
But basically I have various job titles
in various years in the civil service.
But, for the most part, I was kind of like --
I was lots of different things
that sounded vaguely technical, digital, and their manager.
So I can't write a line of bloody code
to save my life and,
if I tried to deploy something on GitHub,
everyone run for cover.
I can't be trusted when it comes to UX decisions, really.
I know quite a lot about Agile,
but mainly I just complain about it.
[Laughter]
>> Matt: But I'm good at running teams.
I'm good at hiring teams,
I'm good at running teams,
and I'm good at supporting teams.
Well, I think I am.
Allison is in the room here somewhere,
who worked for me at one point,
and she might not necessarily agree,
but you can ask her after.
This is what I mean by digital,
and this is what changed my career, basically.
I've been banging around for a long time doing this stuff.
Then in 2011, the Government Digital Service was formed.
Who knows about GDS?
[Pause]
Okay.
Well, some of you.
GDS was this kind of ground experiment
to try and fix Government Digital
because, you know, it was disastrous.
And so they brought a load of people,
created the new department,
brought a load of people into it, and basically hired --
sort of stole people from the BBC and The Guardian, Amoo.com,
and anywhere they could just grab anyone decent from.
And so most of the government departments
went and stole a few decent people
from all the departments as well,
centralized them all into one place,
and created this new department
that was going to introduce
modern working practices to government.
The way that they did this,
they have sort of a carrot and stick approach.
This was the stick,
so basically you could spend no money
on anything with a really broad definition of digital
unless they gave you permission.
All these massive government projects
that used to basically spend
a million quid are looking into whether they can move off XP,
which, you know, as we know,
MHS never quite got around to.
That couldn't happen.
That couldn't happen without GDS's approval.
Basically even very, very singular people
who previously had been allowed
to do pretty much whatever they wanted
had to go cap in hand and get permission.
To get permission, you had to do this.
There was a service standard.
Basically, you had to sign up
to work to this service standard to get any money.
Basically, you had to agree,
and the service standard was pretty simple.
It's all things that any of you have been working in UX,
digital or service design,
or any of these things in the last few years would know.
It was: put users first,
work in an agile manner, deploy regularly.
Don't wait six months before you do a deployment.
It was all kind of just pretty standard stuff,
but it was entirely radical for government.
And you get assessed,
so the way that they assess you is you ship down to London,
the three or four of you.
You sit in a room.
Then four or five people ask you questions
about your projects for four hours.
It's basically like the worst job interview you've ever had,
but it's amazing, and it's pass/fail.
It's straight pass/fail.
One of the things was you absolutely had to have,
you had to have a multidisciplinary team.
You could not pass these service assessments
unless you had your own team
with a user researcher, front end developers,
designers, and all these sorts of things.
They had a big thing about this,
about the unit of delivery was the team.
But here was the thing.
No one had any teams.
Basically, for the last ten years,
government had shopped out all this work,
so massively IBMs, Fijitsus, and Capita.
There weren't these people hanging around
sitting on their hands
waiting for the opportunity do this work.
We'd got rid of it all.
We got rid of the skills.
We got rid of the understanding.
We'd made decisions basically
based on the idea that these weren't
core businesses for the civil service,
so we shouldn't have the skills.
Then we were suddenly being told we had to --
if you wanted any money,
if you wanted to do any work,
you had to build teams.
I'm only going to talk a little bit about hiring.
This is an amazing quote because it's from me.
The technology stuff is hard,
but everyone knows what to do.
It's not that we were trying
to recreate anything particularly rather cool.
You know the open source world
was out there and has solved most of our problems.
We just have to implement it.
Finding people who are willing to do that in government,
who are committed and had those skills, that was the challenge.
It's never really a digital talk
unless you've got a picture of Steve Jobs.
But this is a completely unrealistic thing as well.
It's easy to say about hiring the best if you're Apple,
or if you're Google, or if you're Facebook.
If you can offer people enormous salaries
and share issues and all those things
that appeal to the people
that Emer was talking about earlier,
those aren't the same things you can offer
if you're in a dodgy state
on the edge of Newport, South Wales.
You can't hire the best.
You can hire the best you can get.
But you still have --
but you still have to seek
to get people who know what they're doing.
You really still have to work.
This is usually a picture of Rolling Stones,
but I decided to mank it up
a little bit given I was here.
[Laughter]
>> Matt: Yeah, so leave the rock stars
to the Pyramid stage.
The worst thing that ever happened
in this whole digital technology UX world
is when some idiot started calling people
rock stars in recruitment ads,
and gurus, and [explicit used] ninjas.
[Laughter]
>> Matt: You are not ninjas.
[Laughter]
>> Matt: None --
I mean you're all lovely people,
but I'm not worried about any of you
coming to get me in my sleep.
[Laughter]
>> Matt: I mean that whole thing,
the whole way we describe jobs,
it just does us a disservice.
It does the entire industry a disservice.
I mean I'm continuing to mank it up, as you can see,
so I'm not even going to stick on that one.
But here are some things we didn't do well.
We did loads of stuff to improve hiring,
but these are some things,
a couple of things we didn't do well.
One of the worst things
everyone does when it comes to recruiting
is you write bad job descriptions.
You poorly publicize them.
You finally get some people to apply for them.
You make your decision on who you want to interview.
If you're lucky, eventually you get a decent candidate.
Everyone thinks the job is done.
It's just this reality.
Basically you've spent months, usually,
particularly in the civil service.
It can take, like, six months
just to get to the point
where you've got permission to hire somebody.
Then everybody who was involved in that process
just wipes their hands of it,
goes and sits back at their desk,
and just figures the person
will show up at some point.
You basically just leave these people with no real idea
what they're getting into either.
The things that we learn,
and in the longer version of the hiring talk
it kind of goes into more detail,
but the reason this is in red
is because I never cracked this at all.
But there are certain things
like actually giving genuinely useful feedback to people
who didn't get the job
because a lot of the time
they didn't miss out by much.
There was just somebody better.
You don't want to piss them off
so that they don't apply again.
There is a limited pool of talent
for any of this kind of work.
Depending on the areas you're in,
you're either competing against
lots of other people who want that talent
or basically there isn't that much
in the first place, just generally.
You have to make sure
that you build those relationships.
Basically, sending somebody a two-line email
saying someone was better than you is not helpful,
does not do you any good,
and there are reasons you are in those interviews.
You know why they didn't get it,
and you know what their strengths were.
You have to share that with them.
Also, the successful candidates,
a lot of the time they've got notice periods to work and,
depending on the level of the job,
some of them are quite long,
so it was pretty usual
for three months to be notice period
people had to work and the people we were recruiting.
If from the day you made them the offer they have no --
they'll interact with you
for three months, you know,
that's not helpful.
You forget about them.
They forget about you.
They're not quite understanding
what they're getting themselves into.
You have to spend time working with them.
This is all pretty simple,
but HR usually hates it.
This is one of the things
I would get in trouble about.
HR thinks they own this process.
But you can usually find
the person you've hired on Twitter or something,
and you just get in touch with them.
You take them out for a coffee,
and you bring them to meet the team in advance.
You build a relationship with them so that,
the day they join, it's not like the first day of school
because everyone hates the first day of school.
You have to kind of build that process.
One of the reasons you have to build those processes,
every one of --
I had all these jobs,
and there's never been a decent induction.
Induction sounds like you're joining a cult, for a start.
I mean I know you have to do all the boring things.
I know you have to kind of sign up for things
and learn about how to do expenses
and all these kind of dull things.
But actually, if the first experience someone has
when they join your organization
is they spend five days doing admin,
never barely seeing the team
that they've signed up to work with,
doing none of the stuff that they're interested in,
and basically just being left out in the lurch,
it's no wonder people find that hard.
It's not good for people, people with mental health.
It's not good for their stress levels.
Also, it just doesn't portray you in a very good light
when you're trying to encourage people to join.
None if this is that hard.
You know they're coming,
particularly if you had three months.
You know the work you've got to do, and you can just --
so one of the things we tried to do,
and which the team I left now
do much better since I've been gone, which is a running theme.
Basically I had lots of ideas,
but the team who took over for me
are much better at actually making them real.
They break down tasks,
break down the kind of things in the sprint.
Someone can just take hold
and do something in the first week.
Get them --
if they're a developer,
get them to deploy something in the first week.
If they're UXers, get them
to go do user research in the first week.
Get them to see how people are interacting with a product.
Build these things in.
Build stuff in that is about
what they wanted to do as early as possible.
Get them to feel that they're contributing
to the team as early as possible.
That's where the real benefits are.
Plus you start getting your money's worth out of people
a bit quicker as well, which,
after all the hassle you've gone through to get them,
it's pretty important.
But I think that's a really interesting thing
is just get them in,
get them working, get them interested.
Then all the kind of wrangle with,
like, Oracle pay systems
and trying to work out
it's going to take you more time
to fill in your expenses form
than it's probably worth your time to claim your expenses.
I didn't claim expenses
for six months at the Office for National Statistics
because I didn't think it was worth my time.
They did pretty well out of it.
I'm not sure if that's why they do it,
but you wonder sometimes.
Culture.
I'm going to have a drink.
[Pause]
Who has heard of Peter Drucker?
[Pause]
He never said this quote.
This is his most famous quote and,
in nothing he ever wrote
or in none of his ever collected speeches,
and it doesn't exist in any of it,
but it's quite cool,
and everyone claimed that they know the quote.
He basically as got a lot to answer for
because he basically created management consultants,
which basically then went on
to kind of rip off the world.
But he did have this amazing idea about kind of --
about the importance of organizational culture
and about building cultures
was actually what made places stronger.
That was what you sold.
It wasn't the technology,
and it wasn't your processes.
It was your culture that you sold.
I had to balance it out
because I had a picture of Fergie before,
but I do like this quote.
[Pause]
But here's one of the ones,
so we're ONS, so Office for National Statistics
as being part of the civil service since,
well, Winston Churchill created it,
so like 47 or something.
It's been in Newport since the '90s.
It had a very insular, interesting kind of culture.
Lots of people worked there with their parents.
You would be in lifts
and you'd realize that the people in the lift
were a married couple or a divorced couple,
on more than one occasion.
In my wider team, we had husband and wife,
brother and sister, cousins.
I mean it's weird.
But it very much has a culture.
It doesn't have a culture
that I particularly want to encourage,
but there was certainly one there.
But we were coming in and trying to embed
this way of digital thinking, this digital culture.
You have to be really careful in how you do this
because people react badly.
The idea is that you cannot impose a culture.
You cannot just --
who has read Creativity, Inc., a book about Pixar?
Read it.
It's great.
But the worst thing it does
is lots of senior people read it and think,
"I'm going to make my company like Pixar."
Like [explicit used].
[Laughter]
>> Matt: Seriously.
There's a whole bunch of reasons why Pixar was Pixar,
and it wasn't because someone read a book about Pixar.
And so they come in,
and they try and implement
all the things that they read in this book.
They try to impose a new culture.
That's just not how it works.
Cultures emerge.
Cultures emerge from the ground up, from the teams,
from the work and practice,
from the individuals,
and you have to kind of identify and nurture
the things that are good about that,
and then you have to try and kind of stamp out
the things that are going to be bad.
It's kind of gardening.
You're kind of gardening culture.
But you have to think that through,
and you have to be a real part of that from the beginning.
Part of the way we did this
was lots of places of principles now.
It's kind of one of those things.
Do a search on Google for design principles,
and there's dozens.
MailChimp have got some brilliant ones.
There's various ones.
There's a whole website
that just collects people's team principles now.
Again, these do kind of tend
to be done in a certain way.
That someone has read one set of them.
Someone quite senior decides that's cool,
writes their version that sound
quite similar to the ones they read before.
They get a graphic designer
to turn it into a nice, big poster.
And they stick them around a bit in the offices.
Then no one really talks about it,
but you occasionally get pointed at the principles.
What we wanted to do was to do that differently,
so we were all very inspired.
GDS, again--so that GDS are our kind of running theme--
had these quite famous ten principles,
ten design principles.
Number one is put users first.
Number ten is the importance of being open.
Be open makes things better.
There's loads in between that I don't remember.
Those two were quite important to me,
but we didn't want just to use theirs.
We wanted ones that were personal to our team,
so we asked the team to come up with them.
We ran a little competition.
There were prizes.
People were encouraged to kind of think about
what were the kind of principles
that they wanted the team to stand for.
We did that as a group and talked it through as a team.
Admittedly, I then ended up rewriting them all
because I'm still kind of slightly one of those old guys
who would rather just tell everyone what to do.
ONS has these principles that
reflected the team, reflected everyone,
so there are 11 principles.
The first 11 was my whole kind of football thing.
But they were principles that reflected the team
and the culture that the team wanted to express.
They were aspirational.
They weren't where the team was at that point.
This is where they wanted to get to on mass
because that's what it is a lot of the time.
You know you don't--
So I'm bad with to-do lists.
My main to-do list is
I realize I haven't done anything on my to-do list.
Then I write a to-do list
of all the things I know I've done,
so I can just tick them off straight way.
That's what lots of --
and that's basically what lots of the principles are.
It's basically someone walks around
and says, actually, where are we today?
Writes it up nicely, puts them on the poster,
and then there's no effort there.
There's nothing to strive for.
There's no ambition.
You have to kind of be
aspirational with your principles.
Yeah, culture is more than just having posters on walls.
But it's pretty important
because you have to reinforce these things.
Has anyone come across this poster?
It's okay.
Okay.
Seriously, this is the URL.
It's brilliant.
It's just a list of things
that were put around an office
that say things like:
It's okay to say, "I don't know."
It's okay to be loud.
It says it's okay to sing,
which I absolutely disagree with.
Like that's just not apparent.
There's a whole bunch of things.
It's basically just for people on their first day.
It just kind of unofficially
stuck around the GDS offices.
But then it got onto Twitter,
and did that classic thing on Twitter
where a photo of it lost all context
and just started getting shared.
Then it showed up on LinkedIn.
Now it's in some design museum in Italy,
like framed and that sort of thing,
again with no reference to where it came from.
But it's an amazing thing
that kind of just demonstrates
that you can reinforce these things.
Some managers probably had always thought --
you know, there's always this thing in digital teams
where you kind of expect
everyone else feels the same way as you do,
and that they're as comfortable as you are.
Actually, some people need
to be explicitly told
that certain things are okay,
that certain ways of working are okay.
That actually no one thinks
everyone is on their game the whole time.
And actually, no one thinks
everyone knows everything,
even in your chosen topic,
even if you're supposed to be an expert.
We're all blacking it.
We all look things up on Google on our phone in a meeting
because we think we're supposed to know
what someone else is talking about.
I mean this is just the way that the world works.
Yeah.
The details matter.
[Pause]
On LinkedIn, again,
you see loads of these photos on LinkedIn,
on first day of work,
and there'll always be this picture of --
I've got my laptop, and I've got my iPhone 6.
I've got my hoodie, and this all....
This is what a brilliant first day, and that's cool.
But actually most places aren't like that.
I joined a different government department
after I suffered again
from the whole grass is greener thing when I left ONS.
It took them five weeks to get me a laptop.
I left after three months,
and my phone had never shown up.
I was there for three months
and I never got a phone.
These places --
you know, the details do matter,
but it's not just giving people the generic stuff.
We all do jobs.
We all do things that have specific requirements.
You shouldn't have to fight
for the software you need for your jobs.
You shouldn't need to fight
for a bigger screen if you're a designer.
You shouldn't need to fight for access to bloody Slack.
You know what I mean?
[Laughter]
Like we had a six-month argument about just --
we weren't allowed to use Slack on the work IT.
We weren't allowed to use GitHub on the work IT
for a year even though our entire --
we were doing everything in the open,
so everyone just basically --
we had wi-fi there,
so everyone just brought their own Macs in.
I mean I'm not sure that was better for security.
Yeah, so you have to be able to do this.
You have to give people the opportunity to have the tools.
And you have to give people the opportunity to learn.
I think the whole 10% or 20%
time thing at Google is a complete myth.
It's nonsense because they all work 70 hours a week,
so that 20% of their time - no.
Come on.
What's that?
Sunday morning?
But you do have to build time in
so people can grow as staff.
Just give them opportunities,
and give them the training and the access,
and not tell them what that is.
The worst thing is when you join places and they say,
these are the training courses.
They're not always appropriate.
Some people like e-learning.
Some people don't.
Some people prefer a classroom environment,
some people don't.
It should be for the person who wants to learn
to decide how they want to learn
and not have it imposed on them.
This is murder for me to have this slide
because I work in a completely remote organization.
They have no walls.
They have no rooms.
I only see my colleagues on Hangouts, basically.
They all kind of look slightly jerky,
and I drop out almost always
because my wi-fi is not good enough.
But when there was the opportunity,
having rooms, having walls--
[Pause]
--having people in the same place together.
Like I'm actually genuinely thinking about
who sat with who.
I'm mixing it up,
so not having a clump of UXers
and then a clump of developers
and then a clump of managers.
But mixing it up so there was
a genuine kind of multidisciplinary team
where people were sharing ideas.
Finding ways to give people
the quiet time they needed
to get their stuff done,
giving people the opportunities to,
but have that osmosis in the team.
This was really important.
Giving people places where they're only in rooms.
I don't know what it's like in your offices,
but meeting rooms are always --
everywhere I've ever been,
meeting rooms are like gold dust.
Finding ones that you can actually just go to
when you need to is always a nightmare.
We just kind of claimed one
and didn't let anyone else use it,
and just had arguments about
the fact that it was often empty, but it was ours.
We sat right near it
and basically created like a barrier to it.
But you have to have these places
where people can have quiet spaces
that people can go and do their thinking
and get their work done.
This is --
has anyone ever come across this idea
of the maker versus manager schedule?
Cool.
This was one of the most
important blog posts in my career,
quite early on in my career because,
like I said before,
I could probably code in '96
for whatever that was worth,
but I've been doing this job ever since.
I've been running Web teams
and have been head of whatever,
so I've been the head of, like --
I've been like a senior Web master
and then a head of online and a head of e-something,
and then a head of digital.
I'd probably be something else,
whatever cool in a year's time.
But the more you become that,
the less real work you actually do.
I became a manager and as a manager really early on.
All my other skills just kind of degraded.
This blog post is quite old now.
It was amazing because it broke down this whole idea
about how people who build and design stuff,
how they see their working day
compared to how people who are managers see their working day.
My day was always essentially broken down
into hour long slots that were meetings.
If I was lucky, I got half-hour gaps in between meetings
to write up the meeting and read about the next meeting.
For a lot of people
who do design work and development work,
actually it takes an hour
to get into the right frame of mind
to get on to do the real work.
Then you need two hours after that
to really produce that work.
The minute you disturb someone in that time period,
they start from scratch.
Now I'd never thought about it like that.
I just thought, you know,
to use a term that's pretty bad these days,
I just thought they were all snowflakes.
You know, I just thought everyone
was just being a bit kind of precious.
But it was when you start to really think about it
and start to get y our head around that
--see that's the work in process--
you start to change how you think
about how your teams work
and how you can ask of them.
I was terrible for just walking up behind people,
tapping them on the shoulder,
because I needed some information at that minute
because someone else needed that information from me.
It was a big thing
about kind of changing
that way of thinking.
[Pause]
This is the thing I've always struggled most with
is the trust thing.
I always think I'm trusting the team
until there's a problem,
and then I don't trust the team,
or I don't trust myself to trust the team.
I think there's this really strong thing
that if any of this kind of
culture stuff is going to work,
any of this kind of
digital design thinking kind of stuff work,
like self-organizing teams
and all that sort of idea,
there has to be trust on all sides.
That can't only be when it's going well.
So it's really easy to trust everybody
when sprints are going really smoothly
and you're just deploying,
and everyone is agreeing on stuff,
and user research is, oh,
how brilliant this is.
It's going to save me so much time.
It's not the same when things
are melting down around you,
and you're getting pressure
about how much money you've spent
and how long something is taking.
In our case the fact that
all of our security sign-off
got withdrawn from us
a month before we were going to
launch a massive new project.
You have to be able to trust
in the good and the bad.
That's something that
I'm still getting better at
even after all these years.
A book that's amazing,
and I never thought a book about managing,
about captured in a nuclear submarine,
would make any difference to my life.
But Turn the Ship Around is an amazing book.
It's well written.
It's all about how completely rethinking
the kind of command structure
and the approach and everything
on an active nuclear submarine.
It speaks to self-organizing teams, agile work,
and all this sort of thing
in a way that I never would have expected.
Someone at a conference,
not unlike this, mentioned it
and espoused it in their talk two years ago.
I bought it on Kindle, sat there,
and it took me a year to read it because I was just like,
I'm not going to read that.
It is brilliant,
and I absolutely recommend reading it.
Yeah, so who knows what HiPPO is?
Yeah.
Yeah, so highest paid person's opinion.
The job of a leader in these things
is to be an umbrella
for HiPPO [explicit used], fundamentally.
The only thing --
and it has to be kind of staged
because HiPPO [explicit used] is big.
Each manager above each manager,
and each leader above each leader
has to be trying to cover
the person beneath them with their umbrella.
Some of it is always going to slide past,
but eventually there's less and less of it.
There's no way you can work unless you do this.
We had all sorts of weird things,
like we almost completely
redesigned the website once
because our director general,
which is like the highest thing in a civil service,
decided that the website
needed to be "more vibrant."
[Laughter]
>> Matt: Literally, their only feedback.
When we pointed back
that we were doing user focus
and that sort of thing,
his response was,
"There's no more important user than me."
He hasn't got the job any more, actually.
These are the couple of things that are hard.
It's all very well building these kind of cultures,
but they're actually subcultures
because we built this thing.
We have this culture.
We have this team kind of way
of working and way of thinking.
But we were one team
in an organization of 3,500 people.
There was like maybe 35 of us
who thought and worked this way,
and we were starting to infect other teams
that were trying to do it,
but it was still relatively small in comparison.
It's like red cells and white cells,
and all that sort of thing.
The other cultures are always trying to fight back.
They're always pointing out your failures - loudly.
They're always kind of poking at people to kind of say,
well, why don't you come and work on this?
This would be better for your career.
I'll never forget.
It was a conscious thing.
I don't know if people
were consciously trying to undermine it,
but it was happening all the time
because they just saw it as,
like, we were this slightly radical --
it's not how we've done things here.
That kind of "not invented here" approach.
And so it was a constant kind of battle
to kind of hold your ground
and to try and infect
as many people as you can with your approach.
It's fragile.
You get these things up and running,
but you've got these outside forces trying to poke at it.
It's early.
You're just trying to start something,
and you're just trying to bring people in to reinforce that.
But if kind of bad decisions
and bad ways of working or bad approaches
start to creep into your way of working
and they're not handled,
and they're not managed,
then it's very easy to undermine it all.
That's it.
Questions?
Cheers.
[Applause]
>> Shaun: I'm particularly impressed that,
even though muggins here
forgot to set Matt's timer,
he ran absolutely dot on time, so apologies, Matt.
Questions for Matt, please.
[Pause]
>> Female: Thank you.
I absolutely enjoyed your talk.
I'm currently actually leading a digital transformation
in one of a very classic coms agencies,
so a lot of this really resonated.
I was wondering.
Have you ever had to deal with
freelance versus perm problem
and, like, ethically how did you approach it,
because one of my first day at work
I've noticed I'm being introduced to everyone,
but this guy in the corner?
And I was like, who is he?
And they're like, oh, freelance.
>> Matt: Yeah.
>> Female: I was wondering how --
did you ever have to deal with it.
How do you kind of culturally integrate people
so that they are judged
based on their quality of thinking?
>> Matt: Okay.
Yes,
it's not quite freelancers.
We had contractors.
We have large amounts of contractors.
We made the decision really early on
that we were fundamentally
not going to treat them any differently,
so they weren't allowed to sit separately.
They sat mixed into the team.
Much to, initially, kind of their disgust, maybe,
they had to check their holidays with me.
They basically, even though I have no sign off
on when they break or anything,
they still acted as if they were part of the wider team.
We basically just integrated them in
so that they would do that.
Talks like this, we asked them.
We didn't do a usual thing
where they would tell somebody in our team
to go and do the talk.
If they were the right person,
then they went and did the talk.
It didn't always work.
It is one of the things
that's been harder to sustain going forward.
But, yeah, we absolutely had it.
It was very much a tradition in the organization
that little teams of contractors
kind of worked on things.
They had a manager who would occasionally go and check
that they were doing their stuff,
but they were never integrated properly.
We really worked very hard
to make that from the start.
We were quite lucky as well
that we brought in a team
of contractors to do the work.
They were all quite new to it,
to kind of being embedded
in a government agency,
so they basically just agreed to anything we said
because they didn't know any different.
They were just kind of --
they just went with the flow,
so it worked quite well.
Yeah, we have quite specific strategies for that.
>> Female: What do you generally do with the culture?
Like does it even matter?
Like does that --
does this model even matter
like in terms of how it's impacting the culture
long term for the organization?
>> Matt: Having the mix of the thing?
>> Female: Yeah, having the mix.
>> Matt: So I don't --
so I think it --
so it has strengths and weaknesses.
I think being able to bring
freelancers and contractors
who have got experience from elsewhere,
particularly in institutions
where people have been there a long time,
it's really good to have that outside opinion.
They understand what good looks like in a different world.
They bring kind of a new enthusiasm
and a new sort of approach and kind of perspective.
I don't think it's very often sustainable.
I think that's the real challenge.
The reality is, you know,
for every contractor that I --
financially, every contractor I hired at ONS
was probably worth two and a half times, four times staff
kind of financially over the course of a year,
which is fine when they're doing
that much more work for you, which a lot of them did.
But long term, that's quite hard
when you're public sector or private sector
because you've still got to pay, you know,
make the business case.
That was quite tough.
[Pause]
>> Male: Hi, Matt.
Thanks for that talk.
It was really interesting,
and it really hit home,
actually, for anyone that works
at a government body, probably.
I was just wondering,
in your experience,
I was particularly interested
in talking about organizational culture,
particularly top-down culture
where you're often making digital decisions
based on the whims of a director or chief exec.
Have you ever been able to overcome that?
How do you actually challenge that, which is,
a lot of the time,
extremely endemic over years?
>> Matt: Yeah.
So --
so the reason we were able to overcome it
is not one that I would ever suggest anyone else do.
Basically, everything blew up.
Like I mean we had the worst failure.
The website went down
the day before GDP was going to go live.
It was just like ten hours of no website.
No one could ignore the fact that it was a disaster.
Like no one.
And GDS stepped in and said,
like, you can't do this.
It's making the whole government look bad.
By the way, you've got some people in the organization
who probably know how to deal with this.
We got this ridiculous cover
for months from Tom Loosemore,
who I mentioned at the beginning.
That gave us enough time
to get established, basically,
and to start making some decisions
that were really hard to unpick.
The one thing I learned is
if you get any crack,
you have to go big early.
You have to make decisions quite early on
that actually set you down a path.
The whole kind of softly, softly, baby step thing
is too easy for people
to revert as soon as they kind of,
you know, liven up to what's happening.
We had the whole team in place.
We broke a bunch of procurement rules
and just moved really fast.
Basically everyone, like,
sat in the office within, like,
two months of me giving the green light.
Then it was too late.
There was a contract signed and that was it.
But, yeah.
No, I think it's hard.
I mean I left.
When I left ONS, I went to work for
Department of Environment, Farming, and....
And that was a very difficult culture.
Even though there were lots of people there
who kind of buy into digital, Agile, service design,
and stuff like that, it's much bigger.
It's much more spread out,
and I could make no impact, basically.
It was like you thought
you were speaking to the right person.
It turned out that they had five layers above them.
So, like, I've got no real strong answers
other than if you get that crack of a chance,
you just have to really make
an impact as fast as possible.
>> Shaun: Okay.
No more time for questions, I'm afraid.
Sorry.
Please give it up for Matt Jukes.
[Applause]
[Pause]
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