For 25 years, my job was to connect
things that weren't talking to each other.
I've been doing it since before we called it the internet. And every programme taught me the same thing.
Back in the dial-up days, one of my first programmes spread something we then called "telematics" to 150 small businesses in London's Lee Valley. Later, and much bigger, came Government Connect - a £50 million programme to link hundreds of local authorities to central government, so they weren't each paying separately for the same thing. Then a programme to bring around 90 government agencies onto a single employee survey - which won an award, and meant that for the first time anyone could see across the whole of government and ask: where is this working, and why?
Different decades, different technology, the same job every time. Take the fragmented, disconnected, everyone-doing-their-own-thing mess - and make it one thing that works.
And here is what I learned, on every single one of those programmes. The technology was the easy part. The hard part was always the people. You can build the platform, sign the procurement, ship the system on time - and still watch the whole thing fail, because the humans who have to live inside the change haven't moved. And in large-scale transformation, the humans were rarely having a nice time. Jobs disappearing. Structures flattening. Real fear, real resistance - and no amount of elegant architecture makes any of that go away.
So I went and learned the other half. Not because I fancied a change of career. Because I needed it. I went deep into neuroscience, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), and the psychology of change - how belief works, how the brain handles threat, why some people take the bounce and come through a reorganisation more alive than before, while others, with the same information, shut down. Five careers, each a deliberate reinvention. Over 30 years of inner work that became the foundation of everything I now do.
Over time, those apparently separate strands became one coherent body of work: Human Development Architecture. I created it to understand how human change actually happens, why so much transformation works at the wrong depth, and what becomes possible when we work with the whole person rather than only the visible behaviour.
"The strategy is rarely your problem. The systems are rarely your problem. The people are the work. They always were."
That is the work now - helping leaders and their teams do the hardest part of any transformation: shift the people. It is also, quietly, the story of my own life. I came to Singapore for a four-month contract, and never went back - I gave up my British passport to become a citizen, because I had stepped off someone else's programme and started writing my own. I go first. So you know it's possible.
