Changing how an organisation works, slowly and in public

At Thomas Cook I worked through a platform migration across multiple brands and markets. The technical work was substantial, but the part that took longest was that different markets had genuinely different ways of operating and each believed theirs was the sensible one.

They were often right, which is the awkward bit. Transformation gets sold as replacing bad practice with good practice, and in reality you're usually asking people to give up something that works locally for something that works better overall.

If you don't say that out loud, people notice anyway and stop trusting the rest of the message. I'd rather be clear that a change costs someone something and explain why it's still worth doing.

At Selfridges I introduced product and agile ways of working, moving the team from ad hoc projects to sprint based delivery. That reads like a process change and it was, but the real shift was about who decided what got worked on.

Under the old model, design was largely a service that responded to requests. Whoever asked most persuasively got the resource. Moving to product teams meant priorities had to be argued once, at a level where the trade offs were visible, instead of continuously and privately.

That was uncomfortable for a while, including for me. Being a responsive team makes you popular. Being a prioritised team means saying no to people you like, and it took quite a long time before the benefit was obvious enough to defend easily.

I built and rolled out a design system across Product, Technology and Creative. The building was the straightforward part.

Adoption wasn't. A design system only works if three groups with different incentives all decide it's in their interest, and Creative in particular had reasonable concerns about consistency turning into sameness. I don't think those concerns were wrong.

What helped was treating it as a shared thing rather than a design team asset, and accepting that some parts of the experience should stay bespoke. A system that tries to cover everything usually ends up being routed around.

I spent nearly a decade at Selfridges, and one thing that gives you is a realistic sense of how long change takes. Things I thought would land in a quarter often took a year, and some things I'd written off eventually happened because the context shifted.

The L7 programme pushed me to look further outside my normal remit at how strategy, organisational performance and investment fit together. Individually none of those were new, but I'd not really considered them as parts of the same system before.

The lasting effect is that I'm much less willing to accept a problem at face value. I'm still comfortable taking a problem and working with a team to solve it, but I want to understand why it's being presented as the problem first.