Early days

My first experiences of working life were not that encouraging. 

I loved doing a shift at the cricket club bar, pouring pints of mixed for thirsty men after a day in the sun. 

But I had a bad experience stuffing tickets into envelopes on a night shift for a record shop, which resulted in me being let go (unjustly, I maintain). 

I was baffled by my first experience of the civil service, temping at the Highways Agency in Nottingham. I had a desk and a phone, but no idea what to do, and nobody to tell me.

And I worked in a call centre, cold calling people from the phone book, trying to sell them a key-finding service on commission. I don’t know how I made any money at all doing that.

A proper job

After university, I had little idea about what I wanted to do, other than that I would probably want to do it in London.

So I went to London, and found work in a pub called The Lavender (now The Black Dog made famous by a Taylor Swift song). I waited tables, pulled pints and learned how to make bloody marys. 

I was applying for office jobs all the time I was there, but I remember this as a particularly happy time. I worked very odd shifts, and I only just about earned enough money to live. But I remember a real comradeship between the bar staff, waiters, kitchen porters and chefs, and all the other waifs and strays who passed through.  

After 9 months I’d graduated to some greater responsibilities. I could wear a shirt like the managers did, and be left in charge for an evening, and I’d cash-up at the end of the day. There was a career to be had if I’d recognised it. But I was on a different path.

Being a bad civil servant

I joined the Cabinet Office as part of a batch of people who had responded to a generic job advert and got through a series of assessment centres and interviews. 

The job wasn’t quite as I imagined though, and I was bad at it. There was a lot of filing, and organising meetings. My only superpower was that I knew how to set up a laptop and projector, and press function F5 to toggle between views.

Performance and innovation

I did get lucky in that I was assigned to work in the Performance and Innovation Unit, a new unit made up of outsiders and civil servants, set up by the new Labour government to solve the big problems of the state in new and different ways. 

So I was exposed to some brilliant and inspiring people; I worked on some fascinating projects like reimagining the post office network; and got a taste of working right at the centre of government, especially when the PIU morphed into the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. (Later in my career, I would continue to reencounter the people I worked with there, usually after they had become a director general or a permanent secretary.)

Of course, I was in a very lowly position. But I was in the room when the big thinking happened, and I got my name on some of the reports.

Finding my electronic niche

I only really found my niche when the person responsible for the unit’s website left, and I stepped in. I had a new purpose, and I set about creating an intranet too, and advising people how to use powerpoint slides better. 

I’d found something I was pretty good at, and with this newly found enthusiasm for work, I persuaded my bosses and Cabinet Office HR to sponsor me to do a part time Master’s degree.

Suddenly I had a career rather than a job. And for part of the week, I was learning about human computer interaction, how to write for the screen, and how to code (a bit). I became an expert, and although the job titles didn’t really exist yet for people like me, I knew I had a scarce set of skills that were increasingly necessary.

Into digital diplomacy

When I joined the Foreign Office I properly got into my stride. There, I found myself part of a team responsible for a global web platform for embassies and high commissions in 60 languages, that hosted essential services like travel advice, not just policy reports.

I went to Delhi to recruit an extension of the team there, to Los Angeles to share notes with the State Department, and Hannoi to talk to Vietnamese officials about the open internet. 

We were talking about about the UK having a virtual embassy, and I was starting to feel like a roving digital ambassador.

I was getting excited about social media too. I was in a very small minority initially, but politics changed that: David Miliband replaced Margaret Beckett as Foreign Secretary and brought with him a known enthusiasm for the internet, and a ministerial blog.

So within 2 weeks of him arriving, I was in his grand office with a laptop, making a pitch for embracing social media in a more digital Foreign Office. 

I set up a Foreign Office blogging platform, and became one of the bloggers myself. And via that blog, I tried to live the values I was sharing with diplomats (writing openly about things that went well and things that didn’t) and establishing my place in the government digital community.

I had opinions, and I was brave (albeit sometimes quite naive). I gave talks and ran workshops. I was interviewed by the trade press and quoted in the mainstream press. I was named in lists of top digital people. I worked with Oxfam and others to bring 50 international bloggers to the G20 London Summit and give them press passes. I was in and out of the corridors of power peddling my wares, and anything felt possible. 

Onto health

All of that attention probably helped me get my next job at the Department of Health. 

I wanted to perform the same tricks that I had at the Foreign Office, but I joined a team that was peripheral to the work of the department (literally – our office was in Elephant and Castle, a bus ride away from the ministers and other decision makers). 

So I had to make the case for digital again in a department that felt less receptive to it. I had more internal battles to fight, and I didn’t always win them.

I found myself writing policies and submissions, and having lots of tense meetings, just to be able to do the things I’d been doing before. It felt a lot less fun, but I was motivated. This was health after all – what’s more important than that?

The politics of the time was helpful again. The Conservative government wanted to modernise the health service, and needed to consult. So I made the case for a digital listening exercise, and set to work deploying some of the same tools I’d had success with before, using blogs and social tools to participate and listen.

I was now talking about “open policy making” rather than “digital diplomacy”, grounding the work of the team in what a policy making department of state was trying to achieve. We did some quietly radical things, like publishing a commentable draft bill inviting comments line by line, and creating new platforms for formal consultations, and crowdsourcing ideas for mobile health apps.

And the team became more confident. By this time, we had the support of the Government Digital Service and more levers. Now, all digital spending by health arm’s length bodies had to come through the digital team which had grown to 25 people spread across 2 directorates. We moved into Whitehall, just down the corridor from the Secretary of State.

We’d become more evangelical too, publishing our digital strategy on GOV.UK, with a poster campaign and roadshow around Richmond House and Quarry House, telling people that everything we did would be about: Openness, Simplicity, Evidence, Mainstream, and Efficiency.

I spoke at conferences about how to be confident and empowered, and I kept on blogging.

But after 5 years, I knew I was becoming jaded. Government’s change, people who were previously supportive turn out to be less so, the opportunities for change and improvement seem less novel.

I took a secondment to a role to lead communications performance and improvement, and set about applying agile, digital methods there. And I stepped in to lead a few difficult pieces of work in the department, like running a change programme, leading a management group, and chairing a pay committee.

I ended up leaving via the change programme I’d had a hand in delivering. 

Out of the wilderness to Lagom

I had a few months off. I called it a delayed paternity leave. I did a course to train to be a children’s cricket coach. And I switched off my Whitehall and digital feeds. 

I enjoyed it, but I needed to earn money. So I set up as a freelance consultant, and found some work via contacts in Whitehall. 

I did digital capability reviews for Defra and MHCLG, and some work for the Cabinet Office about online collaboration. And I did some stakeholder interviews about the Genomics Education Programme for Lagom. 

I quite liked the freelance lifestyle. I liked the day rates, and the days off, and the variety. But I worried about the days off too. 

So when Liam asked if I’d like to join Lagom more formally, I jumped at it. The team were great, and the work was interesting. And the way they worked really suited me. So I joined Lagom, first as an associate, then an employee, then a director. 

I learned how to design Discovery and Alpha phases, how to lead user research, and how to be a service designer. And I was able to deploy some of the experience I’d gained in government to help navigate policy and procurement issues with clients.  

Our clients were mostly NHS, sometimes transport, sometimes other bits of the state who popped up on the digital marketplace, sometimes public-service-adjacent clients who happened upon us. 

We were always able to win more work than we could do, and we prided ourselves on not taking on too much, delivering a premium, quality service, and walking away if we didn’t think there was value for us to add. 

I enjoyed working on big ideas, gathering evidence to help make big decisions about what the state should do next. We worked on NHS workforce expansion, social care and transport data, and global health strategies. It was usually 10 week contracts, so we were in and out. Looking back now, we delivered a pretty impressive list of things.  

Towards the end, it definitely felt harder though. Public sector procurement changed. Big organisations that should know better wouldn’t pay their invoices. We found ourselves in meetings, rather than doing the work. So we made the reluctant decision to stop taking on new work and to wind Lagom down. 

Now and next

I’m genuinely not sure where this story goes next, so I’ve going to come back to draft this bit later.