Three stories about mapping. Or four. Or something like that.

This is a talk I gave at the 2019 edition of "Map Camp". When I give talks, I don't like to use slides. This is for several reasons - first of all, I want people paying attention to the things I say, and how I say them, but primarily its because if I provide slides then I find that people frequently attempt to change what I'm going to say.

So, instead of slides, I precisely write out the words I am going to use in the order I am going to use them. It means I don't say anything I shouldn't by mistake (I'm a blabbermouth if I'm not careful!) and also, I can deliver the talk I want, in exactly the time I want to fit.

Anyway, here's the talk:

So yesterday afternoon I went to bed because I had a terrible migraine, and when I woke up this morning I realised that I had an extra thing that I wanted to tell you so what I had planned to be a talk in three stories has instead become a talk of four. Or three and a half. It’s tight so…we’ll see.... Anyway! Good afternoon everybody! It’s a pleasure and an honour to be here. I’m grateful to Simon and the LEF for putting on this event and it’s amazing to see just how much mapping has grown!

I think I really can say that I’ve seen it grow, as I have the rare distinction of being the only person at this event who was present when the Wardley map was first born as a series of squiggles on a whiteboard, as it was back when Simon and I were trying to figure out what the future for Fotango might look like nearly fifteen years ago. It might, of course, not comfort you to know that no matter what powers of prognostication mapping might unlock, the future for Fotango was for it to be shut down by its parent company and while we may have inferred the possibility that that might happen, it was not the maps that unlocked that conclusion.

I was the CIO at Fotango, and we were a small company really, trying to punch above our weight. Most people know the story by now - we were owned by Canon, we were trying to do something novel, and new, namely, a server-side javascript application development platform called Zimki, and Canon just didn’t understand what it was. To be honest, I’m not sure they would even now.

And despite our having mapping its nascent form and despite our attempts to communicate how important cloud computing was going to be, Canon rather famously shut us down in favour of a focus on 3d tvs and compact digital still cameras.

And in some ways you can’t blame them. They looked at the world and saw it not even in terms of cameras or lenses or even printers, but instead, of pallets of fast moving consumer goods delivered en masse to high street retailers and some back office work to process warranty cards and do the accounts. Nothing in their environment, upbringing, or education had prepared them for a world where a service was end to end. They didn’t understand that in the age of the internet, that wasn’t a suitable manner in which to conduct their business. They hadn’t realised that software was going to eat the world, and they had no-one other than us in their organisation to tell them. And sure we could draw it out for them, map it even, but it takes someone versed in both how a map works and with enough sensory perception of the world around themselves to be able to read and comprehend a map.

A map in and of itself, is not enough. The perspective of the viewer, matters.

After that, I went on and created ReasonablySmart, which was another shot at what Fotango and Zimki had been trying to do. I spent some time thinking about some of the things that had bothered me about the service, and then I spent some time building it. Now it never got much traction, but it did get just enough to have the company bought by another small company called Joyent.

I went to Joyent at a really interesting time. It was before any large amount of VC funding had been obtained, and we were trying to compete with Amazon in the very early days of AWS. And, we did so more or less successfully, on our own terms at least. In the end Joyent got bought by Samsung, and sadly for me, the Joyent public cloud is going to be closing down soon - I think maybe even in a few days - but before all that happened, we did take another bet on JavaScript, and this time the bet paid off.

The second bet that Joyent took on JavaScript was on a chap called Ryan Dahl, who had just given a talk at the first JSConf.EU event, where he had spoken about a project of his called Node.js.

People at Joyent had fallen in love with the idea of JavaScript outside of the browser, even if the platform hadn’t really achieved what we wanted, so we offered Ryan a job at Joyent, and then eventually bought the ownership of node.js itself from Ryan so the company could support and grow the node.js ecosystem into what has become an amazingly productive and valuable technology.

But in those early days, I used to talk about how JavaScript was going to come to dominate a lot of server side web application development, and people looked at me like I was mad. I knew I wasn’t however, because what mapping helps us to realise is that something that starts out rare and novel, becomes commonplace and ubiquitous, given time.

So that prediction that Simon and I made, about Fotango & Zimki, and computing, and ultimately JavaScript as well, came true, just as the map said it would. Just not in the way that perhaps we would have liked at the time.

Now, I think, if I am not mistaken, that I am the only person speaking in this particular track who is not currently a civil servant, but before you judge me too harshly on that, I am a former civil servant. After Joyent I bounced around for a little while, and then got invited to join Liam Maxwell’s Office of the CTO as a civil servant, where I worked on a number of different projects, and I do now consult almost exclusively with public sector organisations to help them understand that the future isn’t guaranteed to look like the past.

Simon talks about situational awareness frequently and talks about it as being the reason why maps are important. But what is it?

It’s about knowing your environment. If you’ve found yourself saying you want to map something to help make a decision, you are trying to answer three specific questions: What things are in the environment? What are their relationships to each other? What are their future states? And that is situational awareness.

And it’s really important. However, I also believe part of the problem with decision making, particularly in government, is not - at least in the first instance, situational awareness, it is spatial awareness. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a lot of people don’t know which way up is.

Now it’s not their fault. But it is, unfortunately true.

Organisations, and particularly IT organisations, have spent the last thirty years establishing a context in which they cost roughly the same as each other, and do roughly the same things as each other.

It is therefore easy for them to state, quite clearly and with at least a modicum of intellectual honesty, that they are following what is commonly referred to as “best practice”. But best practices are the behaviours we undertake based on our knowledge of how things have happened in the past. And the future doesn’t look like that.

If you are a typical government IT director, you might be proud that you have bought some commodity laptops for your staff, and pushed the price down to the minimum by doing so.

If you’re opening the box, taking the machine out, sticking an asset tag on it and then installing a customised build of windows 10 before handing it to the person that is going to use it and you’re telling yourself that you have adopted a commodity service, then you are doing the equivalent of trying to sail to the edge of the world.

Or, if when you look at the map of your IT services, you think that your WAN is a commodity because it uses an off the shelf product from BT then you’re failing to have the spatial awareness required to recognize that the “off the shelf” product that you consider a commodity is the equivalent of finding a really, really good provider of canvas belts “off the shelf” to run between the steam engine and weaving looms on your factory floor.

The internet was a thing that happened, and your WAN is nothing more than a canvas belt.

Now if you’re in government then your IT probably looks a lot like this. It probably also looks like a lot of other organisations in the private sector too, but this is about government, so I’m going to focus on that.

Government IT hasn’t reformed over the last decade, but it’s convinced itself that it has because it’s buying slightly cheaper desk phones. But if you’re still running a service desk then ask yourself this: when is the last time you referred to a knowledge base to understand how to use a three pin socket.

But I know that this is quite ranty and doesn’t really prove anything, so let me try going in a slightly different direction…

Over the last nine or so years, government has become very into agile. Or at least It loves to talk the talk. Scrum-masters, standups and retrospectives; Agile at Scale! and the government digital service - of which I was a part - is in no small way to blame.

It took a tool that was intended to be used to deal with unknowns in a manner other than panic, and raised it from the merest of ceremonies to the artifice of ritual, applied as dogma.

Recently I got to observe the output of a “discovery” process. For those of you that don’t know, in Government, discovery has become a catch all term for the start of a project. “We’re going to do a discovery” is uttered time and time again,. Discovery has become synonymous with dogmatic application of ritual, rather than someone clapping their hands together and saying “Right, let’s get started, shall we? What do we need ...”

This most recent example was an investigation into a service that without a doubt required redevelopment. It is a service that should be straightforward and simple, but due to the overlapping bureaucracies involved has become unwieldy and broken and very obviously not fit for purpose. Fortunately, there is a desire and a mandate to fix it, and fixing it - everybody agrees - can mean rethinking it.

I watched as one group of people conducted a perfect, by-the-book discovery. Talking to people, discussing the user need, and building an evidence base for change. They proposed a rebuilt service, that had a sensible workflow, and would get built upon the gov.uk standards. All by the book, and all, subjectively very good. Great stuff! Right?

Meanwhile, another group didn’t particularly follow what GDS would consider a good discovery process, but in parallel they read the legislation, they prodded the existing service a bit, and they had a look at what other countries were doing, and came up with an idea for a service for which it was instantly clear to all involved would be better than the one provided by the first group, and by mapping it, we were able to validate it.

The difference is spatial awareness.

The insight of the map maker matters.

It’s clear that mapping can help us understand what an organisation could or should be doing. But just like a discovery process it is a tool. We need to realize that just looking at our own organisations isn’t enough. We need to look outside.

The first discovery failed to realise it - not because they were bad or incompetant, but because they were only looking inwards at how things had always been done for insight into how things might be done.

Now, I’ve not come to map camp to tell you that Simon is wrong and that maps are bad and that storytelling is better. That’s neither my purpose, nor my intent.

The existence of google street view doesn’t mean I feel no need to travel to different places and it doesn’t diminish the adventures I might have by taking a road trip. Simon has often said that these maps we are making now are primitive forms. They’re the best things we have right now. They are the equivalent of rough pictures of foreign lands with imaginary creatures standing in our path. So we need to understand how to navigate by the stars and stories as well.

Because making maps doesn’t remove the need for storytelling and the maps don’t yet replace the stories but they do help us to understand what the story is trying to say.

And that is more important than ever. The capabilities of technology are having greater and greater impacts on our societies in ways that people not well versed in technology have trouble understanding and predicting. Whether in education, the justice system, social security, or even the idea of personhood, the covenant that has existed between the governing and the governed is under strain like never before or at least not in living memory. And that leads me to the final story! I’ll make it quick. You may remember a few years ago, there was a story that appeared about a man who I think…lived in Texas? - I mean, it was probably Texas ‘cause he started selling 3d printable plans for a gun on the internet, and he was taking bitcoin as a means of payment.

At the time that happened, I sat on a cross-government committee of civil servants that were trying to articulate and amplify issues of emerging technologies to both permanent secretaries and ministers.

Now the committee up until that point had been unremarkable. It just wanted to concern itself with a list of stuff that BIS was vaguely interested in because it had published a white-paper of 10 great technologies or some such, but when this piece of news came out it was panic. And when the various departmental representatives came back to the committee they were full of horror at the idea of what might happen as a result.

Transport was worried about hijackers, and the Home Office were worried about how police might cope with gangs of youths armed with plastic pop guns. And those were valid concerns, but none of them - not a single one - could see the threat that an anonymous, untraceable, un-taxable currency might pose to liberal western democracy.

Historically policy making has always been in reaction to something observable in society. A fact or behaviour yields a policy response. But increasingly our society is being driven by exponential changes in technology and by the time policy makers respond the next change is already underway.

Maps can help us explain why the world feels like it is changing so fast to those that already have eyes to see and ears to hear and maps can do that quickly and and do it clearly. And it is one of the few techniques that I’m aware of that can help to highlight and predict policy challenges that have yet to emerge.

Whether as individuals trying to do our jobs, as departments and organisations, or even governments and societies as a whole, the pace of change has meant we are on the deck of a proverbial titanic and our response so far has been to furiously hurl chairs overboard in the hope that we might stay afloat. But maybe mapping can help us miss the iceberg in the first place.

Thank you.