Career
A career in complexity
Over thirty years, the focus of my work has expanded from technical infrastructure to products, services, organisations and the ways they learn. Each chapter taught me that solving the visible problem is rarely enough. Lasting change depends on understanding the wider system, connecting different perspectives and making complexity intelligible enough for people to act.
This is how those lessons accumulated and shaped the way I work today.
1994–2004
Sun Microsystems
At Sun Microsystems, I learned to make complex technical systems intelligible. As computing shifted from standalone machines to dense, remotely managed infrastructure, administrators faced growing numbers of components, dependencies and failure states. My work helped absorb that complexity into the system, giving people a coherent view of what was happening and enabling them to diagnose problems and act safely.
Principle
Understand the relationships beneath the interface and expose only the complexity people need to make good decisions.
2004–2007
Amphora and Tideway Systems
At Amphora and Tideway, I learned that making software usable was not enough if the service around it remained fragmented. Research revealed that customers needed more than a better interface. They had to coordinate people, knowledge and evidence across their organisations to understand and act on what the technology discovered. By mapping that wider service, I reframed the challenge from displaying information to helping people establish trust, understand what mattered and move work forward.
Principle
The real problem often extends far beyond the product.
2009–2014
British Gas and O2
At British Gas and O2, I learned to design the customer relationship, not just an individual channel. At British Gas, mobile technology enabled a complete meter-reading experience at the point of need. At O2, the challenge expanded to connecting a new commercial proposition across purchasing, billing, account management and support.
Principle
Technology creates value when it changes what people can do — and a proposition only becomes real when every part of the service supports it coherently.
2015–2017
Valuation Office Agency
At the Valuation Office Agency, I learned to separate understanding from implementation. Although my team was responsible for one part of the service, every case reaching it was shaped by people, processes and decisions beyond our delivery boundary. Mapping the wider system revealed the dependencies and exceptions our work would inherit, while allowing us to make pragmatic choices about what could be delivered.
Principle
Implementation can be scoped, but understanding cannot — complexity does not disappear simply because it sits outside a team's remit.
2020–2022
Office for National Statistics
At the ONS working on Census 2021, I learned that shared purpose must be translated into a system for delivery. Creating new ways for people to explore census data required specialists from many disciplines to work as one service, despite different responsibilities and constraints. By connecting user needs, evidence, outputs and decisions, we helped teams move beyond reproducing what had existed before and towards a shared understanding of what people were trying to achieve.
Principle
Sometimes the thing that needs designing is not only the service, but the way people work together to create it.
2022–2024
Eagle Genomics
At Eagle Genomics, I learned to make expertise and uncertainty part of the product. Scientific tools often conceal complex judgements about data, methods and what a result can legitimately support. Working with scientists and technologists, I helped embed that knowledge through guidance, validation and visible assumptions, while making an ambitious product vision tangible enough to test.
Principle
Bringing a future to life does more than create belief — it exposes assumptions, capability gaps and uncertainty before commitment becomes expensive.
2024–2026
Brambles
At Brambles, I learned that insight must become organisational capability. As I led design across a portfolio of supply-chain products, interface problems repeatedly revealed wider questions about operations, product coherence and how teams made decisions. I introduced shared practices that brought research, validation and systems thinking into delivery, then applied the same principles as generative AI accelerated the creation of working software.
Principle
Speed creates value when it shortens the distance between an idea and trustworthy evidence, not simply between an instruction and an output.
Today
Across the years, my work has expanded from infrastructure to interactions, products, propositions, services, organisations and learning systems. The consistent thread throughout is my ability to make complexity intelligible: revealing relationships, connecting perspectives and turning ambition into something people can understand, test and act upon.
Today, I focus on the conditions in which complex organisations can understand what matters, act with confidence and learn when they are wrong.