The Next Evolution: Predictive Purpose

The Frame I Couldn't See

The Next Evolution — Fri, 22 May 2026 10:28:07 GMT

The most important story in this journal begins with a confession.

Not about something I watched happen to someone else. About something I missed entirely — sitting directly in front of me, for years, while I was too focused on the work to see it.

That’s a harder thing to write. But I think it’s the most important story in this journal. Because if someone with my experience, my access, and my proximity to the capability could miss it completely, the problem isn’t individual negligence or lack of imagination.

The problem is structural. And it’s everywhere.

The work

I was brought in as part of a large-scale digital transformation at a major national telecommunications provider. My responsibility covered significant portions of the architecture — data, artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure, integration, digital platforms.

The organisation sat underneath a substantial portion of how the country communicated. Consumers. Businesses of every size. Public institutions. Emergency services. The data flowing through its systems touched almost every aspect of how the nation functioned — patterns of behaviour, movement, communication, consumption, need.

The scale was not abstract. It was one of the largest and most consequential data environments in the country.

We ran a structured process across every major part of the business — working with data directors, mapping what existed, understanding what was usable, identifying where value could be created. It was rigorous work. We selected a platform capable of handling the full complexity of what we had. We built the architecture to support it. And then we identified the use cases.

Cost savings. Cost reduction. Cost avoidance. Revenue generation. Every one of them pointing in the same direction — inward. Toward the organisation’s own commercial interests. Toward the brief as it had been written.

We found significant value. Enough to justify the investment many times over.

And I was satisfied. Because we had answered the question we had been asked.

The moment the frame cracked

Some time into the programme the pandemic arrived.

I was briefed on a request that came in from government and public health bodies. The ask was for data that could inform the national response. Mobility patterns. Population movement. The kind of signals that, properly anonymised and aggregated, could help understand how a virus was spreading and where interventions might be most effective.

The capability to respond to that request existed. It had always existed. We had spent considerable time and resource making it more sophisticated, more integrated, more powerful.

But the response was reactive. The request arrived from outside. Government asked. The organisation responded.

Nobody inside the organisation had looked at that data capability and asked — before the pandemic, before the crisis, before the urgent external request — what could this see that nobody else can see? What could it enable beyond our own commercial interest?

I hadn’t asked those questions either.

Standing in the briefing, understanding what was being requested and why, I felt something shift. Not dramatically. More as a quiet recognition that the boundary I had been working inside had edges I’d never looked for.

The slow realisation

I’ve thought about this a great deal since leaving. Not with guilt, that would be self-indulgent and beside the point. But with a genuine attempt to understand how it happened.

The answer I keep arriving at is this.

The brief was complete. Not in the sense of being comprehensive, in the sense of being self-contained. It defined the problem, specified the scope, described the measures of success, and created a working environment in which all of those things felt like the whole picture. The boundary wasn’t visible because the boundary was everything. There was no outside to it from where I was standing.

The work itself reinforced this. Good, rigorous, demanding work has a way of absorbing attention entirely. When you’re solving hard problems inside a complex organisation, with real constraints and real accountability, the question of what lies beyond the brief doesn’t naturally surface. It requires a deliberate act — a specific moment, owned by someone, built into the process — to surface it.

That moment didn’t exist. Nobody had designed it in. And so it didn’t happen.

What this costs

The pandemic data request was answered. People were served who might not have been. That matters.

But it was answered reactively. Because a crisis arrived and forced the question. Not because anyone inside the organisation had looked at what they had and asked — before the crisis, before the urgency — what could this do for people beyond our immediate purpose?

The problem is that the system produces this automatically, reliably, and invisibly even when the people inside it are capable of something more. Even when the capability to see further exists. Even when the data, the infrastructure, and the intelligence are all present.

The question I’m trying to answer in the book I’m writing is how you change that before the crisis does it for you.

The Plans on the Table

The Next Evolution — Fri, 15 May 2026 07:08:43 GMT

I remember looking at the plans and seeing two things simultaneously.

The first was what everyone else in the room was seeing. A healthcare infrastructure of extraordinary ambition — medical cities designed to deliver world-class treatment to people who had never had reliable access to it. Thousands of beds. Thousands of doctors and nurses. Outreach programmes reaching into rural communities. Digital health initiatives connecting patients to specialists across vast distances. A tiered system designed so that nobody would be turned away regardless of what they could pay.

It was, by any measure, a remarkable thing to be part of.

The second thing I saw was everything else.

Not because I was looking for it. But because thirty years of working across public sector programmes — education, justice, social services, community infrastructure — had given me a particular kind of peripheral vision. When you’ve spent long enough watching what happens to people when systems fail them, you develop a sensitivity to what those same people might do if the conditions were right. What becomes possible when capability, location, and intent converge in the same place.

And what I could see, looking at those plans, was that the conditions were extraordinary.

What the plans actually contained

The medical cities were designed around a core set of capabilities. Healthcare delivery at the centre — but surrounding it, and essential to it, a ring of complementary functions. Education and training facilities. Manufacturing capability. Research and development infrastructure. Commercial and administrative zones. Community services.

All of it in one place. All of it connected. All of it built around the premise that healthcare doesn’t happen in isolation from the rest of life.

That premise was right. But it didn’t go far enough.

The education and training infrastructure wasn’t just a pipeline for nurses and doctors. It was a learning capability that could be extended to agricultural practice, to business skills, to the kind of foundational education that gives people the tools to improve their own circumstances. The manufacturing capability wasn’t just a supply chain for medical equipment. It was a platform for local production, for small business development, for the kind of economic activity that generates employment and keeps value inside a community. The research and development function wasn’t just a support system for clinical innovation. It was a mechanism for understanding hyper-local need.

And the physical presence itself — the fact of a medical city in a specific location, with infrastructure, with footfall, with the trust of a community that had watched it being built — that was perhaps the most undervalued asset of all.

The pattern was familiar from UK programmes. A community hub that started as a health centre and became the anchor for everything else a neighbourhood needed. A digital infrastructure built for one purpose that became the foundation for ten things nobody had planned.

The scale was not.

The conversation that didn’t happen

I raised it. Not formally — there was no formal process for raising it, which was itself part of the problem. But in the conversations that happen around the edges of large programmes.

The response was not hostile. It was something more difficult to work with than hostility.

It was a kind of polite incomprehension. We’re building healthcare infrastructure. That’s what the programme is. That’s what the investment is for. The suggestion that the same infrastructure could deliver wider outcomes wasn’t rejected after consideration. It simply didn’t connect. It was answering a question nobody had asked.

And that was the end of it. Not a decision. Not a refusal. A non-conversation. The kind that leaves no record and costs nothing visible and forecloses an enormous amount of possibility without anyone being aware that a decision has been made.

What it taught me

The wider potential wasn’t hidden. It was visible to anyone who looked at the plans with a different question in mind. It didn’t require additional investment to identify, just a different question asked earlier, by someone whose job it was to ask it.

But nobody had that job. The brief defined the boundary. The boundary defined the conversation. And the conversation found exactly what it was designed to find.

The programme built what it was designed to build. People are being served who weren’t before. That matters enormously.

The missing piece is a conversation that could have happened when the plans were being drawn — the one about what else this could be for.

That conversation didn’t happen because nothing in the programme was designed to make it happen.

That’s the problem I’m writing about.

What are you actually for?

The Next Evolution — Fri, 08 May 2026 11:24:20 GMT

There’s a question that almost never gets asked in the room where it would matter most.

Not what do you do. Not what problem are you solving. Not what does success look like by the end of the financial year.

Something simpler and more unsettling than any of those.

What are you actually for?

I’ve spent thirty years inside organisations of every kind — public sector, private enterprise, global programmes, early stage ventures. I’ve sat in the rooms where large decisions get made. I’ve watched investment cases get built, briefs get written, programmes get scoped and launched and measured and closed.

And I can count on one hand the number of times I heard anyone ask that question seriously. Not as a values exercise. Not as a branding conversation. As a genuine interrogation of whether the organisation was operating at the full extent of what it could be.

Most of the time nobody asked it at all. Not because the people in the room lacked intelligence or ambition. But because the system they were operating in wasn’t designed to surface it. The brief defined the problem. The problem defined the scope. The scope defined the investment. And everything that followed was optimised against that original definition — efficiently, professionally, and entirely inside a boundary that nobody had thought to question.

The result is a gap. A consistent, structural, almost invisible gap between what organisations deliver and what they could deliver. Between the problem they solved and the problems they could have addressed with the same capability, the same investment, the same infrastructure.

I’ve seen this gap in a healthcare programme designed to serve hundreds of millions of people, where the technology and infrastructure being built had the potential to address needs far beyond the original brief — education, local economic development, community resilience — and nobody in a position to act on that potential was ever asked to look for it.

I’ve seen it in a national data programme where the capability being built could have informed public health, urban planning, and economic inclusion at a scale no other organisation could have matched — and the entire exercise was pointed inward, at commercial returns, because that’s what the brief asked for.

I’ve seen it in a bid for a global organisation that had already done the hard work of connecting its business to wider societal outcomes — and watched the response team default to selling services, because that’s what bid teams do, because that’s what the internal incentive structure rewarded, because nobody had built the habit of asking what the client was actually for before deciding what to offer them.

In each case the people involved were capable. The intentions were good. The work was competent. And the gap remained, because nothing in the process was designed to close it.

The question my new book is trying to answer is what it would take for organisations to develop the alternative. Not just to ask the wider question once, in the right moment, with the right person in the room. But to build the habit of asking it consistently, structurally, before the brief gets written and the frame gets set.

I’m building that answer in public, in part because testing the argument as it develops feels more honest than presenting a finished version I’ve already decided is right. So if something here resonates — or doesn’t — I’d genuinely like to know.

Have you been in that room? Have you watched the wider question go unasked? Have you been the person who tried to ask it and couldn’t get it taken seriously?

I’ll be sharing the stories that shaped this argument over the coming weeks. They’re drawn from programmes I was part of, decisions I watched get made, and a few moments where I got it wrong myself. No company names. But every detail that matters.