Unreciprocated responsibility

For most of this calendar year, I’ve been focussing my energy on the native re-platforming work. There is still quite a lot to do in that space, but this past week felt like a return to a mode of operating that I haven’t engaged in quite as much lately. Specifically: trying to steer a variety of projects that exist on the fringes of the App, work that will end up there but which is not happening inside the official programme.

Over the last few years, I’ve sometimes quipped that there were only two logical conclusions for the trajectory we were on: either the NHS App team grows until it encompasses the entire NHS, or it shrinks down dramatically and becomes a platform that other teams build on. I think today we are probably doing both of those things at once, and the result is a kind of federation, a sort of assembly model in which many different parts of the organisation participate, with each piece made by a different team operating under its own brief, priorities, and pressures. With eight or nine official product teams in the NHS App programme, producing a coherent output requires moderate effort. Today, with the number of teams building things rising by an order of magnitude, that is going to become a whole lot harder.

Frankie started in one of those teams this week. This is the space Ralph was already working in. It is a team created precisely because of how the App is changing, tasked with shaping what prevention looks like in the new world where the NHS App is the primary public interface for health services – it is a good example of what our new arrangement might look like from the inside, doing App things without being of the App. Ralph wrote about part of that experience this week, including the tension between pointing out “we already tried that” and trying to connect current work to the wider picture. I think I spent pretty much the entirety of Thursday afternoon doing exactly that with an entirely different group of people. I’m not sure if the need for this kind of thing all over the place is reassuring or deflating.

I don’t know all of the new teams yet. They all seem capable and enthusiastic about the work they’ve been assigned, but those assignments don’t come with a clear view of how it all fits together with all of the other things being done in parallel. That connective tissue isn’t part of their brief and someone needs to provide it.

My week involved a series of check-ins with teams working on a wide variety of topics covering maybe half of the subjects in the 10 Year Plan. Each team is doing work that will eventually end up in the NHS App. Each has design leadership, but none of them report to me. What I’m doing now isn’t managing, exactly; it’s more like trying to be a creative director for a thing I don’t have creative control over. Some of the work I’ve been involved in is really fascinating and potentially quite a big deal for the App overall^[1], but none of them are mine to drive forward. I want these teams to arrive at certain conclusions, I have some past experience with their subject matter, and yet I can’t tell them what to build. Mostly I’ve been asking questions and providing examples of what I’ve seen work in the past. It is a lot of indirect direction. The work is slow and diffuse, but I do need teams to be aware of what they’re getting involved with.

One of the hard challenges is creating coherence against the grain of the incentives set out for individual projects. I have a whole patter about this: your thing may work fine in isolation, but if it doesn’t work fine in the context of the wider aggregate, I’ll need to ask you to change it. No one openly objects to this. Heads nod. But deadlines are deadlines and when the reality of possibly missing a pre-set date for shipping something hits people, this stuff becomes hard-boiled negotiation. “Do we really need to use that component instead of this one?”, “we can’t change the sequence of the form because the supplier system has a weird requirement tied to their medical device status”, and so on. I end up being a bad cop, a lot.

Underneath all of this is an accountability gap that I have a hard time with. More teams building things for the App means more responsibility being distributed across more people. Fine enough, but that distribution doesn’t come with a commensurate transfer of responsibility for the wholeness of the thing. No one person or team is accountable for whether the assembled output is coherent. Everyone is responsible for their own little piece of the puzzle, but no one is responsible for the picture it creates.

So that is probably me, right? Maybe, probably, I can’t tell. I don’t really have the authority to match that responsibility. I’ve written about influence without authority before, and that framing still holds true. The current situation feels like the inverse of the work I was doing a few months ago when acting on behalf of the native re-platforming work. Instead of trying to get a bunch teams to take up an singular set of concerns as we shift our approach to technology, I find myself on the receiving end of a variety of endeavours and trying to work out how they might all fit together. It is wildly difficult to maintain awareness of the whole. Each new thing has the potential to alter what the totality should mean. I am probably in a better position than most to do so, but I definitely struggle to keep up.

This is the shape of things now. The funny part is that this is always how things have worked, to a degree, but when everything grows and grows, it begins to feel unmanageable in new ways. The problem isn’t that none of the teams in our wider federated network care about how the App as a whole works. They do! The problem is that how the whole thing works isn’t their responsibility and they’ve got plenty of other issues to deal with. That right there – that gap – is where friction gets generated. My approach right now is to try to remain as visible as possible, ask questions that drive toward coherence, and occasionally wield the assurance cudgel. Mostly it is about nudging and negotiation, pointing out what’s been done before, and building relationships. I’m not sure that will be enough.