Twelve firsts: lessons learnt from a few decades in technology

What have you learnt in your career?

I was privileged to be asked this question by some of my colleagues in the Central Digital and Data Office, in the hope that some of my stumbles, trips, outright failures and occasional successes would provide useful lessons. I’ve worked for about twenty organisations over more than thirty years, so there were a lot of examples to choose from, but twelve firsts stood out for me - things which shaped me when I experienced them for the first time.

The first time I used a computer was a ZX81 which one of my father’s friends had lent us. We only had it for a few days, but it taught me that if I put instructions into the machine, it would do what I told it to do. I’ve carried on putting instructions into machines, either directly or indirectly, ever since.

My first full-time job was in a lab while taking a year off before studying biology. It taught me that I was not cut out for the precision and repetition of lab work, and that maybe this field was not for me. I did like working with the computers that ran the lab equipment, though. 

My first programming job didn’t teach me to program: I already knew that, and COBOL was not that different from BASIC. But it did teach me to work as part of a team, and to think about how my code would be used by others.

My first step into management came when I took on a team leader role, and learnt that relying on others is rather different than relying on yourself. I also learnt that I like building teams and seeing them get better and better.

My first work as a technology architect was not supposed to be architecture work. I was working with a colleague just as our company was adopting proper project management techniques. We had been asked to write Project Initiation Documents. His described resources, tasks and dependencies. Mine described features and functions and infrastructure - I had accidentally produced a solution architecture and set myself on the next stage of my career.

My first consulting job took me into new industries and new parts of the world, and taught me how you think differently when you are serving a paying client. I have tried to take some of those lessons about quality and communication into non-consulting roles.

My first big failure was a project where I had dependencies on multiple different teams, and couldn’t figure out how to get those teams to fulfil those dependencies. It taught me to break up work, to figure out what motivates the teams that you are dependent on - and that failure of a project is not the end of the world or the end of your career.

My first big moment of technical dislocation was while working for a startup, when I realised that I had been doing management jobs for several years, and didn’t understand what my team was building any more. It taught me to regularly reconnect with technology, and to build real things. It also reminded me how much fun that was.

My first true leadership role was also my first CTO role, when I learnt that leadership is different to management, and that creating a vision and influencing teams across a company required new skills. I also learnt that people rarely tell you that you are stepping from management to leadership, so you need to pay attention.

My first real seat at the C-suite table, though, came when I was part of the executive leadership team working on a major corporate restructuring, and got involved in taking decisions about the make-up of the business, product plans and profitability. It taught me that being a CxO in the technology field isn’t the same as running the business - but that you can help run the business if you can get a seat at that table.

My first big failure to get a job I wanted (I was either very lucky or very persuasive up until this point) was when I led the design of a major transformation programme - but it was given to someone else to deliver. The even bigger lesson was that they did a far better job than I would have done - sometimes there is someone better, and the best thing you can do is learn from them.

My first big global leadership role showed me that, even if you have been leading for some team, there are always greater challenges in creating and communicating a vision - sometimes around the world, sometimes into the far reaches of a highly federated organisation, sometimes over extended periods of time.

I’m fortunate to work in a job today where I get to apply all of these lessons: to influence across organisations and across time, to work with people who are better than me, to play a role in business leadership, to try to lead through vision and connections, to stay close to the technology, to help struggling projects, to do architecture and design work, to build and develop a team, to be part of a team, to focus on the things I think I’m good at - and to make computers do interesting and useful things.

The one thing I’ve learnt through all these lessons, though, is that there are more lessons to come - I’m looking forward to finding out what they are.

(Views in this article are my own.)