Being a Digital Leader - the Good, Bad AND Ugly of Digital Transformation
Join us as we dive deep into the world of digital transformation with real-life stories of breakthroughs and challenges from the front lines. In each episode, we'll sit down with industry experts, AND Digital consultants, and other influential figures in the technology space to hear about their personal experiences of leading digital transformation initiatives.
We'll explore what worked, what didn't, and the lessons learned along the way.
Being a Digital Leader - the Good, Bad AND Ugly of Digital Transformation
Living the purpose: AND Digital's decade of upskilling and impact
Ever wondered how to bridge the digital skills gap while fostering innovation within your organisation? Discover the secrets as we celebrate our 10th anniversary with a special guest, Stuart Munton, Chief for Group Delivery at and Digital. Stuart takes us on a journey through his key roles in shaping the company's coaching, academy, and delivery consulting divisions. He shares how his initial discussions with founders Stephen Patterson and Paramjit inspired a mission-driven approach to upskilling and talent development, ensuring that our clients and AND stay ahead in the ever-evolving tech landscape
Learn from real-world examples, like Aviva, showcasing the power of collaborative delivery. Discover our efforts to support diversity and inclusion through initiatives like AND She Can, Google Digital Garage and the Institute of Coding, aimed at upskilling disadvantaged communities.
We also explore AI's future impact on closing the digital skills gap. Stuart explains how AI tools are transforming productivity in software development while emphasising human creativity. He also underscores the need for education systems to focus more on human-centric skills. Stuart wraps up with advice on building strong communities and fostering curiosity in the digital age.
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We all hear a lot about digital transformation, but unless you've been there and done it, it's easy to feel that transformation is a significant challenge that might seem difficult to conquer. That is why we've launched the Good, Bad and Ugly podcast series. Each episode, we talk to people who've been at the heart of transformation and we get under the skin not just of what they did and how they did it, but how it felt to be at the centre of it. Welcome to our podcast, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Digital Transformation. On today's podcast, I'm absolutely delighted to welcome Stuart Munton. Stuart is here today as part of and Digital's celebration of our 10th anniversary and, as we look to celebrate our first decade, we want to share lessons learned from the journey we've been on and, importantly, how our purpose is central to what we do at and Digital, both within our business but also the work that we do with our clients. So, Stu, it's fantastic to have you with us.
Speaker 2:Lovely to be here.
Speaker 1:If I can call you Stu and you know, let's crack straight into it. I think it'd be brilliant if you could just share and talk to us about your intro for yourself. I could do it, but I won't dare to do so. I think you can do a much better job yourself. So just intro the role that you've played in, and so my current title is Chief for Group Delivery.
Speaker 2:So I work in our group function at the moment, but I've kind of done everything at AND I'm officially number 10 from the organization, so I joined in 2014. I was, strangely, our first squad lead, so I looked after our first squad. I set up our coaching function, I set up our academy, I set up our delivery consulting group. I've kind of worked through our core teams, our group teams and whatever our kind of central functions have been known at times, but kind of the kind of thread, that kind of runs all the way through. That is, I've owned how and works not so much sort of the technical side, but on the kind of the, the delivery, the agile, the product side, and so that's my background and that's kind of where I spend a lot of my time.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, and I know I'm speaking to a veteran of the business. I didn't know you were number 10.
Speaker 2:Number 10.
Speaker 1:Employee. So that's good to know. I've learned something already Can you talk to us about, and our business was founded with real purpose at its absolute core. But can you talk to us a little bit about that purpose to close the world's help to close the world's digital skills gap and and it'd be great, you know you've obviously been very close to that journey over the last 10 years talk to us about some of the examples of things that we've done along the way and there's a lot, but again, if I go back to almost the kind of time pre-and.
Speaker 2:So I got involved with and Digital through Stephen Patterson. So me and Stephen had worked together before and so weirdly, I'd also worked for his wife before. So I've known Stephen for 20 years.
Speaker 2:A long, long connection. But me and Stephen and Paramjit went for dinner back in 2013. And at the point, and Digital didn't have a name. It was a kind of concept that Stephen and Paramjit went for dinner back in 2013. And at the point, and digital didn't have a name. It was a kind of concept that Stephen and Paramjit were kind of working through and they were talking to me effectively as a potential client, as a sounding board.
Speaker 2:I worked for William Hill at the time. I looked after a team of 200. We used lots of consultants. We were interested in agile and delivery because we were doing that as a kind of group and we're doing that transformation. But we were trying to work out kind of how do we hold on to that ourselves?
Speaker 2:And so so the the kind of essence of of what became and digital was in that conversation because they because because steven and pramjit were kind of pitching what you don't want to lose intellectual property, you want to think about kind of the upskilling journey, you want to think about kind of owning that yourself.
Speaker 2:And me, as a potential client, kind of gave him feedback. It was a nice dinner as ever is with Paramjit and we kind of gave some feedback and we kind of parted ways. But it kind of stuck with me about the kind of concept that had been talked around at dinner about closing the digital skills gap, owning knowledge, owning that thing, growing your own teams, growing yourself as an organization, um. And then six, nine months later I joined and um, because, because I it resonated so well with me that I went like that that's the organization I want to go and work for, because the concept is just there, it's great, it's exactly the right thing, so so that that was kind of how I got kind of drawn in by the, the digital purpose yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1:And just to give context to those who don't know, paramjit and Stephen. So Paramjit is our founder and CEO, uh, to this day, and Stephen another one of the founding team.
Speaker 2:So there's been lots of examples of where we have been upskilling ourselves and so there's sort of three different kind of distinct groups from an upskilling and closing the digital skills group gap kind of point of view. The first is with our Andes. So the Andes are the people who work for Andigital. The setting up of our academy and the boot camps is kind of the core thing for that. So back when we first started, so Lisa was running that team at the time and then I ended up taking that team over and it's great because actually we know that people want to work for an organization that cares about their development and closing the digital skills gap with your own people really important and for us as a professional services business, having people with skills which are the next level skills, the next skills, we can talk about ai and how that how we're developing ai skills is really really important. And so if you look, if you look at our upskilling, about halfway through our journey, when we moved into our second BHAG, our second big, hairy, audacious goal, we started to look at the numbers behind what we are doing about upskilling and what are we doing to kind of measure that purpose. And so since that point about five years ago. We've been measuring, we've been counting how many people have been upskilled. There's about 65,000 people. So many people have been upskilled. There's about 65,000 people so far that have been upskilled since that point. Before that point loads more as well, but again we didn't have the kind of metrics and the tracking yet and again we want to be kind of data driven and so from that 65,000, about 20,000 of those kind of upskilling events and upskilling activities are with Andes and that's cool because we want people from Andigital to be upskilled and we want them to have great skills. The next set is then and that's a variety of different kind of upskilling activities, such as we do kind of Scrum training and JavaScript training and all that kind of stuff. The next set is then our clients, and closing the digital skills gap with our clients is an important proposition for how we talk to our clients, because we want to build great products with them, but also we want to build their people, and so we kind of talk to them about kind of how we upskill our own people and that resonates with our clients. And this is this is a saying, that this is one of the reasons that I came to Undigital because I knew that as an employer, as a person who looked after a team of 200, I wanted to upskill my people. I wanted my people in my organization to have that knowledge and closing the digital skills gap with my team me in that kind of scenario as a client super important. And so one of the things we've been doing is we've done 20,000 upskilling events with Andes, but we've also done 20,000 upskilling events with clients and some of those that are kind of memorable through the times. As I said, I've been here for a while, so there's a variety. The ones that kind of resonate for me are work we did for Taylor Francis.
Speaker 2:So Taylor Francis are an academic publisher and we kind of helped them on their complete transformation journey, and part of the transformation journey is closing digital skills gap. So they wanted to transform from a kind of more academic publishing traditional business into a digital business, and they were quite well on the journey. But they needed to know how do they do it in an agile way, how do they do it in a product way, and so we did work with their leadership, we did work with their teams, and then it started to snowball within the organization. So we started with one team and then we ended up with more and more and more. So we ended up doing versions of our onboarding boot camp with about 200 people across their organization a load of people in Oxfordshire, which was very straightforward and easy for us to get to out in Digcot, which is kind of where they're based. But then that worked really well, so they went. We went and did that same thing in Florida. So we went to Boca Raton and did that, did work for their teams there and that worked really well.
Speaker 2:So we then went and did it with their teams in Bangalore and so so that there was this really interesting kind of set of kind of knowledge that was helping Taylor and Francis become digital. It was helping them to work in a more digital way, following the kind of patterns that we were setting but were very tailored to them, and so there was this kind of global pattern, that kind of set up their digital function. Um, the other one that kind of came to mind, uh, uh was the work we did for whipbread and premier in. So whipbread and premier in started kind of year two ish sort of client when we first started with them, and they started in a tiny room, uh, in our offices, uh, whipbread digital as it as it ended up becoming, uh was about two people from whipbread and about eight people from and digital and we kind of built that and it kind of worked quite nicely as a kind of individual scrum team. And then it scaled and we could see actually that was successful and then it got bigger and then we went to they.
Speaker 2:They then kind of found themselves a bigger office, first off in somewhere over in Farringdon, and then they kind of moved into Hatton Gardens and we built their teams up and so there are Andes within their teams upskilling their people by working with them. We were running Scrum courses, we were running JavaScript courses, we were running safe courses. There's a whole variety of kind of interventions. But we also had our agile coaches involved and they were doing kind of coaching and mentoring and at the both the team level and at the kind of the group level, eventually they became reasonably self-sufficient from us because because at points we were a large proportion of that function. But over time as they started to kind of become more mature in the kind of digital transformation, as we upskilled them, they got it and they were kind of taking that on themselves and they become highly successful in terms of how they work as a digital function.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and if I can interject that, I mean I think there are a lot of us who are, you know, I'm certainly with them because I think that part of the proposition is absolutely where the market is and has been for some time.
Speaker 1:But a lot of people have, on the supplier side and on partner side, been slower to really grab hold of that and help to upskill and leave clients in a much more future fit state than when you started working with them.
Speaker 1:The thing that I've always loved and having now, over my four years, seen it come to life is how that happens as part of a delivery. So you know, I love to think of it. It's transformation through delivery and by working really collaboratively with the client, to actually it's not a we're going to tell you how it's done, it's actually we're going to create one team and I genuinely have seen this recently within Aviva, for example, where we've upskilled developers in new languages, and you walk into a room and actually you can't pick out who are the Andes and everything at Andes a play on the word and so who are our team members and who are the client's team members, because actually they have really come together so cohesively as a team, but to see people pick up a new skill and become really proficient, be picking up tickets and working as high performing team members in such a short you know space of time is a really powerful thing absolutely and and it kind of.
Speaker 2:It kind of ranges from, like the kind of the big transformation the aviva one was an interesting one that kind of kind of zammering transformation, um, two smaller ones, um. So even in some of our kind of smaller engagements there is how do you work as a kind of startup team? How do you kind of do those sorts of things? And everywhere in between um, and and the scale. The scale and the variety of our clients is is one of the things which makes it interesting for the andes, but it also allows us to kind of go. Actually it's, it's a bit of an again, the, the, the power of the big and and the small. Yeah, so so together it it's allows our people, our andes, to kind of see various different industries so they learn through that. The clients learn from that, the smaller clients learn from what we know from the bigger clients, the bigger clients learn from what we know from the smaller clients, and it's a nice virtuous process, um. So so, as I said, like there's there's been kind of andy's being upskilled. As the first set, uh, of this 65 000, there's been clients being upskilled. The second set of this, uh, 60 000, 65 000. The final set is probably the kind of higher purpose group, which is kind of communities and partners and people out there. Yeah, so, because the first two groups, great, we're upskilling, we are closing the digital skills gap with our people and with our clients' people. But those people are fairly privileged already. They work in reasonably well-paying technical jobs. That's why they work for Andigital, it's why they work for our clients. The third group is a much wider group so, um, and there's 25 000 people we've upskilled in that space and these are people from a range of disadvantaged backgrounds. These are people who are digitally excluded, these are a variety of kind of different backgrounds of people and so. So for us as a company that the ability to do those first two is kind of what we do as an organization, the purpose gets really really shown in that third group. So examples of kind of sort of the kind of bigger end, of those sorts of examples, we've been working with Google Digital Garage so through last year we were working on kind of redoing some of their programs and looking at some of that. Through that program us delivering the program that we wrote for them we've upskilled 3,500 people and that's 3,500 people who come from places and disadvantaged backgrounds small medium-sized businesses. I went to one of their sessions in Hounslow. It was excellent. Google like dragged people out. If people hear the Google brand, they go. Yes, I want to go of their sessions in Hounslow. It was excellent. Google dragged people out. If people hear the Google brand, they go. Yes, I want to go get involved in that. And we're talking to them now about how small businesses use AI, how small businesses think like bigger businesses, how do you use Google tools, google AdWords, to make your business stand out from the street. So really cool stuff that we're doing which is up with the kind of power of google as a kind of network to upskill more people.
Speaker 2:But then there's other ones, such as the work we've done with uh, the school of code. You know, the school of code, uh is a dfe funded boot camp, so they've got people. They find people who want to become software engineers and we've got people on our side who are experts in that. So we have people who are experts in JavaScript and Java, lots of different technologies, devops, platform work, loads of different things, and they love going and spending time with people who are coming up through that process, because we've upskilled 1,500 people with the School of Code and these are people who wouldn't normally meet.
Speaker 2:Those sorts of people. They don't normally kind of come across professional software engineers in their in their day-to-day and these are people who are kind of changing careers, who have kind of taken the effort to come and do that sort of stuff and it's it's really good. So the school of code has been a really interesting engagement, but also, uh, the institute of coding. The institute of coding is a another dfe funded boot camp where we've done work with probably about 800 people. They're funded by Bath University and the Open University, so really cool stuff they're doing Again. But they find disadvantaged groups and they're helping them get into tech jobs and our people, our Andes, love spending time with them because they can go. Actually, I know you've learned this stuff, I know you've learned the syntax of this, but actually this is what we do with clients in real life to build the products that you use on a daily basis, and it's invaluable kind of information for the people who are going through those boot camps.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the one thing that I I never ceases to inspire me is when you look at the amount of grassroots work that's happening.
Speaker 1:You know, across our business, the impact that we're having in local communities and you know, when I was looking after one of our London clubs, we did some incredible work with this STEM Academy in Dagenham and you know that was focused particularly on young women and really helping to demonstrate to them the careers that they could have and hosting them in our club, in our offices, and just the impact and you know, know, working with the head there, you know the impact that that had of opening their eyes up to a career um that is very much open to them. So I mean, I see this as being a way to really increase um diversity in, in, in in its fullest meaning, yes, um, within our sector as well, and and within the broader sectors in business, because these are people that, yes, they can go on to work with companies like ours, but also they will find their way. Every organization has software developers and digital teams in their businesses now, so the impact that you can have in terms of the diversity angle as well is really tremendous.
Speaker 2:It makes such a difference. I mean, like the Anshi CAM program that you were talking about is great because it basically is allowing us to go. Actually, we need to focus into groups which are minorities within the tech space, and digital does a great job in terms of our numbers and our percentages. We we hit above our percentages against the market, but we can do more because because actually, um, and that's where and she and she can comes in really well, but but also kind of relationships we've had with, uh, organized life organizations like a head partnerships, um, with a head partnerships, like in leeds alone, we've worked with 600 school children. Yeah, absolutely, and it's cool.
Speaker 2:I mean, those are kids from schools in and around Leeds who may not have considered a career in tech and if you get to them early enough, if you get to them before, they've kind of gone. Oh well, that's just techie stuff and that's just for those kind of techie boys over there and you go. No, no, no, tech is for all of us. Yeah, because we need to be involved, we need people involved in it, we need different views, different kind of people in it, because otherwise, if you have the same people always coming up, you get homogenous products from homogenous views and diversity. We kind of talk about it from a numbers kind of, you get different opinions and those different views and those different opinions actually match what society is. If society was exactly what the recruitment pattern of traditional IT firms was, then fine.
Speaker 1:But it's not. Yeah, thank goodness. I mean thank goodness. Life's much more interesting. You know that's fascinating and I think you know the other aspect of it is our Andes. Our team members get so much out of their experiences.
Speaker 1:You know it gives a real sense of purpose to our employees, and so I think it's very much part of you know. Yes, it's part of our culture, it's what we do. It's really important to us. It's linked to our purpose as a business, but on a very individual level. For our team members and I know for myself when I've been engaged in that kind of work it gives you, as an individual, a real sense of purpose and feeling that you're having impact. That is really valuable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean because all of the people who work for Andedge Tool have the opportunity to go and do this sort of volunteering and upskilling work, and the more they get into it, the more they do more uh, and then they realize that the impact they're having, and then then you find somebody who is like you may you may have worked with like five years ago, and actually now they then come back and go hi, stewart, I'm actually doing this now, thank you very much.
Speaker 2:And you go like, yeah, that that that that's real purpose, that that it's a really nice thing, and and and sometimes you never hear from those people again, but sometimes you do, yeah, and so so that that's where some of the kind of programs that we work with are really kind of useful in that sense, um, so so there's stuff, stuff early years from a school's point of view, um, but there's also then kind of stuff from kind of the middle, in the university.
Speaker 2:So we work with uh Upreach, which is a charity that supports disadvantaged people at university. So they already have gone through struggles to get to university, but actually what we're trying to help with that group and we've upskilled about a thousand people with our partnership with Upreach, um, and there we're going to. Actually, this is how you get ahead and you stand out above the other people around you. It's not to put the other people at a disadvantage, but they already are advantaged, those other people. It's trying to level the pairing fields and it's trying to get to an equitable position, and so it's just really good stuff. And the people from Andigital who do that work, they love doing it and the societal impact they're having is great.
Speaker 2:And that's a really great purpose story from an Andigital point of view because, it's true, our people love doing it, the people love getting it.
Speaker 1:It's good for us, it's good for them.
Speaker 1:It's a win-win, isn't it?
Speaker 1:I, you know, I'm really interested in also, like having seen this come to life in a lot of our client organizations as well.
Speaker 1:Um, you know, often this can be the tip of the spear of a broader people transformation, um, and and I think, when you're going in and you're helping to upskill people um with within a client um, I like, I'm interested in your views around like that aspect of the, the transformation, because you, you often spark something and you know, like, I think, particularly where you know there is a real um I don't want to call it a war for talent, but you know it like it, it is a difficult area to recruit into, to find great talent. I, I think that it continues to be the case. You know, organizations are then investing in their talent to keep them current and you know there are some times and I've heard these conversations playing out in client organizations is you've got people that are difficult to retain and so you're effectively investing and making them more valuable and attractive in the marketplace. I'm interested in your thoughts on that aspect of upskilling.
Speaker 2:So you need to do it because you need better people as an organization. You want people who understand your business, you want people who understand your culture, but you may want them to be able to do something different. So there was a product management boot camp we ran about, kind of four-ish years ago, a company called first port and they do lease management, yeah, for buildings, and you'll find Firstport written on lots of buildings all over the place and that's what they do as an organization. So their business is fairly specific to what they do. So, therefore, knowing what they do was important to them. But they wanted to have another group of about six to eight product owners.
Speaker 2:So where do you get them from? Do you find them from elsewhere who don't understand your business domain? Bring them in. And do you get them from? Do you find them from elsewhere who don't understand your business domain? Bring them in and try to get them to understand your business domain, which is quite complicated and complex and unusual in their space. Or do you find people who are doing sort of adjacent roles within the organization and upskill them in the kind of technical product skills? And that's what we did for them.
Speaker 2:So we, we worked, we helped them to identify people from their contact centers, from their test teams, from their field teams, who knew their business, who kind of really kind of got what they did, loved working for that business and what it was for, but kind of needed to be product owners. And we then went through them and go. We kind of helped them select the people who had the kind of most aptitude towards it, naturally, and then we ran them through a two, three week boot camp, similar to how we would kind of onboard people into our digital, and they were super happy. Those people again, those are some of the people I get messages from again as well, saying like Stuart, I'm doing this, or you connect to them on LinkedIn and you see them in their jobs and you see them progressing.
Speaker 2:They're now a senior product owner, they're now a kind of director of product. It's great, yeah. So as an organization, they were really happy because they found they ended up with people with the right skills who understood the culture and understood the organization, and so it was a really good upskilling journey for them and for an organization and for the individuals. I mean you kind of there's all these kind of anecdotes about kind of like training people and then they'll leave and all that kind of stuff. But there's a sort of response, quote from that which is Richard Branson's, but it's sort of like well, you need to train your people so that they could leave and you need to treat them well enough so they don't want to Exactly.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 2:And that's how it is like. If you train people and, uh, and they do leave, fine, that's okay. Yeah, there isn't a problem with that, but you need to work on what you're doing about retention to make sure that actually is the place for them, because if they're trained up and then they all want to leave, there's something different to your training program that needs to be changed yeah, it's really interesting.
Speaker 1:So. So it's both a means to actually retain great talent by offering opportunities to pivot and develop themselves, and there are probably a lot of lessons learned in terms of overall culture and retention strategies from those people, as you say, in any case, from those people as you say, yeah, um, in any case, um, and you know, like skills, I mean, one of the things I've always loved about working in our space is we never stand still and there are always new skills to be learned. Um, you know, and you're somebody who feeds into sort of the broader skill strategy within our business. Um, but over the top, over the last 10 years, um, and there's a lot that's happened in our space over the last 10 years in the world of tech?
Speaker 1:are you know, from your perspective, what are the skills that are ever present, um, and are there any gaps that are consistently widening?
Speaker 2:yeah, um so. So we have always positioned ourselves as an agile organization. So understanding an agile mindset, understanding Scrum, kanban, etc. Those things have been all the way through our process. When we first started, we thought we were going to do much more Java than we do. We actually do much more JavaScript now, and again, I know that they sound similar. They're very different in terms of languages, in terms of how they get used, and so that was an interesting journey for us in terms of from a kind of Java starting group to more JavaScript.
Speaker 2:But coding languages are coding languages. Sometimes they come in and sometimes they go. So we do less PHP now than we used to, because as a language that's sort of dropping off. But we also do kind of more Python now, since that's kind of took a resurgence, and so the agile processes are there and they will be there until we find a better thing that's not agile, and agile is 25 years old-ish now. The product kind of processes are there and they'll be there until we find a better way around doing that. The languages come and go in popularity, uh, and it depends on who's doing what and what what language. Every every week or so, there's a new javascript framework that comes out that people have to kind of learn, but that's fine and that kind of. There's a constant churn of those sorts of things. So if those are kind of the kind of base base, kind of sort of technical skills over and above that, what what we always need is, uh, people who can work in teams, so. So again, like the kind of three, three things that I always kind of talk about is like we need teamwork, yeah, people who can work in teams.
Speaker 2:Software engineering is not an individual game, it's a team sport, and the way that we play it sometimes is teams and then sometimes teams of teams, and so you may have 100 people who need to work in a team that are working on a big thing, or some of our larger engagements. We were talking yesterday at a conference. One of the engagements we were doing with IKEA had 4,000 people working together, and how do you get that stuff to work? So the team working kind of piece is really important. Um, the next piece, which is a constant, is, um, uh, empathy. So so knowing how to talk to people, yeah, knowing actually if someone's upset you don't just layer into them more. If you can help somebody, you do. How do you understand it from their perspective? So teamwork and empathy. And then finally, creativity, so being able to kind of think about the problem, and that might be individual critical thinking, but it might be kind of creative patterns that you use as a team.
Speaker 2:So for me, the Agile processes are changing slowly. So we do more scaled Agile as we do more scaled agile as we've got bigger. As we've got bigger, our engagements have got bigger. We do more of that. But actually the kind of core mindset behind it is similar Product, similar Technologies come and go in terms of languages. We will talk about AI at some point.
Speaker 1:But for me, if our people can be great in teams, if they can have good empathy and they can be creative, they will be a valuable member of the team and then they'll bring the other bits of pieces of those skills into the mix yeah, and that's so interesting because I think you know, whichever client I'm interfacing into, that ability and those skills really come into play because you're pulling so many different disciplines together in order to create the end product and outcome that you want and being able to. You know, if I look in the life sciences, for example, being able to bring scientists together with software engineers, together with product owners, together with the commercial teams that are helping to drive the business, you know, even developing a common language that that team can all understand and use to communicate with one another effectively, like the effort that needs to go into that. And so often it's when those those things aren't done as foundational building blocks that I think, um, people get into trouble right they do and and and.
Speaker 2:There are methods to help with this sort of stuff. I mean, like there's stuff like uh, domain driven design, there's team topologies, there's using worldly mapping, there's a, there's stuff that we do as practices which help to do those things. But in the end, like first, first row of the kind of the agile manifesto is individuals and interactions over processes and tools. It's making sure that people could I mean, the agile manifesto is over 20 years old now um but it's making sure you've got people who can work with people it's a very human thing.
Speaker 1:It's a very human thing that the.
Speaker 2:The one common thing we have at the moment within our teams is they are full of people. Yeah, they may. They may work in a different agile manner. They have a different product manner. They may have a different coding language. They may have some ai enablement around them. Cool, yeah, there's always people yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1:Thank goodness, there's always people. Yeah, I love that. Thank goodness, there's hope for me yet and we made it to quite a way through our discussion before the AI word was brought in. But when we talk about skills, we're talking about skills gaps. It would be absolutely remiss of us not to touch on AI, and the impact it is having but is going to have will be profound, and that's cutting through all the hype that exists. But how do you think advancements in AI technology are going to impact the skills that we'll need in the future and, bearing in mind everything that you've said around humans?
Speaker 2:Humans.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. So the kind of stage we're going through at the moment is quite a lot of hype, but there's also benefit from it. So work that we've done in digital has shown productivity benefits of using products like Copilot. So actual AI-enabled software developers Because if you think about the kind of, if you have some people who are good at teamwork, creativity and empathy and they then have skills in knowing how JavaScript works, but then you've got like an AI-enabled assistant for that person who really gets the protocols, really understands the syntax, really understands how the coding language works, because it's got a really deep knowledge of the documentation and the documentation is super structured and coding language is super structured. It's really easy for the AI to understand them and it can help you with those things, whereas the human bit is then that developer going cool, actually I'm writing something and actually I can get some enhancement, I can move faster, I can write comments and it can give me some scaffolding in my code to kind of produce that kind of stuff. But it allows them then to have the deeper question as a human to go and talk to the customer, to go and talk to the users, to go and talk to their product owner, go and talk to some other developer or their tester and have like a 50-minute conversation where they would previously have been looking how to write the syntax of how to do that process within that language they were using. The AI enables that because it knows it better, because it knows every single letter and word and page of all the manuals that have ever been written about how to write javascript. And no matter how good a human is, they will not remember it and not reference it quite as well as a human will as the ai will. So so the, the partnership, the, the ai enablement, now, good, yeah, where it's going in my mind.
Speaker 2:Um, so at the moment we talk about kind of some of the languages we write as kind of fourth level abstraction. So, uh, it's because sort of machine code and assembly and various different kind of language, languages, we will end up at a point where we will be putting more natural language into the machine. It's a fifth level abstraction where basically we are asking the ai to write all of the code and it writes all of it and then we have to then validate it. Humans are going to be in the loop because humans have to verify it, especially in kind of like sort of secure software and sort of safety environments. But there'll be a position at the kind of fifth level abstraction where you are talking to your ai. It's like, uh, currently we would have a kind of product owner or someone from a product or a design point of view talk to the developer, and but they have to talk to them in a structured manner. Yeah, so, so it might be kind of using stuff like gherkin, so, given when then kind of structural kind of language, but you're talking in a structured way, it will then go cool, I get, I understand what you mean. Is it this? Produce it, you'll test it and see how it works and you go good, yes, I verify that as the thing I want and then move it on.
Speaker 2:Okay, so that's a. That's a fifth level abstraction. That's between now and the next kind of three, five years. Beyond that, you're going to end up in this kind of next level abstraction where you're basically going to just describe the problem space and it will try to then have an ai assistant which will understand the solution space and then the coded space, and then there's a different abstraction at that point. That's where I start to. So it gets a little bit faded and a little bit like uh oh, it's a bit out there, but we'll end up in a point where the ais will be writing code that potentially the humans don't understand, and that's, that's the wary bit in mind, especially in kind of safety controlled environments. But we will be producing loads more code. Yeah, we will be solving the problems. We just may not know quite how we've solved them, or the humans may not the AI might but the humans may not.
Speaker 1:So interesting and interesting when you've also touched on creativity as part of the mix and kind of the human aspect of that and the importance obviously of fine tuning for end users, customers, people. Not everything is a rational. You know there's hearts and minds and and and so yeah, uh, let's see what if we were to fast forward the conversation to 20 years, where, where that would be, yeah, I mean so.
Speaker 2:So at the moment, to differentiate from another product, you need a human at the moment to kind of make a differentiation. Um, if you ask, uh, a an ai product to do that, it will look at hundreds of different references in the past and build you something that's kind of similar, maybe a little bit different, but it can only base it on that kind of stuff. At the moment, pure novel, different ideas still come from humans, and that's the creativity part that we kind of put into the process and then we can check that it's doing the thing we want to do. If you are just trying to make something slightly better, slightly better, slightly better ai's, we're going to absolutely nail that. That's great.
Speaker 2:If you're going to try and make an absolute step change in a business model, if you were, everyone always talks about like, like, being like uber. Yeah, I like for it. But if you were, everyone always talks about being like Uber. Yeah, but if you were the first Uber, you're trying to explain that to an AI and go, we're going to do this thing and you're like you want a taxi. I mean like it doesn't Conceptually. Conceptually, because it didn't exist before. The way that large language models work at the moment, it's very hard for it to make those massive step changes. Can you design Airbnb for me? I don't understand. Is it a hotel, is it not? I don't get it, and so that's the world that AI lives in at the moment. It doesn't mean it's always going to be that way, and so therefore, while we are still in the loop, that's cool. We should be in the loop because we will add that creativity.
Speaker 1:I think there's another whole podcast topic there the role of AI in real disruption, which would be fascinating, but we're talking about the digital skills gap and we're really focused on the gap that we see today. I think, having actually worked in higher education in a very early part of my career, you know institutions. Our education system, you know, has grappled with how to track and stay current and you know you hear of great courses that are out there in universities. But I think you know, in terms of the scale of talent, that we need to feed the demand for skills in the space and that's not going to slow down. It's forever changing, so we're behind, and then that is compounded by the level of change that we see, which seems to only be speeding up. Really, you know, I'm really interested in your views about. You know how all of this um should and this is a big question really how this starts to impact what. What should our schools be teaching our children and young people um.
Speaker 2:So I had an interesting example of this a couple of years ago. So, uh, my old school was running a conference and the conference was between um, secondary schools, universities and industry and I was there representing digital industries because you go back and do stuff for your schools and that kind of stuff, um, and I had a conversation with the current head of computer science at my school and I said to her and also in the same conversation we had the head of computer science at Warwick University and we were talking about the fact that in five years, this discussion about AI, I was going well, actually, you're not going to need to know the syntax of JavaScript, you're not going to need that. And that's where we are and that's where we see in five years. But at the same time we are we are having this kind of battle for hearts and minds to get people into stem subjects. And then we get. We go you need to do stem subjects at a school level and therefore you have to do this.
Speaker 2:But actually by the time that person who is a seven, eight, nine year old now comes through the school system, comes through the university system, comes into industry, they're not going to need to know how to write JavaScript or Python, because there'll be an AI agent that does it better than them. So what they need to be able to understand is how to be again coming back to the same things working a team, creativity, empathy. And so we had this conversation and the computer science teacher was looking at me going like, yeah, but we've been told we have to do all this STEM stuff and I'm like, yeah, we do, because we need it now.
Speaker 1:We're not going to need it.
Speaker 2:In 10 years it's going to be a very different thing. And so we came to this conclusion between the three of us and again we're chatting for a while talking about this stuff that schools are about five years behind universities and universities are about five years behind industry. And so, therefore, if it takes you 10 years to get through that cycle and that's because of curriculum changes and stuff that goes with that if it takes you 10 years to get through that cycle and it's 10 years out of date, you're kind of a lot out of date by the time you kind of hit the market and so so. So we had this conversation and everyone's going like, oh, what do we do now? Okay, um, after a keynote at the at the conference, a guy called dave coplin, uh, who is uh used to be uh one of the ctos at microsoft uh, he's a technologist, like really great guy.
Speaker 2:Um, he stood up on stage and basically said exactly the same things. We're like we just need people who can work together. We need people who kind of do these things and not like, oh, like, yeah, that, yeah, exactly that. Um, and everyone was expecting him to stand up on stage and go I used to work at microsoft and actually everyone needs to learn technology, but he's all about the human skills. Yeah, and it's because, uh, his, uh, his book he wrote, which is called the rise of the humans really interesting book, it's this conversation I I'm sure he'll love the plug.
Speaker 2:No, no, it's good.
Speaker 1:I'll get a coffee.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's a really good guy, but that's where we are. Yeah, we're in the position where AI is important. We need to embrace it, because if you don't, and your competitors do, they'll move faster than you and they'll defeat you.
Speaker 1:So they'll defeat you. So therefore, you need to embrace it, but you also need to understand the role of the human in the cycle and where we are in it. Yeah, and I think I you know, as, as a mother of a soon-to-be 21 year old who's studying biomedical science but still learning, you know anatomy, um diagrams by rote, um, no tech aspect to that. You know I I'm sitting back and going this doesn't feel right. Um, and and those skills that you're talking about, you know I'm sitting back and going this doesn't feel right and and those skills that you're talking about, you know it's things like having a growth mindset, like everything that needs to go around that, and actually building adaptability, you know, into the curriculum as a skill in its own right.
Speaker 2:So Critical thinking is so fundamental through all this stuff. And the anatomy one's really interesting because my daughter wants my daughter's in the lower sixth at the moment. She wants to be in medicine somewhere, but she spent time training AIs, so she's doing these things which you can go onto these things and go. Actually, that looks like a dark spot in someone's lungs. That doesn't, that does, that doesn't, and so therefore she's actually involved in training stuff as an interesting thing as a med student, a pre-med kind of sort of thing.
Speaker 2:But all those industries are going to be disrupted. They're going to be enabled more. So if you look at the kind of work that, uh, ai is doing in medicine at the moment, it's amazing and it is going to save thousands and thousands of lives. But it's going to make the needing to know that thing different. Yeah, like we're no longer going to need dr house to have this sort of strange intuition, because the strange intuition is actually based on a million case references which no human is ever going to be able to do. Yeah, and so the intuition comes through the, the, the kind of the, the echoes in the machine.
Speaker 1:I mean it's so fascinating, because I mean that's the gap right now for me is we we have this really long delay in being able to actually impact the way we're bringing people through in all professions, to be able to really be tooled up so actually as to in employers. That is the real challenge, because when those young people, whether it's via apprenticeships or via a more traditional grad route, when they hit us as employees, that's really where the upskilling yep starts right make it, making sure you are fungible.
Speaker 2:Yes, is is a is a really important skill yeah because? Because if if you are rigid in a world where everything is changing, you will run the risk of being broken yeah, wow.
Speaker 1:You've spoken about the skills that young people, that all people are going to need, um, and you've spoken about the human dimension to that. What is the kind of role with regards to? You know, we all live in communities and operate as members of communities. What, what does that dimension bring to the conversation?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean it's a great point because I mean, like we as and digital we run lots of communities of practice and that's kind of like a core informal network where people can learn from each other, and so they may be like a front end development community of practice. It's really helpful for seniors to kind of share with juniors and juniors to share with juniors and people in various different kind of spaces. So the community is really important, but also supporting external communities as well. So, as an example, I run the Agile Reading meetup group and over the last couple of years we've upskilled 1,000 people. That's cool. I mean it fits in nicely with the and kind of side.
Speaker 2:But the community then helps itself and so humans in an AI-enabled and post-AI world will be better in their communities. So therefore they know each other, they can connect with each other, because all the computers and the AI world will be better in the communities. So therefore they know each other, they can connect with each other because all the computers and the AI already connected anyway. So we should be doing that kind of stuff. So so for me, I think, I think community is really, really important to me. So if you look, look on my LinkedIn profile.
Speaker 1:My, my kind of two core values are about community and curiosity, and and those are the things which which I think are really important um, so, getting people together and helping them to think about being curious yeah, I love that and I you know I see that coming to life in our client interactions as well, and I know we talk about there being three beats to to our proposition of guide, build, build and equip. But under that equip and helping to equip and upskill our client organisations, I see connections between our communities of practice and our client communities of practice and even, in some cases, helping our clients stand up those communities and start to nurture and develop them.
Speaker 2:Getting humans to work in teams and together and being in communities is super important. Yeah, because it's what we're good at. We grew up in kind of small tribal groups. That's where we come from, that's where we thrive.
Speaker 1:Love it. Thank you, Stu. If you could leave and I know we've traversed a huge variety of different topics If you could leave us with one final thought, what would it be?
Speaker 2:um, build great communities of people around you and always be curious thank you very much.
Speaker 1:that's everything for this edition of the good, the bad and the ugly of digital transformation. It's been an absolute delight to have you with us, stuart as I said, a veteran and part of the founding team of Anne Digital and thank you very much for watching and listening. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do remember to follow or subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode to enjoy. So you'll always know when there's a new episode to enjoy. And Digital is on a mission to help close the world's digital skills gap. One of the ways we're doing this is by helping organisations deliver digital transformation more successfully through upskilling and reskilling.
