Al Lee-Bourke

"Technology changes organizations only when people change how they work. Everything else is installation."

— Al Lee-Bourke

I don't trust easy answers. I never have. The longer I've worked, the more suspicious I've become of people who seem certain they already know what the problem is. In my experience, organizations don't work like that.

For more than forty years I've watched one new technology follow another: computers, Geographic Information Systems, enterprise software, the cloud and now artificial intelligence. Every generation thought it was going to change everything. In fairness, it did. Just not quite in the way people expected.

People often assume I've spent my career working with technology. I don't think I have. I've spent it trying to understand people. How we make decisions. How we persuade ourselves. How smart people can look at the same evidence and come to completely different conclusions. How easy it is to become so busy measuring progress that we stop asking whether anything is getting better.

Those questions have taken me into local government, software companies, emergency services, global corporations and classrooms around the world. I've worked with organizations employing a few hundred people and others employing well over one hundred thousand. I've sat with senior executives making decisions that would shape entire businesses, and with frontline teams trying to make those decisions work on an ordinary Tuesday morning. Both conversations matter. I've learned something from every one of them.

Over the years I've become much more cautious about confidence. Early in my career I gave it more weight than I should have. Experience has a way of teaching you that being confident and being right aren't the same thing.

One thing I've learned is that you can ignore the evidence for a while. Sooner or later, though, it catches up with you.

That's why I write.

I don't write because I think I've got the answers. I write because putting something into words is one of the best ways I've found of testing whether it makes sense. If it still makes sense after other people have challenged it, then perhaps there's something worth keeping.

What problem are we really trying to solve?

What evidence would change our minds?

What are we pretending not to notice?

Those questions have been with me for a long time. They keep finding their way into my books because I haven't stopped asking them.

One thing I always tried to do when work took me to a new city was find a jazz club for an evening. I enjoy watching good jazz musicians. The more accomplished they are, the more they seem to listen. I've always thought there was something worth paying attention to in that.

If you've picked up one of my books, I hope you find yourself noticing things you hadn't noticed before. Once you notice them, you start seeing them more often. If that happens, then writing them has been worth it.