Foden Grealy

A very good thing…

I was asked recently what I thought about the new Inside Government section of the almost new gov.uk website. I wrote this:

Ah! Well…

I love the way it looks. I love that the content is written in plain English that I can read quickly and understand readily. I love that the pages look smart and that huge care has been taken about the layout and small things like the choice of typefaces. I think it is great that the content displays as well on mobile devices as it does on screen. I think it’s brilliant that the […]

By Mark Foden|November 19th, 2012|Government 2.0, UK Government IT|2 Comments

How to change the future

This is worth a serious listening to…

How to change the future

…it is a recording of a talk about resolving important, complex social problems given at the RSA last Tuesday (2 Oct 12) by Adam Kahane. The introduction to the talk says…

People who are attempting to tackle these huge global problems often find themselves frustratingly stuck. They can’t solve their problems in their current context, which is too unstable or unfair or unsustainable. They can’t transform this context on their own — it’s too complex to be grasped or shifted by any one person or organization or sector. […]

By Mark Foden|October 7th, 2012|Change management, UK Government IT|1 Comment

Mark Foden is speaking at the Defence Academy ‘Agile’ symposium

I will be speaking at a symposium – An Agile Approach: The key to success? – at the Defence Academy at Shrivenham on 12 September 2012.

After some head-scratching I decided to call my talk “Complexity and the incremental change revolution”; the conference blurb says…

This talk is about complexity in organisations and the need for a revolution in how we think about and manage change. It will explain why it is critically important for government to develop a capacity for incremental change and the deep shifts in mindset that will be needed to enable it. Drawing on real examples, […]

By Mark Foden|August 29th, 2012|Company announcements|0 Comments

Blog all

On hols this week: idling in Hay on Wye, following a rain-frustrated attempt to walk Offa’s Dyke. Had a very good chat last night about blogging with the family we are staying with. I was arguing that everyone should blog. Here (hugely boiled down and a bit mangled for the sake of brevity) are some of the questions we talked about…

Why (on earth) should I bother blogging?
Writing things down, in words that other people can understand, straightens out crooked thinking and helps you learn; it develops your expression muscles so you can get your point across faster and better […]

By Mark Foden|July 11th, 2012|Change management|0 Comments

Working Out Loud

I use this term a lot. And I tell everyone who will listen (and many who won’t) that I think Government needs to be doing a lot more of it. In case I am talking nonsense, I thought I better write down what I mean. Please put me straight if I am erring…

If we share an office or workplace with colleagues; we overhear, we ask quick questions, we sense mood, we have a feel for what others are up to. This can help teams to be hugely more effective; but, nowadays, many of us are part of lots of […]

By Mark Foden|June 11th, 2012|Change management, Selected posts|2 Comments

“Business Change”: Dirty words in Government IT

I have heard mention a number of times lately that the term ‘Business Change’ is out of favour in Government IT circles. And quite right too. Here’s why I agree…

The (now defunkt) Office of Government Commerce used to be pretty hot on Business Change. After all, it was the thing so often perceived to be the problem: a lack of engagement between technology folk and ‘the Business’; poor ‘Benefits Realisation’ and so on. But I think it’s more complex than that: there was something more fundamental wrong and it’s exemplified in the idea of Business Change itself. I […]

By Mark Foden|May 6th, 2012|Change management, Selected posts, UK Government IT|1 Comment

162 slides of unmissable condensed wisdom on tackling the intractable

If you are struggling with (what feels like) a messy and intractable problem, it may help to take 10 minutes to read this absolutely excellent summary of the thinking around Complexity by Jurgen Appelo. For those involved with fixing the problems in Government IT, I’d say it is unmissably important. So …er …don’t miss it…

Complexity Thinking

There’s more of Jurgen’s non-Death by PowerPoint erudition on SlideShare. With thanks to information uber-Maven John McCubbin (and Richard House before him) for spotting this.

By Mark Foden|May 5th, 2012|Change management, UK Government IT|0 Comments

In praise of the Post-it

This very nearly caused a serious tea-spill this morning…

Analyst: Government’s digital leaders’ network shouldn’t be using post-it notes

It’s a story about an analyst who, having read a post on the Government Digital Service blog – First Digital Leaders’ meeting, said this…

“Why did they have a physical meeting? This could have been done far more effectively using digital tools – communication and collaboration tools that would have taken ideas and automatically captured them, rather than the joys of Post It notes and pens,”

Earlier in the day, having read the same post, I had tweeted this…

First Digital Leaders […]

By Mark Foden|March 31st, 2012|Change management, Selected posts|2 Comments

Sitting people on chairs in rows at meetings is a criminal waste

Bee trapped in bonnet. Write…

Quite often I go to big meetings to do with changing things. Almost invariably these meetings have lots of people sitting on chairs in rows – sometimes for hours. The people at the front talk; and the people in the rows (mostly) listen.

I struggle to think of a worse way of promoting change.

Change in organisations is about encouraging people to work with other people to do things differently. If we sit them down – doing little but (if we are lucky) listening and pretty much isolated (because rows are like that) – we just can’t […]

By Mark Foden|March 25th, 2012|Change management, Selected posts|6 Comments

FG and G-Cloud

We are properly chuffed to announce that Foden Grealy (Ltd) has been awarded a place on the Government’s new G-Cloud Services Framework. The framework has been set up to make it easy for UK public sector organisations to procure low-cost, flexible cloud computing services from a wide range of suppliers: see the announcements - CloudStore open for business .

We believe that the Government’s approach to IT is very clearly changing for the better and G-Cloud is a good example of the positive stuff that is happening. Moving to cloud-based services is absolutely the right thing to be doing; but what is […]

By Mark Foden|February 19th, 2012|Company announcements, UK Government IT|0 Comments