Category: Leadership

The power of silence…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Business, Delivery, Information Technology, Leadership, Learning, Life, Management, Project Management

This week the Badger was asked a simple question: ‘What was one of the most powerful tools you used during your career?’ The answer was ‘Silence’ – a response that was not what the person asking expected. They thought the Badger’s answer would be either something like a browser, search engine, Excel, or ChatGPT, or a probing project review process. Rather taken aback, they asked the Badger to explain.

The Badger’s first real appreciation of the power of silence began when, as a young project manager, he and others attended a difficult client meeting with his boss. The client was arrogant, asserting wrongly that project delays were the reason for problems in their business, and making all kinds of threats and ‘what are you going to do about it’ demands. There were numerous points in the meeting where the client expected the Badger’s boss to respond, but they remained silent which was broken by the client continuing to express their opinions and assertions. The Badger found himself wanting to fill the silences himself, but he didn’t because his boss had told everyone to say nothing before the meeting started. When the meeting ended, the Badger felt nothing had been achieved. Intrigued, he asked his boss why they had stayed silent during the pauses where the client obviously anticipated a response. His boss smiled, and said they’d used ‘the power of silence’ to maximise his understanding of the client’s feelings and position without saying anything that might make the client’s own problems ours. Silence, they added, is one of the most potent forces in the human experience.

Experienced managers and leaders know that silence often speaks louder than words. Silence conveys many things – for example, emotion, confidence, fear, resistance, control, acceptance, disagreement, trust or distrust – because its meaning depends entirely on the context in which it occurs. The best leaders don’t puff out their chests, raise their voices, bark out orders, demand to be the centre of attention and to always have the last word, they often use silence to achieve their objectives, whatever those may be, to great effect.

Being able to wield the power of silence is even more important in today’s digital-dominated work and private environments. These are the noisiest they’ve ever been, because we are constantly bombarded with, and thus stimulated by, huge amounts of daily digital input which weakens our desire to remain silent. It’s worth remembering that long before structured language existed our ancestors communicated with their bodies, breath, and stillness, and that evolution has taught us to read silent pauses as closely as speech. So, whatever your role, ensure you consciously have ‘the power of silence’ in your arsenal of tools for achieving your objectives. After all, sometimes the most important, powerful, and best thing to say… is nothing at all…

Consequences…

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Business, Digital technology, Information Technology, Leadership, Life, Management, Offshoring, Opinion, Outsource, social media

The UK’s recent announcement about banning social media for under-16s initiated many media interviews with younger teenagers. The Badger found one TV news interview with a teenage girl to be a great illustration of how social media has changed childhood. The interviewer asked how many hours the girl used social media at the weekend. The answer was ‘9 hours’. The interviewer then asked the girl what she would do without access to social media. The answer was ‘Stare at the walls’. These answers say a lot about the impact of social media on children, and about modern society as a whole.

When there are digital technology advances, there are always consequences. In fact, in life, to quote Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘everybody sooner or later sits down to a banquet of consequences’. Many years ago, one of the Badger’s peers, a forthright and polarising individual, was promoted to CEO. On chairing their first leadership team meeting, they delivered decisions and instructions that most attendees felt were seriously flawed. The new CEO, however, was adamant that they knew best and that they didn’t care about the consequences. The Badger recalls thinking that this was pure dictatorship rather than leadership! Over time, the consequences caught up with the CEO, and they were abruptly and rather predictably exited from the company. Thinking about the consequences of decisions before embarking on a course of action is always wise in any leadership role!

The Badger learned early in his IT career that there are always consequences from tech advancements, and that some consequences can be unwelcome from an economic, employment, and capability perspective. For example, a couple of decades ago tech advances enabled a drive to move software development and IT help desk and support services offshore to lower cost countries. As a result, on-time software delivery became less reliable, IT service quality for end users dipped, customer confidence and relationships wobbled, programming diminished as a career path for onshore software engineers, and onshore capabilities became diluted. Things have changed since because the consequences have had to be addressed.

Today, social media and AI are obvious examples of tech advances with unwelcome consequences. Over 40 years ago, Steve Jobs memorably said ‘There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent’. The Badger thinks if Jobs were alive today then he would say the same thing with the word television replaced by either social media or AI. The Badger thus thinks ‘Consequences’ is a good candidate for the 2026 word of the year covering both tech and the world more generally. After all, you don’t have to look far in today’s society to see that the world is having to deal with many, many unwelcome consequences of policies and actions…

AI IPOs – Look, Listen, and Learn…

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Business, Delivery, Information Technology, Leadership, Technology

The young Badger was given some advice by his new boss when joining a dynamic IT company many years ago, namely ‘Look into everything that’s put in front of you, especially numbers. Listen quietly and closely to everything that others say. Learn from situations and from the good practices and behaviours of others. Heed this advice and you’ll do well’. Decades later that advice is as good today as it was then. As the Badger’s witnessed over the years, not everyone takes such advice on board. He’s been amazed many times that some people running projects or business units have not taken the trouble to ‘look, listen, or learn’ in order to understand the underlying performance of their areas of responsibility.

Looking at, understanding, and being able to explain what’s driving the metrics is important in managing any business or project activity. It’s crucial to leadership, being in control, and instilling confidence in others. One of the young Badger’s first formative experiences was at a CEO review of a business unit’s operational performance. The CEO was a demanding, numbers-focused individual, and the business unit leader had the reputation of being a handwaving optimist with a reluctance to hear bad news. The review did not go well. It quickly became clear that the unit leader’s view of their business was completely at odds with the trends in the unit’s metrics. The irritated CEO raised their voice and said ‘It’s not wrong to make a profit, and if you don’t know your numbers then you don’t know your business’. A lecture followed, pointing out that understanding financial and other metrics was crucial to successful business management. It was an uncomfortable review to witness, but it reinforced to the Badger that the advice he had received was sound. Shortly thereafter, the business unit leader was replaced.

In the AI world, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are progressing IPOs. The Badger’s applied the look (at the numbers), listen (to a wide variety of knowledgeable commentators), and learn (from the history of the digital revolution over 30 years) advice from years ago to assess if these IPOs might be good investments for members of the public. He concluded that they are speculative investments. AI may be a transformative technology that cannot be ignored but investing through a fear of missing out (FOMO) rather than rational assessment is rarely a good idea. Huge sums are being spent on building the necessary infrastructure, but so far none of these companies have made a profit from AI. This short YouTube video neatly explains the AI race in an easily understandable way. It ends making the point that building AI is one thing, but making money from it over the long term is the real challenge. The Badger’s decided that wariness is always sensible when no profits have been made so far, but a huge pot of gold is promised in the future…

Required leadership qualities – Competence, Consistency, Clarity, Communication and Charisma…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Delivery, Education, Information Technology, Leadership, Learning, Project Management, social media, Training

Early in the Badger’s IT career before the internet arrived, training for delivery people – project and team leaders, and technical staff – took place face to face in a group led by a senior delivery person and a professional trainer. Such training was often a one or two-day event conducted away from the hubbub of the workplace so that participants were not distracted by their normal work activities. At one course the Badger attended, participants were challenged to express the qualities that the members of project teams look for in their delivery leader. Participants, all team, or project leaders with various levels of experience, had ten minutes to produce five words for discussion with the course leaders and the wider group.

Many found it more difficult than expected because they struggled to think about delivery leadership from the perspective of team members who were not, and never aspired to be, leaders. Nevertheless, at the end of the exercise and subsequent discussion, the group converged on the following five words as required leadership qualities: Competence, Consistency, Clarity, Communication and Charisma. These words became known as the 5Cs and provided the theme underpinning the rest of the course. Whilst their context related to what delivery people look for from their delivery leader, the Badger’s found over the years that they are a good reference point for what to look for in leaders more generally.

The Badger’s worked for, and with, many senior leaders of all kinds over the years. They all had different personalities, strengths, and weaknesses. Some were more competent than others, some were more consistent and clearer than others, and some were better and more inspiring communicators than others. None were extroverts, but they all had a charisma that you couldn’t quite put your finger on. Underpinned by the 5Cs, the Badger considered some as much better leaders than others. There’s lots of broader and more detailed information available about the traits of good leaders, but the Badger’s routinely used the simple, qualitative, 5Cs as his mental ‘initial leadership quality’ checklist over the years to shape an initial opinion – which sometimes has subsequently changed. Sometimes, however, that initial opinion has not been very flattering and has not changed.

With the 5Cs concept in your psyche, you can’t help but use it to judge leaders who regularly appear on broadcast or social media even though you’ve never met them. Inevitably that’s unfair, but rather than relying on instinct alone, the 5Cs provides some structure in forming an opinion about where that person is on the POOR to GOOD leadership qualities spectrum. Ego, wealth, and having a powerful position is not the same as having good leadership qualities. For example, any leader who rants publicly and profanely on social media is unprofessional and sets a bad example for online behaviour. Someone with GOOD leadership qualities would never do this…

Untruth Social…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Conflict, Ethics & Regulation, Information Technology, Leadership, Opinion, social media

The Badger is not a journalist, a member of any political party, or a subscriber to any particular ideology. He’s just a member of the UK public whose blog normally avoids commenting on the pronouncements of the ‘global elites’ who recently gathered in Davos, Switzerland. Today is, however, an exception because President Trump’s recent utterances were an insulting word-salad where facts seemed irrelevant. Here are a few points from the Badger’s cogitation on the President’s various comments and positions.

The first point is that President Trump has been democratically elected and so we must assume that his policies and approach, whether domestic or foreign, have the support of the American people. The second is that he and this US administration are brutally ruffling feathers domestically in the US and internationally. The President has taken many positions to date that have validity, and many that don’t, but his bullying has changed how his country is viewed by the public beyond the USA’s shores forever.

The third point is that people in Europe feel that the USA is no longer a trusted ally. Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair. President Trump’s utterances have broken that trust. No one trusts a Russian because of President Putin, and now no one trusts an American because of President Trump! The fourth point is that this elderly President’s utterances fully highlight a character with a need for personal attention, praise, admiration and that they are always right on everything. A President who publishes emails from the leaders of longstanding allies and asserts that the UK army was not ‘a frontline fighter’ in Afghanistan is, frankly, untrustworthy, and undeserving of anyone’s respect.

So, here’s the final point. The old adage ‘don’t get angry, get even’ seems apt. National governments recognise their relationship with the US has changed and that adapting to a new future will be challenging. Governments may be angry but getting even is much more difficult for them. Ordinary members of their public, however, have more power to get even than they realise. The US stock market is heavily dependent on the performance of tech stocks. If ordinary members of the public in Europe collectively stopped using social media and streaming services for just one week then the big US tech giants’ revenues would be hit. If everyone stopped using social media for one week every month then the hit would soon mount to a crisis. Investors avidly track engagement metrics, and so stock prices could drop sharply because if users aren’t scrolling, money-making ads aren’t being served. The market impact could be problematic for President Trump.

In a world dominated by social media, streaming, and online services, it’s worth remembering that ordinary people have more power in their hands to register displeasure than most realise. Perhaps it’s time to change our behaviour and wield that power…

Everyone has a story about their dealings with the NHS…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Consulting, Information Technology, Leadership, NHS, Processes and Practices, Technology

In 1948, UK households received a leaflet telling them they were entitled to free health care. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS), funded from general taxation, free at the point of delivery, and available to all based on clinical need rather than income, was born. The NHS still exists, but the way it is organised and care is delivered, has changed considerably. The government of the day sets its budget and spending has grown, on average, by 3.9% in real terms since the 1950s. The NHS is huge.  It prioritizes emergencies ahead of treatments which are not immediately necessary but are important for maintaining or improving a patient’s life. Waiting lists can thus be long and are something the NHS can use operationally to stay within financial constraints. They are currently high and only responding slowly to government initiatives, as this  3-minute video highlights. The public remains sceptical about whether improvements are real because they still encounter frustrations with their NHS interactions. The care received from NHS doctors and nurses is rated highly, but navigating ‘the system’ to get it can be irritatingly problematic.

Everyone has a story about dealing with the NHS. In May 2025, after more than a year waiting, an acquaintance had a day-surgery procedure with an overnight stay and discharge the following morning. They were told on discharge that they’d receive a follow-up clinic appointment by letter for 4 to 5 months’ time. This was also recorded on their formal discharge letter. Having heard nothing by the end of October, they phoned the relevant hospital department to enquire about the appointment. They were passed between different extensions and ultimately to an answerphone where they left an appropriate message and their contact details. Having heard nothing again by early December, they phoned again and were ultimately redirected to a different extension to leave a message on an answerphone! Again, nothing had happened by early January 2026, and so they sent an email to an address buried in their discharge notes. An email reply appeared within two hours saying that the appointments team had been asked to make an appointment. Since then, there’s been nothing!

Yesterday the acquaintance asked the Badger, ‘Given your service operations and IT experience, is this a symptom of a failing service?’ They added, ‘In the old days, I’d have been given a card with my clinic appointment on it on discharge before leaving the ward. Who’s to blame for replacing that for the woeful process of today?’  The Badger answered the first question with yes, and the second with ‘Blame rests with governments, NHS leaders, and the external management consultants whose advice rarely improves NHS efficiency.’  To the Badger’s surprise, his acquaintance, a retired management consultant, agreed fully and added ‘more technology won’t help unless these processes get sorted’. They have a point…

Have the lessons from the ‘Move fast and break things’ era really been learned?

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Change, Information Technology, Leadership, Risk, Technology, Transformation

The first quarter of the 21st century is complete, and so it seems appropriate to reflect on a period of continuously accelerating digital innovation that has transformed how people work, play, communicate, share information, and buy things. The technological change seen so far this century differs markedly to that experienced by previous generations. It’s been fast! Previous generations experienced the impact of technological change much more slowly. The technologies the Badger’s grandfather and great-grandfather were used to in their childhoods, for example, were still central to their lives in their old age. With subsequent generations, it’s become normal for the barely imaginable technologies of their youth to become commonplace in their later life. Just think, if your ancestors could spend a week with you today, most would be wide-eyed and speechless in awe at the digital technology you use!

Digital technology has driven significant changes in society in the last 25 years, and AI will be no different. In the last 25 years, the internet has become critical global infrastructure, and the advent of smartphones has blended communication, entertainment, photography, and productivity into a single, pocket-size, device. Personal and professional interactions have become dominated by email, instant messaging, and real-time video calls rather than paper, and the way we store, access and manage large amounts of data has moved from local, physical, items like high-capacity CDs, to ‘The Cloud’ where it can be accessed from anywhere at any time. Streaming for entertainment and the online purchasing of goods have become the norm, and cyber capabilities have become crucial for militaries and policing. And then, of course, there’s social media. Whether you love it or loathe it, it’s been an addictive disruptor of everything!

All this, and much more, has happened in barely 25 years. Our lives have become deeply entangled with digital technology and the world has become more unstable. While this instability can be attributed to economic, climate, pandemic, and geopolitical factors, the digital revolution has, in the Badger’s opinion, played a significant role in societal disruption. Why? Because the early Facebook philosophy of ‘Move fast and break things’ epitomised the ethos of the companies that are today’s tech giants, and ‘Silicon Valley’ as a whole. This ethos showed scant regard for the overall societal impact of what they produced. As we are now seeing, the societal, ethical, political, and human problems this ethos produces only really manifests itself many, many years later. With AI continuing the digital revolution in the second quarter of the 21st century, a good question to ask is this: have the lessons from the impact on society of the ‘Move fast and break things’ era been learned and applied in the AI world that will be transformational in the coming decades? AI gives enormous power to those who control it, and so the Badger thinks the answer to this question is obvious. You, however, may think differently…

AI – from ‘build, baby, build’ to ‘bust, baby, bust’?

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Business, Delivery, Information Technology, Leadership, Risk, Technology

Every Christmas/New Year period, the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme invites well known individuals to guest-edit the programme. Each guest focuses on a topic relevant to their interests, experience, and society. Two of the Christmas 2025 guests were inventor, engineer, and businessman Sir James Dyson and the AI pioneer and entrepreneur Mustafa Suleyman.  The Badger was driving to visit relatives on the days they were guest-editing. He had the Today programme on the radio as background noise on both occasions. He turned the volume up when each man was interviewed because they were intelligent, impressive, and articulate individuals conveying enormous common-sense and objectivity, characteristics which seem in short supply today.

Their words resonated with the Badger. Sir James Dyson, for example, likes ‘doers’ rather than ‘talkers’, and Mustafa Suleyman spoke eloquently about AI and that it must be ‘a tool in the hands of and under the control of humans if it’s to benefit all of humankind’. There’s plenty of ‘talkers’ in the world, but it’s ‘doers’ like these two with vision, objectivity, commonsense, and a passion for humankind, rather than politicians, which have the greatest influence on the lives of most people. The Badger agrees that AI is a tool. There are plenty of ‘talkers’ concerned that humans would become subservient to AI, but if we let that happen then we only have ourselves to blame. There’s currently a huge ‘build, baby, build’ rush to construct new, giant, energy-hungry, AI data centres and to amass and use the chips and devices they need to function. Enormous sums are being spent around the world, the technology continues to advance way ahead of any regulation, and AI company stock market valuations are stratospheric. Having worked in IT during the dot.com era, the words of these two men made the Badger ponder more about the current AI ‘build, baby, build’ surge.

Four conclusions emerged. The first was that such surges often produce over-capacity and ‘bust, baby, bust’ outcomes (c.f. China’s property crash) with the bigger the boom, the deeper and longer the bust! The second was that AI is here to stay, but some huge AI companies will not survive even though the AI market bubble is not like the dot.com era when many companies with high valuations had no revenues. Inevitably, when investor appetite for speculative risk tightens for any reason, and it will, a painful correction will happen. The third was that eyebrows should be raised when tech companies arrange for the restart of shuttered nuclear facilities to provide electricity for their new data centres.   

The Badger’s last conclusion was that we should question whether the world’s leaders, including those of hyperscale global tech corporations, are the right kind of ‘doers’. Do they have objectivity, common-sense, and mankind’s well-being at heart, or are they just examples of Lord Acton’s 1887 line ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’? Whatever the answer, 2026 looks likely to be a troublesome year…

‘Do what’s necessary to fix this fast’ – Would you be up for the challenge?

Posted on by The Information Badger in Delivery, Information Technology, IT Project Management, Leadership, Learning

Here’s a situation. A contractor has a large fixed-price contract to develop a major system (hardware and software) that’s crucial to the client’s business. The project is in serious difficulty. Contracted deliverables to date have been of poor quality and late. Lots of software has been developed but there are severe test and integration problems. Hardware from a subcontractor is also late, exacerbating the difficulties. The client has constructed a new building which has been sitting idle for six months waiting for the new system to be installed. They are threatening punitive litigation. The project is causing the contractor significant, company-level, financial damage and resolving the situation has become a business-critical issue. Client and contractor executives have agreed that the contractor has one last chance to deliver the system and avoid litigation, ostensibly because unrelated matters within the client’s wider enterprise have delayed for some months when the building must become operational.

If you, an employee of the contractor not associated with the project, were asked to ‘Do what’s necessary to fix this fast’, what would your reaction be? The Badger once pitched this scenario and question to a group of IT sector project managers. Their responses were interesting. Most of those with cost-plus project management experience said they wouldn’t take on the challenge because being associated with a problem project might damage their career prospects. Others said they’d accept the challenge but only if it were accepted that their need to review the project, establish committees, and rebuild stakeholder management meant it was unlikely the project could be ‘fixed fast’.

Only one person, someone who had run a couple of modest fixed-price contracts, said unequivocally that they’d take the challenge. When the Badger asked them why, their response was – ‘If you’ve successfully run software and hardware intensive fixed price projects then you’ve learned that you’re a highly focused, demanding, disciplined and decisive individual with limited patience. You’ve learned that you need to be respected by your team and your client but not necessarily liked. You’ve learned the importance of dynamism, belief, team spirit, and having a positive attitude, and the importance of looking forward and taking speedy action to head off emerging threats to success. You’ve also learned that decisions must be good ones but not necessarily popular, and that ‘No’ is an immensely powerful word. Having learned all this, taking on the turnaround of a seriously troubled project threatening the company seems like a great personal opportunity rather than a foolhardy thing to do’.

The Badger smiled. Here was a kindred spirit! Fixing troublesome projects is always a challenge and a great opportunity to expand one’s capabilities. The contrast in attitude between those with cost-plus and fixed-price contract PM backgrounds was stark. If you were asked to ‘Do what’s necessary to fix this fast’ today, would you be up for the challenge?

Identifying the cleverest person in the room…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Business, Information Technology, Leadership, Learning, Meetings, Project Management, Psychology

IT professionals have experienced rapid innovation, constant engineering process evolution, progressive professionalism and quality improvement, and the commoditisation of technology and services over the last five decades. As an IT professional, the Badger’s worked with many clever and intelligent leaders, managers, and technical people who thrived on this continual dynamic change. Clever and intelligent people have always been at the heart of IT, but clever people don’t always have the greatest intelligence, and vice versa!

While fixing a dysfunctional project decades ago, the Badger had to attend a meeting involving the company’s Managing Director (MD) and other senior company staff and their opposite numbers from the customer to decide the project’s future. It was the Badger’s first time attending such a senior-level meeting. During the pre-meeting briefing, the MD sensed the Badger’s nervousness and reassured him that others would be doing the talking. As we entered the room containing the customer’s team, the MD winked at the Badger and whispered, ‘Tell me afterwards, who’s the cleverest person in the room?’  The meeting was difficult, but it concluded with agreement on a way forward. Deciding on the cleverest person in the room was also difficult. Afterall, how do you tell who is cleverest in a room of clever and intelligent people?

After the meeting, the MD playfully repeated the question and the Badger answered with what he thought the MD expected, namely that it was the MD! They chuckled, shook their head, said it was one of the customer’s team, and then went on to tell the Badger that cleverness and intelligence are different, but related, traits and that he should understand the difference to judge people and situations well. Cleverness is about speed of thought, ingenuity, emotional insight, adaptability, and creative problem-solving, while intelligence is about deep understanding and learning capacity. Clever people can think quickly, improvise, and solve problems in novel or unconventional ways, characteristics that are valuable in dynamic situations like debates, negotiations, or tricky interpersonal circumstances. Intelligent people, however, can acquire, understand, and apply knowledge in one or more domain, characteristics that are valuable in the likes of scientific research, planning, and the mastering of new disciplines. Clever people can be intelligent, and intelligent people can be clever, but the cleverest person in the room is always the person who has the best blend of both traits.

Learning more about the distinction between cleverness and intelligence over the years has been extremely useful. Since people are at the heart of the operations of any organisation, learning more about the difference not only arms you to pick out the cleverest person in the room, but also changes your perspective of those with impressive job titles who, the Badger’s learned from experience, are often unlikely to be the cleverest person in a room of other clever and intelligent people!