It started with a phone call. “How would you feel about looking at our cybersecurity and doing an assessment? I think we could be doing other things more effectively too. I would value your advice.”

And so began just over three years of work, starting with a simple seven day project, morphing into more regular retained consultancy and ending in twelve months of full time digital leadership.

The key to successful change is clarity of vision (why are we doing this?) and building trust (why is he here?). I’m not there to catch anyone out. I’m not even there to say you must ‘do this’ (although I might make a very firm recommendation and point out the consequences of not doing it). I’m there to discover, understand and help make things better (and easier).

The ‘security audit’ was straightforward. Some rational recommendations (all later implemented) and some interesting opportunities discovered. An organisation that had started with great systems but not quite kept up.

The big challenges were the database (not meeting needs) and the information storage (definitely not meeting needs). But what were the needs really?

So I asked. Individual conversations - what do you do, what do you need to do it well, why, what’s frustrating right now… simple questions but when ‘probed’ with an honest and open curiosity, can yield really interesting answers. It set the intention and we did the ‘quick fixes’.

But it needed a clear strategy and it was going to take a lot of effort and rolled up sleeves to get this from ‘ok’ to ‘excellent’.

So the client recruited two posts (a luxury to many I know) but it moved things along faster and more easily.

We were finally going to ‘do a transformation’. And we did. Fifteen programmes of work touching everything from data protection refinements to new equipment, from service design to better training, from a much improved tailored database to a completely transformed Sharepoint.

Of course it’s never quite over. But working together, aligned and to a clear strategy and objectives, we put all the foundations in place and set the organisation up for success.