It is why his programmes tend to survive contact with the organisations they are meant
to change, when so many do not. What he brings is a disposition, formed over years
inside the work rather than applied to it from outside, and it resolves into three
habits of thought. Aristotle had a word for the faculty they draw on. He called it
phronesis: the practical wisdom that formal knowledge cannot supply, the capacity to
reason well about situations that refuse to hold still. Simon has spent a career
learning to exercise it at scale.
The Socratic practice
Hand Simon a problem and he begins where almost no one begins, by doubting its
description. A problem that arrives already named arrives with a solution already
implied, and the name usually comes from whoever felt the pain most recently rather
than whoever understands its cause. So he does what Socrates did to the confident
men of Athens. He asks what the thing actually is. What breaks, for whom, and when.
How the present state came to exist, and whose interest it quietly serves. It is an
unglamorous discipline, and an unpopular one, because it slows a programme at the
exact moment everyone wants to move. But Simon has watched too many transformations
solve a problem no one actually had.
The stated problem is a claim, never granted the status of fact until it has earned it.
The utilitarian practice
The second habit is a moral one, though Simon would not use the word about himself.
A system, on his account, is worth what it returns to the people inside it, summed
across all of them. That is the whole measure. Every extra click, every workaround,
every hour lost to a process that serves the system rather than the person using it,
is waste, and at the scale of a global workforce that waste is paid in years of
human life. This is Bentham's arithmetic, unfashionable for a century and exactly
right here: at that scale, friction becomes the moral content of the design. Simon
holds the systems he is responsible for to the good they return, and counts their
friction as a cost, because someone always pays it.
The polyrhythm of transformation
The third habit took the longest to see, and it is the hardest to see from outside,
and it is the most distinctive thing about the way Simon works. Enterprise change,
he came to understand, runs on at least three clocks, and they keep different time.
Technology moves fast: a platform can be configured and deployed inside a quarter.
Behaviour moves slowly: people absorb a new way of working over years, at the pace
of trust rather than release notes. Capital moves on a third clock again, set by the
financial year and the board calendar, indifferent to the other two. A programme
comes apart when it forces these into a single tempo. Move at the speed of the
technology and the workforce is left behind, running the old process inside the new
system. Pace everything to the slowest clock and the business case erodes before any
value arrives. The art, and Simon treats it as an art, is to keep all three sounding
at once, the way a polyrhythm does, and to know at every moment which clock the next
decision answers to. It is a musician's discipline carried into an industrial one,
and almost no one else in the field thinks this way.
None of this was arrived at in the abstract. Each habit was formed under load, on real
programmes at real scale, and the record of that is the rest of this site. What the
record shows, read closely, is a single mind refusing the easy version of a hard
problem, again and again, across a career.