Transformation is a problem of judgement.

Practice one

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.

Practice two

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.

Practice three

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.