I’ll publish some positives from 2025 in a follow up post, but I can’t start there. For family reasons 2025 has been a hard year in a decade of very hard years and that’s made work hard too.

There were definitely some positives. In the first half of the year I managed to do some talks about Platformland, including a bit of travel, before having to pull the plug in June. The project work I’ve managed to do has been with great people on interesting projects, plus I’ve started doing a few paid workshops. Fleeting conversations with the Anna Freud Centre on epistemic trust and AI, and at the edges of the Administrative Fairness Lab conference got my brain making interesting connections. With a bit of distance, the blueprint for digital government looks pretty good. But more on that in another post.

2025 is the year I accepted a few difficult truths. Firstly, I will probably never return to full-time work (I haven’t managed that since well before covid), with all the implications that has for things like pensions and housing. Secondly, and partly for that reason, the type of career I had still hoped to build in the public sector is now permanently out of reach. That really cuts as I’m not sure when or if this moment will come again (maybe it’s already been and gone).

I’m still figuring out what work looks like, but it probably means going all in on consulting work, of the type I spent a decade actively avoiding, or at least circling around (because doing that sort of work in an internal consultancy at GDS made me sick) under my own banner. Hopefully I’m older and more robust. When I have been able to work this year, I seem to have made working work.

One thing I do know is whatever work I do needs to be shorter, more radical, and more product focused. Sadly, in the UK we have ended up in a place where there are no shortage of senior digital jobs, but the perceived ‘fit’ for them is someone who is ex(insert big consultancy name of your choice) who is good at talking the talk, but with no real understanding of what it is to design and deliver digital products, and zero radicalism. That combined with a UK government that is Very Enthusiastic about digital, but without people who understand what you can and can’t, should and shouldn’t do with it close to ministers is a bad mix. To quote Edwin Collins, Too many protest singers, not enough protest songs.