I attended a show and tell by the team thinking about the branding of digital in government – the same content as the one Jukesie attended. His write-up is very good, but I had some different thoughts.

The proposal on the table, as I understand it, is to try to find a unifying brand for people working on ‘digital’ – whatever that means – in the Civil Service. I don’t understand this idea. From an engineering perspective, the abstraction feels all wrong.

When we abstract something, we essentially make a model. We lose fidelity, but we gain the ability to manipulate the thing itself through the model. So it’s important that the model actually maps to the reality, or at least, to enough of the reality.

For example: your mental model of how a lock works may just be “key goes in lock. If it turns, good. If it doesn’t turn, it’s the wrong key.” And that’s fine enough for most cases, but probably not if you’re a locksmith, or an archaeologist specialising in secure entry systems.

Where we start to make mistakes with models is where the model tries to include too much, and consequently becomes useless because it then doesn’t work for anyone. And I’m not talking about clashing mental models, although these are common and difficult: one element of interpersonal relationships is that everyone is carrying around mental models of other people, and these are necessarily simpler than reality. I’m talking about a model that tries to encompass totally different things, and which consequently doesn’t work for anything.

And this is where I come to “digital in government”. I will put aside for a moment that nobody in our weight class is doing this (Tesco, the NHS), and that I think that brands who already have a name for their people (Monzonauts is the first that springs to mind) should treasure and evolve that. I think the abstraction is wrong, because:

• ‘digital’ is already an abstraction, and a poorly defined one
• ‘government’ is already an abstraction, and a slightly-less-poorly defined one

Generally speaking, people these days seem to be joining organisations based on mission. They want to build the bank of the future; or they want to protect the nation; or they’re absolutely passionate about tasting the bottom of Elon Musk’s shoe. Whatever.

My point is that organisations in government have a very broad set of missions, and a very broad set of technologies. Generally speaking, my suspicion is that people join government organisations for their particular mission. Folks are joining MoD because of that mission. Other people are joining DWP, and their mission is markedly different. If we’re going to have brands, my view is that they already exist in departments and should be developed from that point.

‘digital’ is a nightmare of an abstraction. Are user researchers digital? Are business analysts? Engineers are, but are engineering managers? And I know I’m falling foul of my own critique, as I inch towards “all labour is Labour”, as the world divides itself neatly into people who live on rental income and people who labour…

But perhaps that’s why it’s a poor abstraction. ‘digital’ people might as well be ‘civil servants’.

At the end of the day, my experience of the hiring pipeline is something like:

brand awareness -> brand understanding -> job search -> application

And I feel, quite strongly, that there is no brand for digital in government. Instead, the brand is the work. The brand is the mission. And we could do more to lean into that.