As we step further into 2026, I find myself working on something that is both the most challenging and the most impactful piece of work I’ve ever been part of. Not because of the technology involved, but because of what it asks of us as a business.
This work is about building a genuine business-wide understanding of our platform. Not the technology we build on, but the way we work: our processes, our people and skills, and how all of that comes together to create extraordinary experiences inside our organisation and for our customers.
The goal is simple to state and yet hard to achieve, explosive growth without a matching increase in the cost of doing business. The tools to support this already exist. What makes it difficult is moving all the levers at once and doing so in a way that feels intuitive rather than abstract.
There is a strange part to this challenge. This isn’t hard because the answers don’t exist; it’s hard because the way of thinking required is new, counter‑intuitive (maybe), and demands deeper engagement (definitely) than most change programmes ever do. This blog is my attempt to make that thinking clearer and to explain why it matters to me so much and perhaps for me to reflect a little as to why I am hell bent on getting this right.
What Does “Explosive Growth” Really Mean?
My organisation has three business priorities: People, Performance and Platform. In reality all three exist to create growth often described as explosive growth.
Performance is the easiest to grasp. The language itself implies improvement and momentum. People makes sense too; without brilliant colleagues, there is no chance of creating a new paradigm in performance. Both are familiar, intuitive levers.
But Platform, why does that matter?
Because growth needs more than intent and effort. It needs something solid to stand on. Shifting sand won’t sustain it. Think of a deck chair on a beach, slowly sinking and needing to be lifted every hour just to stay usable. (I long for that beach holiday.) You can keep adjusting, but the underlying problem never really goes away.
As we start to design the platform of the future, it becomes clear that explosive growth is not about incremental performance. We can do that with what we already have. If we truly want to be extraordinary at what we do, we need to do something fundamentally different. Not just upgrade the systems we rely on. Not just adopt new technology to create faster, clearer data. We need to go back to the root of execution itself: how do we actually do what it is we do repeatedly, at scale, and without friction?
That is why the platform priority is the most business‑focused “digital” programme of work I have ever tried to steer and I use the word digital advisedly. Even including it feels slightly misleading. This isn’t about technology as an end in itself; it’s about creating a repeatable, resilient way for the business to operate as it grows at pace and taking our people along for the ride to a new way of working.Growth at platform scale is not incremental. It is exponential, and it is transformative.
I often use a simple time‑and‑scale analogy to help make that real:
- A million seconds is about 11.5 days
- A billion seconds is about 31 years
- A trillion seconds is roughly 31,000 years
Abstract numbers, but ones that suddenly make the idea of exponential change tangible. In the same way, our journey to extraordinary through the evaluation, evolution and ultimately the valuation of our platform can be the catalyst for the kind of growth everyone in the business wants to achieve.
Another way to visualise this is through the physicality of money:
- $1 million in $100 bills stacks a few inches high
- $1 billion reaches the height of a clock tower
- $1 trillion rises nearly 68 miles into the sky (above the clouds!)
Explosive growth changes the shape of outcomes, not just their speed. Ultimately, growth drives performance; performance creates value for our customers and returns for our shareholders.
If we’ve built a shared understanding of the what of explosive growth, we’re now ready to turn to the more important question: why platforms are the only way to achieve it sustainably.
Why Platforms Drive Explosive Growth
Over time, what’s become clear to me is that organisations capable of truly explosive growth behave very differently to those that simply get bigger. The difference isn’t ambition, effort, or even talent. It’s whether the organisation is able to act as one.
Platforms create what are often called network effects, but I think about it more simply: they allow the business to respond to customer needs as a single organisation, even when it operates across many frontiers. Microsoft have started using the phrase “Frontier Company” to describe organisations preparing themselves for the next industrial shift not just by adopting new technology, but by rethinking how the organisation itself works and learns.
As we think about building the business platform of the future, one idea keeps resurfacing for me:
How well have we connected the organisation to itself?
Silos in structure and in thinking create a surprisingly clumsy future. They force us into a process‑by‑process, workaround‑heavy way of working that feels busy but never quite coherent. Platform thinking, done properly, creates new network effects from the ground up. When it works, operating in isolation becomes unnatural. Working as one organisation becomes the default.
That connectedness also unlocks something else I’ve learned to value deeply: ecosystem thinking.
When an organisation is genuinely networked, its ability to lean on partners, colleagues, peers, and customers to co‑create solutions doesn’t feel like a special initiative it becomes automatic. In contrast, organisations that are trapped in the here and now often struggle to bring diverse thinking to the table. Not because people don’t want to think differently, but because the platform beneath them isn’t stable enough to look beyond tomorrow.
A platform designed deliberately across the whole organisation creates space for the ecosystem to think together while still bringing different needs, experiences, and perspectives into the conversation. When that happens, better decisions don’t need heroic effort. They become normal.Platforms also change our relationship with agility.
What I’ve seen is that agility isn’t about moving faster for its own sake. It’s about removing the friction that slows everything down. A well‑designed platform makes it easier to adapt, integrate, and scale and quietly removes the waste embedded in processes that exist simply because “that’s how we’ve always done it”.
Driving growth isn’t always about discovering something new. Sometimes it’s about doing what we already do but doing it better, more consistently, and with far less effort. Agility is no longer optional. Customers expect it. The pace of change is accelerating ‘even’ in our industry and sustainable performance increasingly comes from how responsive we are today as much as from the capabilities we’re building for tomorrow.This is where platforms and explosive growth finally meet.
When delivered well, the platform becomes shorthand for growth itself. Its value becomes tangible. We will know we’ve been successful not because we say so, but because peers across our industry start to comment on how we operate not just what we deliver.
The approach we’re taking to this is different, and that difference matters. If performance is the outcome we care about, then every change we make must be anchored to it in some way. That grounding is what allows the platform priority to become more than an initiative it becomes the foundation for sustained, scalable growth.
The Route to Evaluation and Implementation
How do we go about understanding what truly makes up our platform, and deciding where change will genuinely unlock growth? More importantly, what does “better” actually mean when the aim is to operate repeatedly, at scale, and without friction?
For me, evaluation has to start with the capabilities the business needs, not with technology choices. Only once we are clear on how work should flow across the organisation does it make sense to ask whether our current processes, skills and systems are helping or hindering us.
The SAMR ladder is a framework I have leaned on before. Originating in education and later adopted in health technology, it provides a useful way of thinking about the degree of change being considered:
- Substitute: Improve efficiency within existing processes (new apps).
- Augment: Increase capacity and consistency (automation).
- Modify: Change workflows and connections (integrated ecosystems).
- Redefine: Create fundamentally new ways of operating (process‑first, enterprise‑wide orchestration).
Used well, SAMR helps place bets proportionately. Used poorly, it can nudge organisations towards change for its own sake doing something every time, regardless of whether real value is created. That tendency is one reason it fell out of favour in parts of healthcare, where stability can matter as much as innovation.
In my organisation, I am fortunate to work with a brilliant product and architecture team who have strengthened this thinking by pairing SAMR with a more rigorous assessment, the TIME analysis:
- Tolerate: Good enough for now; no value in changing yet.
- Innovate: Strong foundations with room to add new value.
- Migrate: Better options exist that we can adopt or adapt.
- Eliminate: Old, painful, and no longer needed as part of our platform.
Together, these approaches create an essential discipline for platform thinking: knowing when stability is the right answer, and when incremental change is no longer enough.
My belief remains that it is where we are able to redefine deliberately reshaping how work flows across the organisation that we unlock the capabilities required for the exponential growth described earlier. Redefinition is not about ambition for its own sake; it is about removing structural friction so that scale becomes natural rather than exhausting.
Evaluation first, implementation next, and review as a continuous cycle. Once this journey starts, it has no real end because a platform, done properly, is not a programme to complete, but a way of making better decisions as the business grows.
Collaborative Sense‑Making and the Platform Concept
My writing often returns to this concept because it sits at the heart of how I think meaningful change actually happens. In this blog we have focused heavily on platform as a business priority and its role in reinforcing performance. But without the people priority, none of this is achievable.
Expertise is shifting from individual authority to collective intelligence. David Holmzer’s research highlighted this many years ago with the idea of the end of the expert and the rise of the collaborative sense‑maker. Agile ecosystems thrive when teams interpret data together, adapt together, and learn together. Platforms must enable this kind of collaboration not simply deliver tools which is why the platform priority has to meaningfully overlap with the people priority.
Transformation lives or dies on how people are engaged in delivery. This is not just about managing change, but about constant participation, shared understanding, and clarity of purpose. Without that, even the best‑designed platforms struggle to take hold.
In other organisations where I have led transformation, we adopted a Practice‑based model: like‑minded groups of people aligned around shared skills and disciplines. We increasingly see this approach across industries from CIO and Digital Leader networks to global architecture communities. Practices provide continuity, shared standards, and a safe space for learning, which makes them a powerful mechanism for sustaining platform thinking over time.
Practices will focus on:
- Building communities, not just products
- Fostering continuous learning loops
- Measuring ecosystem health, not just output
- Supporting human‑centred design and learning
- Counselling colleagues as they move through change
It may sound ambitious, but I have seen this work first‑hand. At the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), I inherited a mature practice model that created a genuinely well‑oiled machine across areas such as cyber security, innovation, and engagement. Practice, used deliberately as a people strategy for digital change, made a profound difference and I believe it can do so again in other industries.
I often return to a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln:
“If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I would spend the first four sharpening my axe.”
For me, this perfectly captures the people priority. If we want the kind of growth we are aiming for, our people must be prepared, connected, and ready to work differently together. Platform is how we make that possible and therefore is where we need to spend more of our time being sure we are ready for change and growth in ways like we have never seen before.
A Summary Vision
Scale is a hard thing to grasp when you are making such wide‑ranging change happen as a business priority.
The earth is 4.6 billion years old. Scale that to 46 years. Humans have been here for four hours. Our first industrial revolution began only a minute ago. The current industrial revolution began when you started reading this blog…
Agentic transformation is happening now. It is real, but it is hard to grapple with. It demands a broader set of skills, deeper collaboration, and a fundamentally different way of thinking about how work gets done.
· Platforms are not just technology. They are growth engines.
· Agile ecosystems turn linear businesses into exponential ones.
· People, working in collaboration, are no longer a supporting act they are the force that keeps the machine moving.
If platforms are how growth now happens, then choosing to build one deliberately is no longer a tactical decision. It is a leadership choice about how we work, together, at scale.
Are we ready to redefine our altitude and our velocity at the same time with a laser like focus on the performance we want to achieve and the collaboration we need to be to get there?
I think so!