The most important story in this journal begins with a confession.
Not about something I watched happen to someone else. About something I missed entirely — sitting directly in front of me, for years, while I was too focused on the work to see it.
That’s a harder thing to write. But I think it’s the most important story in this journal. Because if someone with my experience, my access, and my proximity to the capability could miss it completely, the problem isn’t individual negligence or lack of imagination.
The problem is structural. And it’s everywhere.
The work
I was brought in as part of a large-scale digital transformation at a major national telecommunications provider. My responsibility covered significant portions of the architecture — data, artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure, integration, digital platforms.
The organisation sat underneath a substantial portion of how the country communicated. Consumers. Businesses of every size. Public institutions. Emergency services. The data flowing through its systems touched almost every aspect of how the nation functioned — patterns of behaviour, movement, communication, consumption, need.
The scale was not abstract. It was one of the largest and most consequential data environments in the country.
We ran a structured process across every major part of the business — working with data directors, mapping what existed, understanding what was usable, identifying where value could be created. It was rigorous work. We selected a platform capable of handling the full complexity of what we had. We built the architecture to support it. And then we identified the use cases.
Cost savings. Cost reduction. Cost avoidance. Revenue generation. Every one of them pointing in the same direction — inward. Toward the organisation’s own commercial interests. Toward the brief as it had been written.
We found significant value. Enough to justify the investment many times over.
And I was satisfied. Because we had answered the question we had been asked.
The moment the frame cracked
Some time into the programme the pandemic arrived.
I was briefed on a request that came in from government and public health bodies. The ask was for data that could inform the national response. Mobility patterns. Population movement. The kind of signals that, properly anonymised and aggregated, could help understand how a virus was spreading and where interventions might be most effective.
The capability to respond to that request existed. It had always existed. We had spent considerable time and resource making it more sophisticated, more integrated, more powerful.
But the response was reactive. The request arrived from outside. Government asked. The organisation responded.
Nobody inside the organisation had looked at that data capability and asked — before the pandemic, before the crisis, before the urgent external request — what could this see that nobody else can see? What could it enable beyond our own commercial interest?
I hadn’t asked those questions either.
Standing in the briefing, understanding what was being requested and why, I felt something shift. Not dramatically. More as a quiet recognition that the boundary I had been working inside had edges I’d never looked for.
The slow realisation
I’ve thought about this a great deal since leaving. Not with guilt, that would be self-indulgent and beside the point. But with a genuine attempt to understand how it happened.
The answer I keep arriving at is this.
The brief was complete. Not in the sense of being comprehensive, in the sense of being self-contained. It defined the problem, specified the scope, described the measures of success, and created a working environment in which all of those things felt like the whole picture. The boundary wasn’t visible because the boundary was everything. There was no outside to it from where I was standing.
The work itself reinforced this. Good, rigorous, demanding work has a way of absorbing attention entirely. When you’re solving hard problems inside a complex organisation, with real constraints and real accountability, the question of what lies beyond the brief doesn’t naturally surface. It requires a deliberate act — a specific moment, owned by someone, built into the process — to surface it.
That moment didn’t exist. Nobody had designed it in. And so it didn’t happen.
What this costs
The pandemic data request was answered. People were served who might not have been. That matters.
But it was answered reactively. Because a crisis arrived and forced the question. Not because anyone inside the organisation had looked at what they had and asked — before the crisis, before the urgency — what could this do for people beyond our immediate purpose?
The problem is that the system produces this automatically, reliably, and invisibly even when the people inside it are capable of something more. Even when the capability to see further exists. Even when the data, the infrastructure, and the intelligence are all present.
The question I’m trying to answer in the book I’m writing is how you change that before the crisis does it for you.
More on that soon.
*This is the fourth entry in the Predictive Purpose journal — a book being built in public. If you’re reading this for the first time, start at the beginning. Subscribe at neilcatton.substack.com.
Neil Catton is the author of The Next Evolution, The Cognitive Crucible and The Shadow System - available on Amazon, and writes at the intersection of technology, ethics, and human purpose.