Reflections 11th October

Clues, Cues and Automobiles

If I’m considering something I’m trying to understand, rather than just analyse, a question I’m happy with eventually forms. Then, as I work towards an answer, the question often changes. Not only that, but the new question starts pointing itself at other things, and before I know it, a whole ecosystem of complexity has grown from the original query, like some variety of sensory bindweed.

The query that triggered this post surfaced a couple of weeks ago, when Range Rover announced its new electric version, with a range of eye watering six-figure price points.

There is no doubt that it’s a clever piece of engineering, but I struggle to see its relevance, given its range limitations. It seems like using a jumbo jet to do the school run. When something equally capable of the commute and school run can be had at a quarter of the price, it must be a headache for the marketers whose careers are now on the line.

How has that happened? JLR has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to highly skilled automotive engineers, sitting inside a heritage of working within a framework of traditions that gave us the Jaguar XK120, the E-Type and the wonderful, ubiquitous, go-anywhere, fix-it-with-string Land Rover (it was a workhorse of my early career, and I hold it in great affection and appreciation).

These were groundbreaking vehicles with character and purpose, designed and built by engineers with ideas. Their pallid, respectable, safe successors have emerged through decades of consolidation, changing ownership and increasingly complex commercial demands. I find myself wondering whether a love of engineering still sets the direction, or whether it is increasingly being asked to deliver a proposition already settled by finance and marketing.

This week’s launch of the Jaguar Type 01, an EV of immense proportions with a price to match, brought that question into sharp focus. It makes the marketers’ task with the electric Range Rover look relatively straightforward. Craig Kinnersley offered a typical sharply critical reaction:

Photo": BBC

“Rather aptly, the car looks like a hearse. Which, at this point, feels entirely appropriate for the brand.”

An easy, cutting, remark, good for passing attention, though I think something more interesting lies underneath. The challenge being faced here is not unique to JLR, nor is it simply a question of whether heritage businesses should change; it is what guides that change.

New ownership can, if it chooses, renew a distinctive tradition by retaining its essential character, or turn it into a slick, marketable identity, extending the name while weakening the connection to the work that earned its reputation.

The crucial distinction is between developing the business’s character and merely exploiting its recognition.

Founders do not simply create brands. They establish preferences for a particular kind of engineering, a particular material, or a particular way of making things. Those preferences become recognisable because the business keeps acting on them. They become a form of organisational muscle memory.

Later owners inherit the recognition, but not necessarily the conviction. Undocumented practice matters. The temptation is to preserve the recognisable signs while making the underlying business conform to the markets, margins and growth strategies promised to detached investors whose money has financed the acquisition. In the process, the willingness , understanding and skill to take the risks that established its character can disappear.

Buying a name associated with exceptional craft does not automatically buy the conditions that produce exceptional craft. Those conditions have to be understood, funded and protected.

And so, my question took a detour: how might we notice those conditions changing?

Organisational change is reported through metrics, but some of its most important consequential effects happen elsewhere: in what people stop questioning, what they need permission to attempt, and whose judgement no longer counts. By the time the difference becomes visible in the product, the business may already have taught itself to be something else.

When a question takes a detour like this, we often need someone with a different perspective to help us see what we cannot. In this case, the useful perspective came from the world of games. Game designers have to think about something organisations often leave to chance: how an environment teaches people what is possible. A good game does not need to explain every move. Its layout, obstacles and small invitations help the player discover how to proceed. The world teaches its rules through the experience of being in it.

Businesses, often unconsciously, do much the same. The values statement may celebrate ingenuity, but the approval process teaches caution. The recruitment page may promise autonomy, whilst the weekly meeting teaches people to wait for permission. A craft workshop may contain generations of accumulated knowledge, but when the reporting system has room only for costs and deadlines, people quickly learn which version matters.

There is an important distinction here between what an environment allows and what tells people it is allowed. An engineer may formally be entitled to challenge a decision, while the experience of the last person who challenged one teaches them not to. The policy remains; the practical invitation disappears. Cultures build gradually, but disappear suddenly.

It gives me a different way of thinking about character. Perhaps it is not principally something a business possesses. Perhaps it is something the business keeps teaching, every day, through thousands of small encounters: which problems deserve attention, whose judgement counts, what can be challenged, and what is done without question even when it is difficult to justify on a spreadsheet.

Acquiring owners inherit that environment as well as the name on the door, and can change what it teaches without intending to. Sometimes, it may be unwitting blindness, at others wilful blindness. A different approval threshold, a new definition of performance, or a requirement to make every exception comparable in similar terms: each may seem reasonable in isolation. Together, they can make the choices that created the business harder to make again.

An organisation rarely explicitly abandons its character. It can simply stop making room for it. The danger is not measurement itself. It is allowing what can be compared to decide what deserves to exist. Once every aspect of a business is assessed through the same categories, the particular reasons for doing things differently begin to look like inefficiencies. The distinctive becomes an exception requiring justification. What once answered “Why do we do it this way?” must now answer “Why can’t we do it like everyone else?” Local context gives way to a common set of norms, and different parts of the organisation become legible through the same measures. Even a framework intended to help us understand a business can become another means of standardising it.

When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a reliable measure. People begin optimising the number itself rather than the underlying outcome it was meant to indicate.

Goodhart’s Law

It is a subtle transition. The identity can become clearer, more polished and easier to communicate at precisely the point when the character becomes harder to practise.

Nor does the answer lie in treating tradition as infallible. Early convictions and heuristics can create extraordinary work, but they have a lifespan: their habits can also teach people what not to question. Loyalty can preserve knowledge; it can also suppress unwelcome news. The same character that makes a business distinctive can make it blind.

A healthy succession needs to discover both: what must remain possible, and what must finally become discussable. It is a different task from preserving everything, and a harder, more demanding one than replacing everything with a “best practice” standard operating model.

So the question changes again. It is no longer simply whether a business has retained its heritage. It is whether the people working there can still exercise the judgement that made the heritage so valuable, and whether they can challenge that judgement when circumstances demand it.

We might notice the loss earlier by looking somewhere other than the confident process we are offered. Watch a design review, follow a request for an exception, and listen to what happens when someone brings unwelcome news. Notice whose contribution gets named when something succeeds, and who gets named when it fails. Ask yourself what a newcomer would learn about succeeding here without ever seeing the values statement, or perhaps what the business would continue teaching if allowed to.

The useful word, I think, is permission. Not merely what the organisation says people may do, but what its everyday environment makes possible, credible and safe.

I do not know what has happened inside JLR. The cars prompted the question, but cannot answer it, yet they have led me towards a question that seems important to ask of any acquired business whose reputation rests on distinctive work.

The outward identity may seem intact: the more revealing question is: what does the business now make it sensible to do?

There is no metric for it, but it is what will determine what happens next.