In Memoriam - Peter 2.0
Remembering a spectacularly courageous and inspiring human being, friend, and colleague.
“Let’s turn a liability into an asset” — Dr Peter Scott-Morgan
Dr Peter Scott-Morgan, who died on 15th June 2022 following a five year battle with Motor Neurone Disease (MND), was a spectacularly courageous and inspiring human being, friend, and colleague.
He was also a pioneer who spent his life breaking the rules.
Not wilfully breaking rules just for the sake of it.
But wherever he felt the rules stifled the human spirit and stymied societal progress.
Peter realised he was gay from an early age, causing him problems at the exclusive private school he attended just a few years after the UK decriminalised homosexuality.
His school publicly took a very dim view of his orientation, and whilst he was punished for being, as his Headmaster explicitly told him “an abomination against God and humanity”, he was also propositioned by at least two male teachers. 1
We talked about how early experiences like these helped shape his fascination with the complexity of human relationships, social life, and of course, organisational cultures.
I first met Peter in 1986 when he joined the open innovation services lab, Cambridge Consultants Ltd (CCL), where I’d been working since 1983.
Peter was one of two new hires tasked with developing CCL’s presence in the emerging Computer Integrated Manufacturing market — the pair being dubbed, in typical CCL style, “The Dynamic Duo”. 2
We didn’t work closely together until a few years after his 1988 move to CCL’s parent company, the technology and innovation management consulting firm Arthur D. Little — a move I would make myself seven years later.
Our work first converged in the early 1990’s.
Peter had shifted from his original focus on robotics — his PhD subject — to understanding the deeper drivers of complex systems, such as human communities, and specifically the hidden barriers of organisational change.
He’d noticed that many of the recommendations ADL provided its clients were, as with all big consulting firms, “intellectually neat but rarely worked in the real world”. 3
But unlike most other consultants, he’d decided to do something about it.
By then, I’d not only realised that one of the main benefits CCL brought to our clients was in how our technologists, scientists, and engineers helped client people work better together across internal boundaries — resulting in greater innovation, agility, and adaptiveness — I’d also been helping clients cultivate this capability in their own organisations, after a long-standing CCL client asked me: “Could you come and make our people behave more like your people..?”
Given the convergence of our work, Peter asked me to review the draft of his upcoming book — The Unwritten Rules of the Game — which became McGraw-Hill’s Business Book of the Year in 1994.
This led to us working together increasingly closely over the next 13 years, until Peter retired from consulting in 2007.
We shared a fascination with systems thinking, from early in each of our respective areas of study — Peter’s in robotics, mine in real-time control systems.
One of Peter’s favourite anecdotes was about how to tell a systems thinker from a linear thinker.
He’d pose the question: “You have a robot arm tasked with lifting heavy objects in a factory. But the arm bends under loading — how do you fix that?”.
The linear thinker would weld more metal onto the arm, to stiffen it up so it didn’t bend. But a heavier arm would require more power to operate.
The more elegant, systemic solution is to allow the arm to bend, so long as it doesn’t exceed its elastic limit, and compensate for the bending via feedback in the control system.
It was a metaphor with powerful parallels in organisational management and leadership.
Linear thinkers in executive roles invariably seek to impose ever more stringent rules on others in attempts to inhibit deviation from their perception of “I’m in control”.
Systems thinkers happily tolerate deviation so long as things remain in overall control — they don’t need things to be in their control.
We had tremendous fun and learned a huge amount working together on numerous projects around the world, most of which I can’t describe in any detail due to client confidentiality.
One without that restriction was the work we carried out together for BBC Director General Greg Dyke, and his successor Mark Thompson, to decode the hidden logic driving the BBC’s culture.
This work entered the public domain following Dame Janet Smith’s report into the sexual abuse perpetrated by Jimmy Savile whilst a top presenter at the BBC.
Dame Janet’s report highlighted our finding that people like Savile got away with violating the espoused “BBC Values” because high profile on-air ‘talent’ was “more valuable than the values”. 4
One of Peter’s most profound contributions to the understanding of organisational culture is the insight that culture is an embodied experience.
In practice, we all operate from this awareness in adapting to different cultural contexts, but because this awareness is itself embodied, we rarely realise we do so.
Most academic models and consulting approaches completely miss this fact, mistakenly approaching culture change in an overly cerebral way.
Which turns out to be why so many culture change efforts go disastrously awry.
As Peter pointed out, in characteristically evocative terms, the insight that culture is an embodied experience is the secret everyone already knows. 5
Amongst Peter’s many strengths was his ability to remain unfazed by unpleasant surprises, leading to what I’ll always think of as his main mantra — one I heard, and saw him embody, many times — “Let’s turn this liability into an asset”.
That’s certainly what he did in spades after being diagnosed with MND in late 2017.
Here’s how he broke the news to me in January 2018:
“A few weeks ago I was diagnosed with ALS — Lou Gehrig's, the Ice Bucket Challenge disease, the aggressive form of Motor Neurone Disease that typically kills you within a few years when the paralysis reaches your lungs.
A year ago I could run; now I'm in a Hi-Tech wheelchair.
HOWEVER, despite the lousy Morbidity Statistics for ALS, it may come as no surprise that I discover I'm not especially good at doing what I'm told and statistically curling up to die.
For me, the more I think about it, being diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease is a fabulous opportunity. I intend to make the absolute most out of it. People tell me I should take the attitude “I have MND, but MND doesn’t have me”. I totally disagree. I intend to EMBRACE it. Then squeeze. Harder and harder.
All my instincts and my scientific training and curiosity automatically lead me to want to turn this MND liability into an asset — rather than attempt to ignore it or compensate for it for as long as possible. The Terminal-Disease-component of the ALS diagnosis may not be especially fun – but there’s absolutely no reason why I can't have some fun in managing the fallout. I’ve spent my life striving to achieve firsts and I see no reason to stop now. For the foreseeable future there will be an exponential number of emerging technological / medical advances, and I’m eager to help pioneer the application of some of them to ALS.”
Those few paragraphs summed Peter up in a nutshell.
He went on to explain that he intended to become a human guinea pig for experimental procedures that would pioneer new treatments not just for MND sufferers, but for degenerative diseases more broadly.
And that’s exactly what he did over the past four years.
He had several elective surgeries to literally remove, physically, the parts of his body most likely to inhibit his thriving — he refused to think in terms of merely surviving.
He set up The Scott-Morgan Foundation, a UK registered Charity (1187386) with the objective:
“For the public benefit, the advancement of science, health and education, by carrying out, promoting and publishing research into the ethical use of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, robotics, and other high-technology systems to enhance the capabilities and wellbeing of those restricted by age, ill health, disability or other physical or mental disadvantage”.
He partnered with DXC Technology to apply advanced technologies to help people overcome extreme physical disabilities and other life-challenging conditions. 6
He featured in a UK Channel 4 documentary: Peter — the Human Cyborg. 7
He was interviewed by Stephen Fry for the 2021 Hay Festival. 8
Peter leaves behind his devoted husband Francis, whom he met in 1979.
Together they set United States legal precedent — that penchant for breaking the rules again — when Peter was posted to Arthur D. Little’s HQ in Massachusetts.
Peter describes the scenario:
“Ever since we’d moved to the States, Francis had been at risk of being refused entry. I was on an executive transfer; officially, he was on vacation. The law said that the unmarried partner of someone on executive transfer could travel in and out of the USA as much as they liked, but Francis wasn't recognised as my unmarried partner.
This seemed unfair.
We worked with an immigration attorney to make our case, and eventually an official clarification of the law arrived that agreed ‘gender is immaterial’ when it came to defining an unmarried partner. Francis flew into Logan Airport brandishing his newly minted right of entry; this set legal precedent and was communicated to every immigration attorney in the country. Job done.”
Peter and Francis were one of the first same sex couples to be granted a Civil Partnership on the day this became possible in the UK — 21st December 2005.
I had the honour of being their Best Man.
My wife Alison, who joined me and our son Alex at the ceremony, said it was one of the most romantic weddings she’d ever attended.
Peter, renowned for creating memorable events, had naturally excelled himself — this time optimising every exquisitely designed detail and artistic flourish together with Francis.
Peter and Francis’ Civil Partnership was retrospectively converted to a marriage as soon as UK law allowed in 2014.
You can read more about Peter’s inspiring life in his book Peter 2.0 (Penguin 2021). 9
I’ve been fortunate to work with some great colleagues over the years, but few have had as much impact on my professional practice, and on me personally, as Peter.
He will be sorely missed by all who knew him.
RIP Peter B. Scott-Morgan (19 April 1958 - 15 June 2022). A supernova in a world of stars, who burned brightly but was extinguished far too soon.
You can read about Peter’s early school experiences, his professional career, and the start of his MND journey in his autobiography, Peter 2.0.
Alluding to the Caped Crusaders, Batman and Robin — the irony being that at CCL, the more senior “Batman” was named Robin.
Peter 2.0 Kindle p183.
Peter’s DXC Technology Partnership.
YouTube video of Stephen Fry interviewing Peter at the 2021 Hay Festival.
Ibid. Peter 2.0