The erratic motion of a yellow butterfly is immune to artificial intelligence – Calvin Tomkins

I’ve become obsessed with this observation from Calvin Tomkins, writing memoir style on nearing 100 years of age with beautifully captured nuances of the everyday, his failing body and his memories. It stopped me in my reading tracks because it was poetic and true and simple and because it reassured me that however technology brazenly continues march on and march over, there are things that will remain out of its grasp.

In September 2025, six months after I started a stint as a Product Manager in Defra, I signed up to a systems change course on climate transformations with the School of Systems Change. This was largely in anticipation for a project that I was hoping would materialise and a longing for different lines of questioning. I think 2025 demanded that of all of us.

I was brought into Defra in part to apply tools and understanding from the course I run through the School of Good Services called ‘Designing Sustainable Services’. Here are links to work that explain what I did while I was there:

• Product managing the design of sustainable services; an odyssey
• Identifying the environmental impacts of digital services: lessons from the ‘Get air quality data’ service

Sure, it’s work that I’m happy with. I wish I did more. But for much of the year I felt cornered in the box of central government plodding the well trodden processes of designing digital services. Many of the questions placed in front of me in my role were complicated ones – predictable, goal orientated, linear problems. But they became complex when policy positioning was ambiguous, when team changes meant day to day relationships shifted and when different groups worked only to promote their own interests.

Designing digital things is complicated. What makes it complex are the constant fissures in relationships and our inability to negotiate. We are beholden to contracts so constrained that they brazenly affect relationships and stifle nuance. So of course trying to add sustainability considerations ended up feeling like an odyssey. I applaud those that are well and truly buckled in on that spaceship.

Over the year I constantly evaluated the role of digital in my life and ruminated on how easily it had become the focus of my work. Some of the time I wish I wasn’t working on it at all. I don’t think much of what I’ve helped to build would effectively overhall any system of change in part because I don’t think we my work has managed to work closely enough with others in said system. I recognise now how bounded and ineffective I feel when not working “in” the system, but working as part “of” it.

All this to say that I’m doubling down on my professional wishes that we spend less time building “the thing” and more time seeing where it fits in the puzzles of life by concentrating on remits, dialogue, narrative and system boundaries and doubling down on how technology is an enabler of change, not the change itself. If its not pushing at the nub of how we organise, share and communicate then I don’t think I want much to do with it. If theres no new governance baked in to build I’ll turn the other way.

All this to say that I want to be the yellow butterfly.

So now I’m working to actively transition the way I lead – from setting destinations to directions, from products and services to systems and networks. I’m much better at this layer of influence. I’m not your detail orientated person but I work well with them. I’ve avoided calling myself a strategic designer forever as design as a profession at parties is ambiguous enough without putting another ambiguous word in front of it. But I guess that’s what I am, it’s what I’m good at and it’s actually what I think is really needed.

Onwards with immunity from AI.