Lessons from the Post Office scandal

Have you ever done jury duty??

I have now done it twice in the UK, and my second time was last week.?

I was at the Southwark Crown court, one of the biggest courts in the UK, where you have to go through airport style security every time you enter the building.

The security guards, in their attempt to make friendly conversation, kept on asking me if I was finding the experience interesting.?

Honestly, I wasn’t. I found it emotionally draining.

But I think this is a good thing.?

When sad things happen, I want to feel sad.?

In general, it is better to look on the bright side of life than finding fault with everything.

But, trying to be upbeat all the time denies the breadth of the human experience.?

In order to create a society we want to live in, we need to get sad about sad things and then,? work to change them.?

This is why, in the latest episode of the Tech for Non-Techies podcast, I shared the lessons leaders need to learn from the worst miscarriage of justice in UK history: the Post Office scandal.?

900 people were wrongly convicted and four people committed suicide because Post Office leadership didn’t know how to deal with a software glitch.

In an age when every large company is powered by software in some way, leaders for whom it remains a black box are ignoring their fiduciary responsibility.

Here’s a summary of what happened: when the UK Post Office embarked on a big digital transformation project back in the late 1990s, they put out a tender out for a software contract.?

Fujitsu won the work, and created the Horizon software tool to be used in local Post Offices around the UK.

The Horizon system was accounting software, which was supposed to report how much money?local Post Offices made.?

The issue was, the software was glitchy.

It kept reporting that the local Post Offices made much more than they actually had, leaving the local Post Office managers to cover the shortfall with their own money.

When people couldn’t, or wouldn’t pay up, they were taken to court, and the software reports were used as evidence.

Only this evidence was from glitchy software - an unreliable witness.?

It is easy to blame this on the software, and the engineers that made it. But this isn’t the just and fair approach.?

Software is often released to customers with problems in it.

This is not great, but it happens.?

Responsible management teams know this and have a plan to correct it as soon as they hear about it.

Look at what happened at Microsoft just a couple of weeks ago, when Gemini, Microsoft’s generative AI tool created pictures of black Founding Fathers.

The software wasn’t ready, it wasn’t properly trained and yet it was released.?

Microsoft is one of the wealthiest companies in the world and home to some of the best engineering talent.?

And yet, the best and the brightest still sometimes make mistakes. (I find this comforting!)

I am sure that Satya Nadella is not pleased with Gemini’s quality assurance team, and they are now making internal changes to the software release process.

But, soon after news of the software glitch came out, Nadella addressed it, took that version of the software off the market and and the team is now working to change it.?

This is literally the opposite of what Post Office management did, when they continued to prosecute people despite having many reports that the Horizon software was faulty.

We cannot bring back the lives lost to this awful injustice.

But we must learn from it to make sure it never happens again.

For a further exploration of the lessons learnt, listen to episode 194 Lessons from the Post Office scandal on

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Sophia