Creativity and teamwork at Bletchley Park

For years I’ve been meaning to visit the British code-breaking centre from the Second World War, Bletchley Park, finally making it there this last long weekend.

Just so interesting, even exciting, to learn about the extraordinary achievements of creative thinking and teamwork. And the consequences for achieving sustained success – the shortening of the war, perhaps by years, and the saving of innumerable lives.

I had not realised how extensive it was, nor how much of it still exists. Nearly 10,000 people worked there at its peak, just a few of them still celebrated, Alan Turing the most.

It had me thinking about whether the German military machine enjoyed similar successes.

The Germans certainly poured similar resources into code-breaking, but with significantly less success. Why was that? My understanding is that while the British had one centre dedicated to all the services, the Germans had something like a dozen separate departments working in secrecy and isolation from each other. So there was very limited opportunity for one branch to benefit from the breakthroughs of another.

They did, of course, have successes. The most significant of these was that, in the early part of the war, their Naval code-breaking team were able to know the positions of all British ships – naval and merchant. 

I believe there are learnings here for R&D functions everywhere?

Alan Turing’s 100th

When polls were conducted in the media at the millennium to discover who folk thought were the most influential people of the previous century, I don’t recall Alan Turing’s name being mentioned.

Yet arguably, if he had been better celebrated, he might well have been No 1.

What an extraordinary and sad life he led. He was born in London on 23 June 1902 – so the hundredth anniversary of his birth falls on Saturday.

These are some of his achievements:

Before the Second World War he invented the Turing machine as a tool for studying the computability of mathematical functions. Turing's hypothesis holds that a function is computable only if it can be computed by a Turing machine. This implies that Turing machines can solve any problem that a modern computer program can solve.
During the war he worked at Bletchley Park, leading the team that broke German codes, including the settings for the Enigma machine.
At the National Physical Laboratory after the war he created early designs for a stored-program computer.
Many think of him as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.

Throughout his life he most likely suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome, although this was never diagnosed. He was arrested and charged with gross indecency in 1952 (when homosexual acts were still illegal). Given the choice of imprisonment or chemical castration, he chose the latter.

He died from cyanide poisoning two years later, the inquest deciding that he had committed suicide.