Professional Development
The £20,000 Problem: How Parliament's Longitude Prize Invented Modern Outcome-Based Software Commissioning
In 1714, Parliament offered a prize of £20,000 — equivalent to several million pounds today — to whoever could solve the problem of determining longitude at sea. What followed was forty years of political conflict, competing methodologies, and the slow, grinding triumph of a working solution over a theoretically elegant one. For anyone who has ever written an acceptance criterion, managed a difficult stakeholder, or watched a committee prefer a beautiful proposal to a functioning product, the Bo
Jun 26, 2026
