projects were told to start small, fail fast, get feedback from users early, and evolve as they went along. When I interviewed Mr Bracken about this approach, which by 2014 had begun to have some striking successes, not least in the gradual but accelerating roll-out of a single government web portal named gov.uk to replace 1,800 separate websites, I realised that what he was describing was evolution, as opposed to creationism.