Monthly Reflections: February 2020 — Digital Transformation

There has been a lot of activity in February — and much learning as a result. I wanted to publish my draft of reflections gathered over the month, however, I thought it more pertinent to publish my speech from the recent #BeMoreDigital conference hosted by Charity Digital. I had a lot of positive feedback on this, as well as on my contributions to the opening and closing plenary sessions.

As I was representing The Children’s Society at the conference, the question put to me by the chair of the opening and closing plenaries Zoe Amar — Digital Leaders for the conference was: How has The Children’s Society come to define Digital Transformation?

“Digital Transformation” as terminology has been bandied around the sector, but what does it actually mean as a tangible and practical application?

I remember the start of The Children’s Society’s digital transformation journey, sometime in 2015, we started talking internally about how we could better position our marketing and digital teams to work together on a common approach. That was it. That was the starting point.

We had acronyms like WOMS (whole organisation marketing strategy) and WODS (whole organisation digital strategy) — cue audience eye roll — focusing on how we could use digital channels more effectively to market us as an organisation, and effectively, generate profile and support.

In all honesty, I would say that those days were slightly painful: sitting in digital transformation board meetings where it felt like we were perpetually going around the table getting updates from people on ‘how they were embracing more digital ways of working’ (or not )— without much of a clue of what we actually wanted to achieve at the end of the day. Or even what we envisaged a “digitally transformed” or “digitally mature” organisation to be.

For me, digital transformation is about reimagining your organisation. In a nutshell, it’s about using technological approaches to create new (or modify existing) business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing young people’s needs and business /market requirements.

Defining digital transformation will be different for every organisation and will look different for every organisation— but there are some key principles to start with to ensure you’ve got all the foundations in place.

For me, the key moment which enabled The Children’s Society to start defining it’s digital transformation journey was when we applied to the Lottery for catalyst funding to truly transform not just our application of digital — but the whole organisational mindset. Applying to the Digital Fund actually forced us to start thinking tangibly about what a ‘reminagined Children’s Society’ would look like. To a certain extent, we even stopped trying to use the word ‘digital’ because of how loaded a term it actually is — and the baggage it carries.

I would like to share a few learnings with you about the key elements that were crucial for us moving forward on this journey:

1. Get the basics right first. I hear it all the time at these sorts of events. You can hardly expect to be adopting new tech and using new digital channels or platforms when you can’t even provide you staff with the basic IT infrastructure they need in order to do their jobs. Connectivity (particularly where you might have a mobile workforce), tech that works, training and capacity building that supports at every level of skill are non-negotiable. Get it right at this level and doing the more innovative, sexy stuff will not just be easier, but more effective to embed later on down the line.
2. It’s all about people and at the heart of it — culture.

• Don’t underestimate the power of buy-in and ownership. This applies to everyone from your trustees and senior leadership to the people operating at the coalface. If you have the supportive and enabling environment, senior leadership driving and sponsoring the change agenda demonstrates there is a will to change. There’s nothing worse than trying to sell your senior leadership and trustees an approach that will radically transform the organisation — and their response is —” that’s great but we have no appetite, money or time to invest in this”. They have to own it and drive it. I’d go so far as to say it should be driven by the Chief Exec.

• You don’t need a CIO, CDO or CTO to do this. Some organisations are privileged to be able to hire a Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Digital Officer or equivalent. The Children’s Society made a point of NOT going down this road. On one level, we felt doing this would potentially enable other senior leaders to abdicate responsibility for driving digital change. Every organisational leader should have skin in the game and understand how this change is made practical in and to their teams.

• Above all — remember your audiences — whether they are beneficiaries or supporters. Always come back to what they need. I often hear organisations, (including funders), start with ‘oh we need an app’ or ‘we need a new platform’. How many of you have heard this? The more efficient and effective approach — and we have learned this the hard way — is to get under the skin of a specific problem your beneficiaries are facing. Make it your business to understand it inside out. And THEN try to the find the best solution to solve that problem. It may surprise you to find that a technology solution or digital channel is not the best approach after all.

3. Get a support network around you. Whether this is peers from other organisations embarking on the same journey, or even ahead of you in the journey — or a group of expert advisors who can help you navigate the journey. We have learned so much from the likes of charities like Scope and Cancer Research UK, and other specialists like CAST (Centre for accelerating social technology), Nesta Impact, BGV and SHIFT US (in particular Nick Stanhope). They have made all the difference in helping us define our roadmap — and envisage the change that we want to see.

• Our partnership approach with BGV (check it out) has been transformational. By bringing together our expertise in supporting vulnerable young people and Bethnal Green Venture’s expertise is supporting social tech ventures to build their businesses — we have proved the concept that partnership working with the techforgood community can help us achieve impact at scale which we would never have had the capacity, capability, foresight and skill to do on our own.
• Shout out to the guys who wrote what I call the ‘GDS book’ that did the rounds in our office. The proper title is ‘Digital transformation at scale: why strategy is delivery’ (I know. Snappy) …or you can just google ‘GDS book’ like I did. This is a lessons learned book based on the set-up of the Government Digital Service — and forms a blueprint of considerations for any organisation embarking on digital change.

4. Don’t try to do it all at once. Very often organisations embark on a huge change process which both disrupts working practices and the morale of staff. Our digital transformation work has three core strands -which made sense for the Children’s Society and the way we are currently structured. These are: digital impact; digital engagement; and digital infrastructure — all supported by efforts to improve digital culture. Take out the word ‘digital’ from any of these and they are perfectly understandable to any of our employees. People get ‘impact’; ‘engagement’ and infrastructure.

• Start small and adopt a test and learn approach. Some of you may be more familiar with terminology like ‘agile methodology’ or a ‘design approach’. But in a nutshell, this means trying stuff out, iterating, testing again, iterating again. It doesn’t need to be perfect first time. And it won’t be. You don’t need months or years to make small, but significant changes. And if it doesn’t work, bin it, learn and try something else.
• A good example on this approach is the virtual reality (VR) scenarios The Children’s Society has developed to help young people to better copy with anxiety. Entitled VR With You — for any of you furiously trying to google it. We started with a small test, what we call, a ‘riskiest assumption test’. This was ‘Will young people and practitioners engage with VR?’. Our hypothesis was that they would, but we had to test it. So we purchased two £5 google cardboards, two tickets to Birmingham, and spent the day at our drop-in mental health service coaxing young people, youth workers and therapists to try it out. It wasn’t costly, it certainly wasn’t flashy — but it proved our concept. Enough so that off the back of this test, we received funding from the Comic Relief and Paul Hamlyn Foundation Tech for Good Fund to conduct further discovery research and build a prototype. We now have a number of fully fledged VR scenarios, co-designed with young people and professionals, being tested with different cohorts of young people to help them better cope with anxiety and mood regulation — and in different environments like schools, care homes and drop-in services.

Before I make it seem like we have everything worked out (we don’t), I’d like to say that we are still thinking very hard about the conditions we need to have in place to make this journey, to make this change we seek. Some of those exist, some of them don’t — but we continue to work at it. Our new ways of working (more often than not), resonate with the external ecosystem, but we are still, to a certain extent, struggling to gain momentum internally (within the organisation) for a variety of reasons. This means that some of the innovation on approaches and principles being tested at present are only capable of incremental improvement — and therefore in my mind, potentially only have a limited impact for young people. Our ambitions for change are so much greater than that. So we are actively working on this.

So in conclusion, how did we decide what digital transformation looked like at The Children’s Society? This is what a ‘reimagined’ organisation like for us:

• Acting on the firm commitment from our leadership to inherently change the way The Children’s Society serves young people and the communities they’re in
• Embedding design principles and digital practices, like ‘test and learn’, across every stage of development and delivery of services and in efforts to achieve systems change
• Enhancing our capability to understand new needs and expectations of young people
• To interact and co-create with young people as an everyday reality
• Creating services with young people with a clear route to, where applicable, scale these through digital means, working through partnerships that facilitate for this
• Understanding the skills needed in a modern digital workforce to make a difference in real time for young people
• Building knowledge of design, innovation, and use of data, across traditional functions such as finance, HR, safeguarding, and legal support which can act as bottlenecks to new ways of working with young people.
• Showing a commitment to working generously — encouraging an ‘open source’ approach to development and learning

We are shifting the understanding of ‘digital’ from ‘something we do’ to ‘something we are’. And it’s a tough shift. Our view is that if the conditions to change don’t exist in the organisation (to be able to work in new ways) — a step-change will never occur. I’ll say it again — the conditions are important to enable change.

For further information, please feel free to kirsten.naude@childrenssociety.org.uk.

I also consult and provide advice to charities and public sector organisations and can be contacted on kznaude@gmail.com in relation to this.