Reverting to type
Let’s imagine the digital team you’ve set up has shipped some services to real people, and – by and large – they’ve gone down well. The rest of the business has begun to take notice. They might have won some public recognition, prizes even.48 The team looks and sounds a bit different from everyone else. Nobody is exactly sure what it’s going to do next.
For digital teams trying to change a big, lumbering organisation, there is a real advantage to keeping your strategic ambitions ambiguous for as long as possible. If people outside the team aren’t precise about what you’re trying to do or why, it makes it harder for them to reflexively object to what you’re doing on principle. Any big organisational change will ruffle feathers. There will be plenty of people with a strong incentive to shut down the idea of a digital organisational change before any momentum can build, because it could make them look redundant, complacent or worse. It is harder for objections to wound if they come from a person who isn’t sure what they’re supposed to be violently opposed towards.
However, retaining this strategic ambiguity – which is just a slightly pretentious way of saying ‘not writing your full plan down’ – only works for as long as your digital team remains small. The outside world might not be completely sure what you’re up to, but everyone within the circle needs to be crystal clear. Strategic ambiguity does not mean there is no plan. It means not explaining it in full until you’re confident it’s the right thing to do, preferably because you’ve delivered most of it already.
This is a controversial statement, but here it is: your plan should be based on reality. Most 5- or 10-year plans or digital strategies issued by companies or governments simply aren’t. A long list of hopes and questionable assumptions is bundled together in an elegantly written paper drafted over the course of several months. No indication of the underlying uncertainty within the plan is given. This is then published. The document begins to degrade in usefulness from the minute it is finished. As and when reality intervenes, most organisations employ a sophisticated form of denial, where reality is bent around the plan. ‘We met our targets,’ they say. ‘We may have changed how we measured those targets, but we definitely met them.’ If things have gone really awry, the plan’s very existence is forgotten entirely. There is no point in producing one of these documents. If you feel tempted to, that may be because the mix of skills in your team makes it incapable of doing anything else. The correct course of action here is to resist the urge and hire different people.
However, after a certain point, there are good reasons to sacrifice some strategic flexibility. The critical variable is scale. If your digital team has gone beyond the point where everyone knows everyone else by their first name – say 50–70 people – that may be a sign that it is time to introduce more clarity. Having an implicit plan to guide your work only succeeds when the networks of trust are small enough for the plan to be communicated to everyone without being lost in translation. In digital teams with around a hundred people or more, you need a more effective way of broadcasting and consulting on plans than corridor conversations.
The other variable is the sweep of influence the digital institution is seeking to exert over the organisation as a whole. In the first year or so, focusing on smaller services and building credibility can be done largely through personal relationships. Having won a licence to play on a bigger field, you will need some way of creating that credibility and trust at scale – and you can’t personally meet and win over everybody. There’s nothing for it. Now is the time to write a digital strategy.
What’s my strategy?
Your digital strategy is not a shopping list of things for your current organisation to do. Implicitly or explicitly, it should be a recognition that your business or government has to become a different kind of organisation, a digital organisation. This will happen whether or not it wants to change. It is dealing with new types of problem, things that are unpredictable, undefined and constantly changing.49
The digital strategy must act as a signal towards the operating model you want your whole organisation to adopt and the culture that will allow that to happen successfully. While the content should focus on the practical steps that will help everyone on the way, the thread running through it is institutional change. This will come as a surprise to people who thought your job was fixing websites.
There are multiple routes to institutional change, from starting internally, to buying disruptors, to even quietly creating your own most feared competitor in a way that is semi-detached from your main business. One of your early strategic decisions is deciding which of these paths will not work best for your organisation, and therefore narrowing down your options.
Typically, writing a strategy is the first step that a team in government takes, long before anyone has tried delivering anything. The conclusions these documents draw therefore tend to come from abstract sources; literature reviews, international comparisons and economic models. All of these are valid foundations for basing important choices on, but they are only ever a partial reflection of reality – particularly for addressing anything involving a large measure of unpredictable human behaviour. The great advantage that a digital team will have is that, by the time you sit down to document your strategy for the next three to five years, you will already have an evidence base that offers a richer view than the usual sources. Data and user feedback on real services are a powerful complement to the traditional options from the strategy toolbox. Having a wider sweep of evidence to draw upon makes a digital strategy far more resilient to shifting circumstances than a standard strategy paper.
The trick for a good digital strategy is not to throw away orthodox techniques. A digital approach should add different (and sometimes competing) perspectives. Deploying different forms of evidence to work out problems and solutions – user research and web analytics taken from live services and prototypes, for example – gives you multiple bites at testing your assumptions, from different angles. You still might end up in the wrong place of course – no strategist can see into the future – but at least you will get a better idea of where your thinking is shakiest, and therefore needs more testing. The strategy really is delivery.
Taking a rounded view is the best way to write a digital strategy – any strategy really – that’s worth having. Even starting from this point, you still have to be careful. Most well intentioned and thought through strategy documents, corporate or government, end up gathering dust. You don’t have time to waste on producing something that nobody reads. There are a few ways to avoid that fate.
Short and clear
Government officials are especially guilty of judging the quality of a strategy by its weight. There is a school of thought that believes that if you haven’t exhaustively shown your working and bored an audience into limp submission, your output cannot be taken seriously. In its most extreme form, this extends to the vocabulary; if you haven’t sprinkled the text with big words or business guff, you’re apparently not smart enough to have big ideas.
Most of the time, the reverse is true. Your digital strategy should be concise. It should also be pleasurable to read, insofar as a strategy document ever can be. Writing a short, clear strategy is not purely for the readers’ benefit. It exerts discipline on your thinking. If you are unable to express why you are making certain choices without resorting to long-winded officialese, the problem is as likely to be with the quality of the thinking as with the quality of the writing. If you don’t understand what you’ve written, there’s no chance anyone else will.
A good trick for keeping yourself honest is incorporating more than written words into the strategy. Include diagrams and short videos. Unlearning bad writing habits formed during years in a large corporate environment is not easy. Taking away the simple option of writing more words forces people to think more creatively, and stumble over the ambiguities that don’t always make it through to the page. Apply the same tests to your visual language as your words. If a reader doesn’t get the message you want to convey from a diagram first time, unprompted, the problem is with your diagram, not the reader, no matter how pretty your pictograms are.
Of the web, not on the web
The vast majority of government and corporate strategies are published as pdf documents, dumped on the web for later downloading. There are many good things about pdfs, but they are a bad format for anything that is a living document, rather than what the organisation reckons at a point in time. A digital strategy should be a website, not a pdf.
Publishing your strategy as a digital product is a good idea for the look of it; you’re a digital team after all. A web native answer gives you more scope to move beyond text and incorporate other media, hyperlinks and reference material more neatly (it also makes it easier to add gimmicks and distractions, so be careful). However, the real benefit is that publishing web pages sets an expectation that this strategy is something that you will curate and update over time, as you learn more about the variables that will affect it.
A digital strategy should have the humility to say: ‘We don’t know what the future looks like. We do know unanticipated events will occur.’ Rather than ignore this, as the typical static strategy document would do, pretending there is false certainty (and maintaining this illusion right up until the point when it’s decided an entirely new strategy document is needed), a web strategy can embrace it. That’s not an excuse to change the strategy whenever it’s convenient or to conceal embarrassment. The version control on the website should make it very easy for readers to know where, when and why you have made any edits.
An incidental benefit that the GDS discovered during their work on the Government Digital Strategy in 2012 was that creating the strategy as a digital product provided an opportunity for the bureaucratic hackers usually involved in writing such things to get some experience of digital delivery. They learned Markdown, found their way around Github, set up stand-up meetings and a backlog. Producing your strategy as a digital product is a neat way of offering some role reversal opportunities within the digital team; the bureaucratic hackers get to do some rapid, iterative delivery, and the digital product teams create the conditions that allow them to get on with it. It also proves that even one of the most familiar artefacts of big organisations – the strategy paper – can be built digitally, in a simpler, faster way.
Retrospective: challenger banks
Digitally skilled people often join large organisations with some expectation that they will invest time teaching their colleagues new tricks. In government, introducing policy wonks to code through drafting a digital strategy on the web is a neat example.
However, knowledge transfer is a process that should go both ways. In new banks challenging the industry’s status quo (such as Monzo in the UK), teams have invested significant time in making sure their coders and designers understand the technicalities of banking, as much as they are helping the bankers get a grip on digital.
Challenger banks often run internal training on banking for their web engineers for this purpose. Investing this time gives those bringing new skills into an organisation more context about the situation they now find themselves in. It also makes clearer which rules, regulations and responsibilities cannot be ignored in the interest of innovation.
For a balanced multidisciplinary team to work well, both the digital and bureaucratic experts need to recognise they have an obligation to spend some time learning more about the other.
Actions, not words
Flick through a typical strategy document, and you will often be impressed – awed, even – by the intricacies of logic and articulacy of argument within. Yet on reaching the end, you may feel a sense of emptiness. You go back through the document; there are justifications, targets, sweeping conclusions. Something is missing. ‘That all sounds splendid,’ you think, ‘but what are you actually going to do?’ We have seen – on several occasions – government strategies on topics from energy to healthcare where hundreds of pages of prose have been finished before, at the very end of the process, a few random actions or a half-hearted delivery plan are squeezed in at the last minute. The chapter structure of these documents is revealing. Usually, they are organised by topic or policy area. These exercises are about what we are, not what we do.
A digital strategy should reject this. For the digital team, what you are is what you do. The lion’s share of your short digital strategy should be devoted to explaining what you plan to deliver, when you’ll have it done by, and who is responsible for getting it finished.
One of the debates you will need to have as you agree these actions is about deadlines. One of the cards a good digital team can play is that it is able to get things started quickly. That is not the same as saying that it is always going to get a service fully live and operational more quickly than what has happened before. This is a subtle difference, but an important one. Putting deadlines against your actions is not a bad idea; it focuses teams, keeps momentum high and provides natural points to review whether the overall strategy is still the right one. The skill is setting the right expectation about what will be delivered by that deadline – a minimum viable product used by 25 people, a fully working service in front of millions of users, or something in between. If you don’t know, opt to under promise and over deliver; it is better to have a disagreement than a nasty surprise.
Organisational context
There is a good chance that while you’re writing your digital strategy, several other teams in the organisation will be setting out their own grand plans. There will also probably be other existing strategies that your efforts must at least be seen to coincide with.
In the UK, the Government Digital Strategy was published at the same time as plans for civil service reform, national broadband rollout and, most importantly, a programme of widespread austerity in response to the 2008 financial crisis. All of these would have been government priorities with or without the digital strategy supporting them. The digital strategy was an opportunity to reinforce the aims of each individual plan, as well as presenting a degree of strategic coherence from the organisation as a whole.
The political or corporate context inevitably informs the tone and emphasis of a digital strategy, but it shouldn’t define all the content. In the UK, if the economic times had been more rosy, the potential savings arising from moving services online would have been less in the spotlight. If civil service reform hadn’t been a clear objective of the government (and owned by the same minister who was responsible for the digital agenda), the digital strategy may not have been so explicit about claiming a mandate for institutional and leadership change. But in any version of the political atmosphere, the actions that a workable digital strategy needs to include are roughly the same. Context frames the problems to be solved; it doesn’t explain how to solve them. That plan needs to come from you.
Giving others the opportunity to take some credit for your plan is rarely a bad idea in a big organisations, and making sure your strategy contributes to others is a smart bet. Only do this when the mutual objectives really do coincide, however. The worst thing to do is to allow your digital strategy to become a document trying to capture all the organisation’s IT moans and technophilia in one place. You need a workable plan, not a shopping list.
Getting agreement
Of course, writing a strategy down is only one piece of the puzzle. The real challenge is getting people to agree to it.
Getting agreement to a digital strategy is really no different to getting agreement to anything else in a large organisation or bureaucracy. It takes patience, a deep knowledge of the protocols, and no small amount of cunning. This is where your bureaucratic hackers will step in.
With any luck, the digital team will have begun to win some friends by aligning with other plans. These other strategies will have their objectors, however, so you may acquire those critics too, as well as your own personal detractors.
There will still be plenty of people in your organisation who will equate digital with IT, or possibly with social media and communications. Many of those will therefore view your work as too technical, involved and dull for them to trouble themselves with. It can be tempting to just let this indifference lie, concentrating instead on those who show some interest. Starting with the enthusiasts is a good idea for building support; the more powerful cheerleaders you have around the organisation advocating on your behalf, the less glad-handing you need to do personally. You should resist the impulse to focus only on friendly faces though, because it is the unengaged who will cause the problems later. Do not pretend that a digital strategy is anything other than a plan to transform how the whole organisation goes about delivery, and therefore something that will affect them. It’s better for them to find out now.
Getting agreement to the strategy is one of those tasks where it usually makes sense for the digital team to follow recognised organisational patterns rather than try and develop some new, disruptive path to agreement. Now is not the time to come out all guns blazing to change the standard business case format, say, however unhelpful it may be. Before you get the chance to change the game, you first have to prove you understand the rules. Following procedures now also offers some protection for later. When the going gets tough, you want there to be absolutely no doubt that the direction of travel you’ve set out was indeed ratified by everyone who should have ratified it, and look, here’s the piece of paper that confirms it.
For us in the UK, this meant getting sign-off to the digital strategy from a Cabinet Committee; a group of senior ministers representing all of Whitehall’s biggest fiefdoms. The meeting itself is largely a formality, of course – the real work takes place in the discussions, write rounds and phone calls beforehand. As the process of ‘stakeholder handling’ drags on, there may be a temptation to circumvent particularly tricky people by going straight to their boss or minister. This is a tactical call that you may end up regretting, especially in government. A minister may disappear in 18 months; an official can hate you forever.
Along the way to building some consensus behind the strategy, you will have to make some compromises. Making your first draft very ambitious is never a bad idea, as it gives you more chips to bargain with later. Some compromises are better than others. Compromises that involve extending deadlines, widening financial targets, or taking out actions you’re not certain are correct are the best concessions. They allow you to admit that there is still lots of uncertainty, but maintain that the basic strategic premise of institutional reform is right. Compromises that substitute clear actions for mealy-mouthed language, let individual departments off the hook or excuse poor performance indefinitely are not a good idea, and you should fight against them.
Summary
49 This is how a ‘digital strategy’ is broadly defined by GCHQ (of all places), in their excellent paper Boiling Frogs. It is available on Github at https://github.com/gchq/BoilingFrogs