Preparing for the day digital dies
Public service reformers often have to lean heavily on words. Words like delivery, nudge or digital.
Exact definitions of these words are hard to pin down. They are designed as loose clothing for a set of ideas and attitudes, corralling together those keen to shake up the status quo.
Leaders have a shelf life, a special period of time where their energy, drive, legitimacy and lieutenants align. When that time elapses, they start to look visibly iffy, like an old yoghurt straining at the seams.
Words have a half life, rather than a shelf life. Their energy seeps away steadily, consistently, quietly and inevitably. Delivery enjoyed about 10 years of currency. Nudge got about 7. After roughly 5 years at the helm of UK government, it feels appropriate to ask how much longer the word digital will get.
Some might say the digital fallout will go on and on, like Cats. Supporters of what I’m going to call ‘The Cats Conjecture’ may point to terms like economics, which have successfully snagged on the fabric of Whitehall. Like digital, economics is a practical toolbox and a panglossian set of assumptions about the world and how it works. But as a word, unlike digital, economics is supported by academic foundations. These define and refresh the term’s identity. They also provide supplies of graduates hoovered up by recruitment processes designed to snare them.
More likely, I think, that digital will fade away as a term, probably quite so. This can end badly or well.
Words fade because their power is diluted. The gravitational pull a word exerts on a group of reformers also drags in those who pay lip-service to an idea.
Say something often enough and it becomes meaningless. We’ll know digital is a word in real trouble when it appears in rebranding exercises. This is already happening.
It’s a wonderful diversionary tactic, changing your name. Get the hard bit squared away in the title and under the surface you can get away with pretty much everything you were doing before. ‘Of course we’re moving with the times. We’ve changed our name! We’re pretty much unrecognisable.’ By this stage, if you’ve got management time devoted to worrying about your name, you’re probably not delivering very much.
But the good news is that words sometimes fade because their work is done. The need to append the word as an identifier becomes redundant.
Do something often and well enough, it becomes the basic expectation. When the ‘paperless NHS’ and ‘digital services’ are called ‘the NHS’ and ‘services’, we will know the actions and behaviours that digital is used to signify have actually changed the relationship between the citizen and the state.
If digital is subverted as a word, do we need a new one to keep this show on the road? And what is it?
If the point of words like digital is to corral a group of empowered people and help point them in the same direction, maybe we don’t need one.
Instead, we should just trust them to get on with delivering, and let others worry about the words.
@ad_greenway
