What makes a digital initiative “Strategic”?
The topic of digital transformation makes us uneasy. The issues are complex and finding the right people to help implement digital strategies can be a fraught process. It is not surprising that arts organizations have mixed feelings of excitement and doubt when opportunities like Canada Council’s $88 million digital strategy fund arise.
In such a climate, there are in fact practical steps that individuals and organizations in the arts and culture sector can take to understand and embrace the changes and the work that these times demand.
The first step in any new direction involves asking the right question: What makes a digital initiative “strategic”? What can arts services look like when they go “digital”?
To address these questions, BeMused Network and ArtsPond launched the Digital Arts Services Symposium (DASS) in 2017. The most animated discussions emerged around finding practical solutions to address recurring issues in digital initiatives. More specifically, people wanted to know how to navigate the development cycle of strategic digital initiatives from the ideation stage to sustained growth.
Months after the symposium, we continue to get requests for slides to be shared at conferences and board meetings to engage more people in this important discussion. People want to figure out how to turn their vision into reality, and how to find the right tech resources that they can trust with a plan.
To share this important conversation with more people, below are three ideas that resonate the most to those that are in the early stages of developing strategic digital initiatives.
I hope they will help you articulate your vision, or at least, ask better questions.
3 mindsets that could make or break your strategic digital initiative
Let’s get one thing clear: There is no digital magic bullet to solve your organization’s problem. Whatever is trending in pop-technology circles are most likely not relevant to what you want to do, so don’t chase that shiny penny.
Instead, embrace digital as a medium for experimentation, and accept iteration as a critical part of the process. Focus not on delivering digital products or services, but on creating a solution to your problem that can leverage the scalable nature of technology, and ultimately maximize the value of the resources you have.
Embracing a spirit of experimentation.
So many arts administrators are artists at heart. They understand the artistic impulse and the creative process, but securing a grant requires a different set of skills having to do with measurable outcomes, accountability, and knowing how to navigate funding institutions.
After years of writing grants this way, we have an opportunity to actually write a grant proposal that is all about experimentation with the digital medium. The language and structure of Canada Council’s digital strategy fund strongly suggests this.
They have released a proportionally smaller amount of the funds to start, using the first round of applications, I suspect, to ascertain what type of proposals are being submitted. It gives them a chance to evaluate how successful their communication has been at soliciting the types of proposals they are looking for.
An iterative design and development process is a given in any digital project. It is important to have an idea of what you want to build by the end of the project, but it is even more important to accept that the idea will change.
I am not suggesting that funding bodies no longer care about outcomes, but a hallmark of success in the digital realm is about how flexible and open you are to change. In other words, how much do your trust the process to address the problem you set out to solve, even though the solution was not what you thought it would be?
Not delivering the digital artifacts of what you proposed is not the same thing as failing to address the problem you set out to solve. We just have to adopt the artistic mindset, and understand that technology is the medium, not the answer.
Your digital strategy may include tactics such as building a website, or an app, or even some non-digital components designed to engage people. However, an iterative process means you will re-evaluate existing and new tactics, while remaining anchored by your strategic vision.
One can appreciate Canada Council’s strategic digital fund through this lens. They have restructured their organization to bring in people who are trans-disciplinary, open to critically reviewing their own process, all to improve the chance of success in address the problem of digital transformation in the arts. Each round of funding is not only an opportunity to review the applicants, but also how well they are doing against their own strategic vision.
So in summary, as you craft your proposal, embrace your inner artist. Trust the iterative process. Redefine failure. As Seth Godin so aptly puts it, “An artist is someone who does something that might not work.”
2. Develop projects that are collective in scope.
We develop projects focused on the organization that we work for. That is how we have fostered a culture of competition rather than collaboration in the arts sector that is ineffective at best, and toxic at worst.
The current interest in digital strategies is fostering an openness to at least talk about collaborative projects. There is still a ton of organizational baggage to shake off, but the people that align with such values (at least the ones I’ve spoken with), are excited about the possibility of change, and are in it for the long haul.
Prof. Catherine Moore raised an important point during the symposium that is worth repeating here: rethinking how we operate often requires us to decide what we will stop doing.
We associate our identities with what we do, because it is what we engage with every day. The overarching mission and vision of the organization is revisited much less frequently, and we don’t devote nearly as much time imaging the different ways in which they can be realized.
Developing a collaborative project requires a high level of trust between stakeholders and the project delivery team. It is hard enough to cultivate it in just one of those areas, never mind synchronizing it all.
However, there is a common ground that we could all work from: by pooling our human and financial resources, and finding those with whom our interests align, we could fundamentally transform the way we operate, and ultimately, sustain ourselves.
There’s a concept I have taken from Netflix’s Culture Deck that has been shared over 17 million times since 2001: loosely coupled, highly aligned. It’s an idea worth reflecting on.
You keep the values of your organizations and run it your way, but if we are highly aligned, there is no reason why we should not do everything we can to collaborate, and work towards something that’s bigger than any one of us.
Sidenote: If you enjoyed the deck, this article of her departure from NetFlix in 2016 also a great read.
In summary, it all just comes down to trust and openness: Trust in collaborators and service providers. Be open to reinvent yourself and your organization to better realize your mission. If these two ingredients are not there, it’s never too late to start cultivating them.
3. Develop “digital literacy” to increase your competitiveness
Digital literacy has layers, yet we use the word as a blanket statement for what we need in order to better understand what technology can do for us. So let’s break it down, first with the idea of “literacy” which we are probably familiar with.
The best way to develop our literacy skills is to read and write. That’s why we encourage children to spend time at the library, we take great pains to cultivate in them a love of books, and teach them how to organize their thoughts in the written form.
Digital literacy is no different. Instead of reading and writing, it is all about learning and creating. Instead of “books” (which take a number of forms these days), there is a multitude of formats and media. Make a podcast, create a vector graphic, manipulate a photo, cobble together a blog, create a VR installation, learn 3D modeling.
Learning to use an online word processing service, email newsletter service, online ticketing service and the likes don’t really count. You are learning to be a user of a digital system, rather than learning how to create digital assets.
Just as you wouldn’t confuse the ability to use the library catalogue with actual literacy skills, don’t confuse your ability to use online services for actual digital literacy.
The benefit of understanding digital literacy in this light is three folds.
First and foremost, you won’t get bogged down in deciphering terms and jargon. Remember, you are not trying to become a technologist. You just need to understand it enough to be able to work with them.
Secondly, you get over the fear of failing to create digital things. Just like creating art, it’s best to just dive right in and get messy. Who cares if you get it wrong, or what you created isn’t “useful”. Neither is the point.
Lastly, you begin to grasp the scope of what is digitally or technologically possible. Let me share a quick anecdote to explain what I mean:
Early on in my foray into creating digital arts services, I worked with a developer who assured me that anything I wanted was possible, so I should not limit myself to telling him what I wanted to achieve. That’s easy enough, I thought.
Until one day, after too many exchanges where we both hit a wall in agreeing on the scope for a pilot project, he said to me: “What you’re asking me to do is like asking me to code a button that will blow snow out of the screen every time you click it.”
It gave me a good laugh, and it was a turning point for me. Having been told so long that anything is possible with technology, of course there are limits to what it can do. It’s just that on a human scale, we don’t often run into those limits, but non-technical folks don’t have a sense for what they are.
Engaging in the creation of digital artifacts deepens our understanding of what those limits are, just as reading helps us understand the limits of words, however powerful they can be.
This understanding calibrates our expectations of what is realistic and possible given common constraints such as time and budget, making us more confident in how we work with those who builds technologies.
Building a Community of Practice
One of the biggest takeaways from the conversations for me was how many people were wrestling with the same problem, and the energy that gets ignited when we get together and address it. It’s a task that is daunting, but exciting at the same time. It has made me realize that we need more than an annual symposium, we need to build a community of practice.
As a follow up to the symposium, we are in the early stages of forming a Digital Arts Services Alliance. It is created in the spirit of fostering meaningful connections within the ecosystem in the arts, for a sustainable future. This has been my vision for the BeMused Network since the beginning, and I am excited to continue my work in collaboration with ArtsPond in this trajectory.
The alliance will be all about connecting arts leaders and pioneers with technologists, designers, and researchers who understand the arts and culture sector, and are invested in its success as much as we are.
If this is a conversation you’d like to be a part of, drop me a note, connect with me on LinkedIn, or following this medium publication for more updates.
Thanks to John Terauds and Jessa Agilo for reading earlier drafts.
