Weeknotes 3 — We need to talk about digital strategy!
I took part in a great writing workshop yesterday run by Joe (Hemingway) from Working with Joe. I’m sharing my Weeknotes produced during the workshop as a bit of an output and to show Joe that I wasn’t just sending Slack messages during the session!
My next ‘writing goal’ is to share and reflect on the learnings from the actual workshop. But let’s get this one out first.
For context: as part of the workshop we were asked to spend 5mins writing an outline and 15mins writing more descriptive detail so we’d end up with draft weeknotes. Here’s the ‘good enough’ output (full disclosure: I cheated and did an extra15mins worth of edits):
Wins
Back at work after an Easter break of ‘Sea, covid and sun’!
Delighted to land back at work with minimal drama, no crisis, no real setbacks (yet). What’s going on? Should I be worried? Oh hang on, I’ve just read that Joyce’s oven caught fire while I was away! (she’s ok, the oven sadly didn’t make it)
After what felt like lots of fire-fighting and risk management before my break, it’s nice to be focusing mainly on support delivery for the DDC cohort with a final month full of wide-ranging activities. I even get a bit of headspace to think about learning & evaluation processes, longer term strategy and other projects. And take part in a writing workshop. Lucky me!
Learnt
Everyone wants to talk about digital strategy! At least, that’s what’s coming out of the DDC cohort as the most prevalent need.
People need a roadmap, structure, some clarity before diving into a piece of work. It makes sense. It helps to prioritise capacity and resources. It helps collective decision-making. It also helps everyone agree on what we are not going to do.
And yet it’s probably also ok to just dive into developing a specific strand of digital work where there is already energy, skills and momentum. Quick wins and all that. But probably best to tie it to an overarching strategy, no?
We’ve recently gone through an exciting ‘strategy review’ process at CAST and developed a new strategy post-Covid19. It really helps us have clear(er) vision / missions / objectives. I would love to spend more time aligning what we think our (and our stakeholders’) digital priorities/needs are with the new strategy. e.g. Is it developing further our new digital toolkit? Is it prototyping a digital leadership framework we’re testing out? Is it integrating our systems via a CRM or equivalent? Is it investing in better laptops for staff? Software skills training? What are we not going to do?
To support the DDC cohort, we’re kicking off a new Digital Strategy course with our friends at Dot Project —I’m really looking forward to collaborating again with the brilliant Dot Project team and learning lots of useful stuff along the way.
Challenges
Getting my head around different learning and evaluation pieces — definitely not my comfort zone!
We’re aiming to embed DDC digital leads’ learning journeys through existing channels for the DDC cohort, playing some of these back and validating said learnings through the existing interaction points: mainly check-in calls, group peer support and volunteer feedback.
I’m more used to collating data through surveys (or similar) to help validate and complement existing qualitative and quantitative data we’ve captured along the way (old school style!). It’s exciting to be learning from Dan and Matt (from Deepr Design Studio) and trying a new approach but I’m also a bit nervous about the outcome. Basically, how well does it work in practice? There’s only one way of finding out — test and learn, test and learn!
MS Teams and Sharepoint — enough already! The nature of our work means we have to be flexible and adopt different ways of working —a bit like a digital chameleon. This means having to use collaborative tools like MS Teams and Sharepoint daily, as well as Google Suite, Slack etc. which we use in our organisation. In my experience, MS Teams/Sharepoint/etc aren’t designed for external multi-stakeholder collaboration (internal maybe, but not external). I think they’re designed primarily to create friction!
Recently I ended up in two breakout rooms simultaneously on an MS Teams call I joined as a guest (I was present in both rooms and could also hear audio from both at the same time!). Cue the chair (which one?) asking: “David, what are your thoughts on these policy principles?” Me: “Eject, eject!” I left in my parachute wondering why these tools are still the default for a majority of organisations…
