The pen and paper department
You don’t have one, do you?
As we roll on through the slow morass of organisational dysfunction, it’s hard to see the wood from the pencils. We love to buzzword with digital. Digital transformation. Digital lifestyle. Digital natives.
As this carries on, I find it harder and harder to communicate the longer-lasting trend: digital is no longer a separate thing. It’s just the way we do things; the air we breath, the water we swim in. We’re only recently shaking off the paper metaphors and making truly digitally-native products, Slack being a good example.
It’s a dilemma: you need to make ‘digital’ a thing? As it’s not on the radar of leaders enough- it’s still mostly lip-service at organisations who’ve been under-investing for years, meaning that they have to spend much more to catch up.
But then if you label things digital, and build digital teams, you run the risk of perpetuating it as a noun (a department, a budget, a project) and not a verb (a way of doing, or more fundamentally, a way of being).
I’m still torn about this. What keeps coming back is Tom Loosemore’s Code for America post-GDS talk: TLDR: GDS is a great thing, but it wasn’t revolutionary enough.
Perhaps it’s connected to the notion of labelling technology in such a way that people can understand something new until such a time as it becomes redundant. Phone eventually replaces mobile phone. Car eventually replaces self-driving car.
So the question then becomes: at what point does an pre-digital era organisation inherently understand how to swim in the digital water? One that routinely includes designers, engineers, and product people in everything it does? That’s structured to innovate continuously?
Is there one out there?
