The internet is here and it isn't going away. Our society is being digitised and there is no going back. Charities need to become 'digital'. What might a truly digital charity look like? The answer is, we don't know yet because it hasn't happened, but broadly I'd say that a digital charity will be able to keep pace with change in society.
Becoming a digital charity offers new modes of operating. It isn't just digitising existing ways of working, but completely transforming the business model and how they achieve their purpose. But its all about steps in the right direction. The Charity Digital Code of Practice can help charities think about what those steps might look like.
"The Charity Digital Code of Practice is for charity professionals looking to get more strategic with digital. The Code can help you figure out the key actions that your charity needs to take to stay relevant and increase your impact, efficiency and sustainability."
The Code of Practice has seven elements. And I have some thoughts about how charities can look at each of them from a transformation perspective to consider the underlying models that inform the current way of doing things and what might emerge as new models.
"Digital should be part of every charity leader's skillset to help their organisation stay relevant, achieve its vision and increase its impact."
If you google 'digital leaders' you'll find all kinds particularly unhelpful articles advising leaders to 'transform people' and 'inspire teams', and all seemingly based on the idea that being a digital leader is just like being a leader but digitally. Charities need leaders who understand that digital leadership requires an entirely new approach.
"Leadership models of the last century have been products of top-down, bureaucratic paradigms. These models are eminently effective for an economy premised on physical production but are not well-suited for a more knowledge-oriented economy. Complexity science suggests a different paradigm for leadership—one that frames leadership as a complex interactive dynamic from which adaptive outcomes (e.g., learning, innovation, and adaptability) emerge." (Uhl-Biena, Marion, & McKelvey. 2007).
Peter Drucker made made the point that leadership practices were out of date more than twenty years ago. "As we advance deeper in the knowledge economy, the basic assumptions underlining much of what is taught and practiced in the name of management are hopelessly out of date... Most of our assumptions about business, technology and organization are at least 50 years old. They have outlived their time." (Drucker, 1998).
And slightly more recently Manville and Ober highlighted how thinking from previous centuries still permeates our leadership and management thinking. "We're in a knowledge economy, but our managerial and governance systems are stuck in the Industrial Era. It's time for a whole new model." (Manville & Ober, 2003).
Leaders having more knowledge and skills about digital ways of working, practices, tools and technologies, etc., is essential for charities to evolve, but if digital is just seen as a channel (same approach to marketing but do it on Facebook) or as technology (we got a new website, why haven't online donations gone up) then that leadership will never transform the charity.
Internet-era leadership models will undoubtedly involve moving from a command-and-control, centralised approach to a decentralised and distributed approach, or as Uhl-Biena et al (2007) propose, "leadership should be seen not only as position and authority but also as an emergent, interactive dynamic—a complex interplay from which a collective impetus for action and change emerges when heterogeneous agents interact in networks in ways that produce new patterns of behavior or new modes of operating". This complex systems thinking approach describes 'leadership' as an emergent property of the interactions within the system rather than as a characteristics of individuals. A practical example of this might be distributing decision-making authority to closer to where the information to make that decision is, rather than decision-making being held within a gate-keeping role of a small number of people.
Stan McCrystal, retired General and business solutions consultant is slightly more poetic about the type of leader required to succeed in complex and interconnected environment. “The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing. A gardening approach to leadership is anything but passive. The leader acts as an “Eyes-On, Hands-Off” enabler who creates and maintains an ecosystem in which the organization operates.” (McChrystal, 2015).
"Charities should make the needs and behaviours of beneficiaries and other stakeholders the starting point for everything they do digitally."