The important skills
What skills and roles should cultural organisations be prioritising to deliver effective digital work?
I’m just back from a 2-month bike ride around Europe. It was great, but don’t worry I won’t go on about that here (on my other newsletter however…).
I’ve just read an interesting blog post from Sarah Mace, who has been heading up all things digital at Leeds 2023.
In this post Sarah talks about the approach that she and her team(s) have taken to their digital thinking and delivery, the partners that have been involved, and the roles and skills that exist on her team.
This question around roles and skills is one I am asked about a lot.
People know they need ‘digital skills’ and ‘digital roles’ but they’re rarely clear on exactly what those skills and roles need to be.
In her post, Sarah says “if you’re trying to implement more digital ways of working, hire delivery people as a starting point, you won’t regret it” but I think that’s only half the story.
If you have a lot of very good delivery people you will get lots of things delivered, but how can you be sure that they’re the right things that are going to be impactful for what your organisation needs?
That’s why my answer to the question ‘what digital people do we need’ usually has two parts, you need people to help you define what is actually needed, and yes, as Sarah says, you then need people to help you deliver what is required.
The cultural sector has huge gaps across both of these areas.
There aren’t anywhere near enough people with the right product strategy, product management or service design experience to ask the right questions, prioritise the right needs, and define an effective solution.
Nor are there enough good delivery folks with experience delivering complex (and impactful) digital projects.
We still seem stuck as a sector thinking that allowing boards or senior teams to define what a digital solution needs to be, and for that idea to then be passed down to overworked and inexperienced teams to deliver, is a good idea. It never is.
If you’re looking to build effective digital capacity within your organisation, this is where you should start.
These skills can be learned, but we need to allow that to happen either through structured training or specific coaching. Rarely if ever have I seen people successfully ‘pick this stuff up on the job’ without a lot of direction, guidance and support.
The good news is that even if your organisation can’t afford to create specific roles, there are an increasing number of talented freelancers who work with the sector that can work with your teams to help develop these skills.
It is also one of the benefits of being part of funding programmes such as the Bloomberg Digital Accelerator - that there are product coaches available as part of the wraparound support of the programme.
It would be encouraging to see this develop as a consistent part of any digital funding in the sector so that the bad ideas are squashed, and good ideas are given the opportunity to evolve into their most effective form.
My Substrakt colleague, Katie Moffat, has written about digital skills more broadly in this article for Arts Professional.