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What are the barriers to a fully digital approach?

Strategy: There's no backing away from the challenge of transforming your organisation into something which is decidedly digital first. But where do you start?

The culture wars over digital are over. You may remember the battles about whether anyone pays any attention to social media (‘it’s all people posting pictures of their breakfast’) and whether putting credit card details into a website would ever be a thing. They’re gone. The digital people have won.

But it’s not a total victory. Traditionally, in the education industry, it’s been a hybrid, with lessons ‘in real life’ supplemented by contact and content online. In the halcyon days before the pandemic, the prevalent view was that the real life version was the ‘real’ product and digital was the shadow version. OK, if there’s nothing else…

In post-Covid times, while we may crave a more human experience, it’s unlikely that we’ll head straight back to the old model. Habits have changed and we’ll all be more cautious about how we interact in the future. Layer on top of that the habits of Generation Z, who see far fewer downsides in a digitally-led life and you’re looking at a seismic change in the delivery of learning. We are well into the era of digital-first.

Can you cope with a fully digital approach?

Change management is always difficult. Whether it’s driven by innovation, crisis, or the need to adjust to market forces, it’s tricky. There’s always a number of hurdles, comprising some, or even all, of these:

Institutional resistance to change There are always people who just don’t like change. It makes them uncomfortable. Even if the new ways are clearly for the better. These people need your leadership. It’s no good to say to these people that ‘this is how it is, get used to it’, you have to sell them the vision. The better way is to paint the picture of the bright sunny uplands so that they see the digital nirvana ahead.

Give them detail - a precise plan for how they’ll step through the next few months or years and how they themselves will pick up the tools and skills they’ll need for delivery. Make sure they are included in that vision - if they feel threatened, the resistance will continue.

Some will push the ‘sinking ship’ vision instead - either do this or we’re doomed - but that tends to add to the anxiety levels rather than detract. Go there if it’s getting desperate (and if it’s genuinely the case; crying wolf won’t help), but creating the sense of an existential crisis will only last so long.

Know your customers

Proper digital transformation isn’t driven by you or your organisation. It’s driven by your customers. A ‘user-first’ mindset is crucial to delivery and will be the difference between muddling through and true transformation. And to get that user-first mindset, you have to discover three qualities in your organisation:

  • Humility: Understand that you don’t have the answers. Make your assumptions, by all means, but let them be challenged by the numbers. Your customers tell you what they want by what they do. Watch what they buy, what the user journeys are that guide them there, what the search terms are… open your eyes and ears. Those needs can be quite specific, opening up niche markets that you hadn’t thought of. The data has the answers.
  • Inclusive listening: Get the whole team involved. You may currently have a range of touch points with customers which tell you what you need to deliver. What are the issues raised by the people who phone your office? Are they different to those from people who email in? Ally that to the search terms, to the questions raised at trade fairs, to the information you get from student satisfaction surveys… and so on. Everyone, whether they have a public-facing role or not, will have an informed view. Embrace them all (you can prioritise them later).
  • Iterative management: You won’t get it right first time. But can you build a vision of the digital future and then change it? And then do it again as you learn more? The truth is that you will be constantly changing as technologies and the habits around them change. You have to learn the fluidity that comes with constant change. That can be hard and needs the right mindset - that to change isn’t to admit failure, but to admit nothing more than the constancy of change. That can be difficult for some.

Risk management

Change is risky. Sometimes it's almost as risky as not changing. But you can risk a lot of resources on digital platforms, or bringing new skills to an organisation, to transforming the ways you interact with your customers. You need to get it right, obviously. Or if you get it wrong, you need to know how to iterate quickly. The idea of embracing risk - of experimenting (perhaps with pilot projects), of learning as you go, and changing as you move (and as your customers change) is vital.

Organisational iteration

It’s one thing to iterate with your platform and product but, as hinted above, it’s important too to change the organisation itself - if not in terms of the personnel, then certainly in terms of the outlook and approach. You’ll need to learn how to:

  • Understand change around you. What are customers doing now that they weren’t doing last year? How has technology impacted that? Can you see the change coming? If 5G networks become the norm, for example, does that mean you can comprehend delivering live video to students’ phones? Or even augmented or virtual reality lessons? Understanding change is about seeing it coming as well as reacting when it’s obvious.
  • Deliver technology. You’ll almost certainly need to upgrade your tech quickly. Do you have the expertise in-house to do that? Is your IT component mostly about putting laptops on desks, and do you need a Chief Technology Officer (with all the future-facing qualities that hints at), rather than a Head of IT (with all the static management that conveys)?
  • Make bold choices. Whether in terms of significant pivots of the overall strategy, or quick decision on capital spend, you’ll need to hold your nerve and make choices that make you nervous. You may have to spend more than you realised, or change the structure of your organisation. People will question your decisions. You’ll need to keep the faith.

There are plenty of bumps in the road, and it’s the vision which will smooth them out.. If you can deliver a coherent glimpse of the future to your team, and show them not only where the mountain top is, but also how you’ll get there, then you can overcome these issues.

There is no blueprint for digital success other than learning - learning from what works (and what doesn’t) and building an ever-changing, but always digital, future from the accumulation of greater knowledge about customer needs and of your team’s ability to deliver. The process of change will never end, but that’s the fun.