What are we doing about boosting the Digital IQ of our organisations?
As we continue to transform and tilt ever further towards automation, it’s time to question the amount of support we are giving our colleagues.
The latest report from PWC says that confidence in our digital abilities is at an all time low.
In a global survey of Executives 52% rated their digital IQ as strong . Down from 66% just three years ago.
Our people , it seems, simply can’t keep up with the advances in technology . So what are we doing wrong?
First of all the scope of “digital” has changed. It used to mean our IT capabilities, then extended to take in social media awareness. Now it’s much more pervasive, touching on strategy, culture, customer and colleague experience.
Employing people with the right digital skills is now non-negotiable.
Yet some organisations are adopting a wait and see tactic: let the old guard retire and be usurped by a new breed of younger digital natives.
Except that won’t happen.
‘Born digital’ millennials are a figment of our collective imagination. A review paper has concluded that “information-savvy digital natives do not exist.”
Instead we need to focus on seeking out what Pew Research call ‘digital readiness’.
Related: No More Zombies: Kill off Projects That Stopped Showing Promise
This exhibits itself in two ways:
These two factors express themselves in the third dimension of digital readiness, namely use – the degree and aptitude to which people use digital tools in the course of carrying out their day to day work.
Being digitally ready doesn’t mean having a CEO on Twitter or chasing the latest apps. It means knowing what your personal goals are and what tools to use to achieve them. It means creating new networks and sharing knowledge to benefit your team or organisation.
In the Pew research, only 50% of people describe themselves as very digitally confident. Therefore it follows we all have people in our organisations , from Executives to the frontline, that are falling behind.
Perhaps we need to identify the digital laggards and connect them with the leaders who are often hiding in full view from the organisation. They are often overlooked by traditional Leadership Development programmes which tend to perpetuate a hierarchical model of ‘identifying future leaders’.
In my experience the most digitally ready often operate in ways that are wholly inconsistent with the current operating structure. They take a more radical approach to decision-making, and they don’t recognise a command-and-control model.
We haven’t really discussed the implications of this for our leadership. The new potential of artificial intelligence and robotics poses major new challenges for organisational development .
Really we need a new set of questions :
Just like knowledge has been democratised through social media, leadership will become democratised and ever more flattened. Making the transition from the individualist nature of leadership to a more collective focus won’t be easy.
It requires moving away from thinking that tools and systems can transform us.
It requires moving away from seeing ‘Digital Leadership’ as the preserve of an elite few who we all follow.
Unless we all feel that our Digital IQs are improving – that we are ready for the challenges of an increasingly automated future – we may find we have no place in it.