Managing Digital Change Using an Evidence-Based Approach

In the digital sphere, change management should emphasise people and resources, as most technical problems are fixable with the right team, explicit requirements, time and money. Strategic change management requires coordinating a structured period of transition from one situation to a new, desirable situation to achieve lasting change within an organisation. It relies on applying knowledge, tools and resources to deal with change and defining and adopting corporate strategies, structures, procedures and technologies. Technology is relatively easy to change, as it is accessible to logic; people's work behaviour far less so. Change management is about convincing people that the change proposed is needed and that the benefits of change will outweigh the disadvantages or temporary costs to them. Impact evidence will help with making a convincing case for change.

Thinking of innovation

Innovators should be tasked to develop a new capability first, and to introduce new technology only if needed. Digital tends to perpetual development, beta testing, upgrades and sometimes non-delivery. Software development is not always innovation and should be managed according to the needs of the organisation. Digital sits within innovation but is not the entirety of it.

Establish a sandbox environment to make innovation a healthy activity for the organisation. Sandboxes enable genuine experimentation with ideas while not losing sight of day-to-day ‘business as usual’ deliverables. The sandbox concept can provide near-term opportunities for innovators and help consultation with the community before committing to long-term investments. A sandbox environment should support best practices for digital solutions and technical content production by allowing for iterative, low-risk development and testing. Note that a sandbox may be a formal technical area with tools, etc. It can also be a metaphorical, playful space where the team can play with low consequences and destroy and rebuild successive, imperfect attempts at creating something.

Responding to community needs

Agency for community stakeholders will be challenging to achieve in a digital ecosystem. Infrastructure costs often dwarf other budgets and drive decisions without much consultation (either internally or externally). Thus, it takes effort and commitment to achieve. Community agency must be championed at all echelons of the institution. Those in active contact with community stakeholders need support, and responsive change must be a reality, not a vague promise. Community activity should seek to provide opportunities for self-expression and personal development and to steer our work actively.

Community action groups/panels can be an effective way to diversify the voices that steer our work, drawing together those who want to help shape the direction of plans and activities. These should comprise people of diverse ages, backgrounds and interests.

A call to action

The transition from thought to action is always fraught with unforeseen obstacles. This is normal. I suggest using the BVI Model and its Framework (www.bvimodel.org) to focus on objectives and tasks as the inevitable obstacles are traversed. Keep the task record alive and active with regular discussion and sharing of experience with the stakeholders. Use SMART objectives to remain focused on what is achievable. Measure success against meaningful indicators.

Avoid the superficial bright lights of technologies that appear to offer user involvement. Social media is no panacea. Concentrate on embracing people’s knowledge and creativity as the key to user engagement and serious involvement in doable activities. Participation by the public is critical to becoming an activist and responsive place to work.

When it is done well, the institution integrates this mode of participatory engagement into its soul, resulting in it resonating far more profoundly than superficial consumption. Especially in the face of our attention economy, it is crucial to have a shared understanding of our core values and to deliver them hand in hand with your community.

Adapting to evidence-based decision-making

We must move away from a common managerial practice of ‘doing–knowing’ where decision-making is done without knowing enough and then either later justified or only learning once the consequences have materialised. Managers can tend to substitute for the best evidence: obsolete ideas, anecdotal experience, specialist knowledge, hype, ideology, and copying top sector performers without much consideration.

At the heart of evidence-based approaches for improved organisational performance is the commitment of leaders to apply the best evidence to support decision-making. Leaders set aside conventional wisdom in favour of a relentless commitment to gathering the most useful and actionable facts and data to make more informed decisions. Evidence-based management is a humbling experience for leaders when it positions them to admit what they do not know and to work with their team to find the means of gathering that information. Evidence-based management is naturally team-oriented and inclusive, with little room for the know-it-all or an exclusively top-down leadership style. Good managers act on the best information available while questioning what they know.

By bringing innovation and engagement to the strategic focus more centrally, it also becomes possible to treat the organisation as an organic, growing work in progress that seeks to continuously improve, much like a garden. Encouraging trial activities, piloting in the sandbox and enabling experimentation in close collaboration with the stakeholder communities will develop the internal knowledge base and skills.

Reward the learning gained from experience; record it, even in failed ideas. Appreciate that negative impacts can happen and are an opportunity to do better. In these ways, the knowledge base increases and the organisation can benefit from evidence-based management, with a more enlightened staff and a clearer vision of strategic direction.

Evidence-based management is not about piling up random, meaningless data, hoping that the sheer volume of numeric data will produce the desired answer. Metrics for metrics’ sake is a particular problem that can occur if the evidence or impact agenda is applied without clarity of purpose. Uncritical emulation and casual benchmarking are similar problems, with cherry-picking of data. In such cases, decision-makers rely on the metrics of perceived high performers in their sector. They make decisions that emulate perceived peers without understanding the contexts or strategic differences that may have driven the top performers. This is the classic comparison of oranges and apples.

There is also a tendency for managers to choose comfortable metrics. Targets are set to be easily achievable because who wants to miss a target? However, they also will not stretch the organisation to grow or develop. Comfortable metrics do not seek to know anything that might challenge the status quo. Change is a threat (probably because it has been in the past), making it hard to innovate or take any risks. Digital innovation can be very challenging for a deeply embedded culture where there is a conservatism born out of fear of failure, criticism or mistakes. In such circumstances, the perfect often becomes the enemy of the good, stifling the development of new ways of working. Fear of failing to reach an artificially set performance metric, with no intent to learn from the data gathered, will keep such a negative culture alive and kicking.

Any performance metric that does not produce an actionable response is usually pointless.

Celebrate success and develop collective excellence

Strategic leadership founded on evidence-based management with robust feedback loops is very desirable. All public-facing activities benefit from advanced, data-strong evaluations of their digital visitors and from evidence-led decision-making to inform strategic decisions and prioritisation. Collaborating with community stakeholders in decision-making and fully involving them in the organisation shares agency and leads to a better understanding of the most impactful changes. Celebrate together the successes and appreciate the collective excellence of all involved to learn, develop and foster a sense of ownership in our future direction.

Broadening the base of influence and decision-making to be inclusive of the whole organisation and bringing in the opinions of external stakeholders can be hard to accept. Facts, evidence and impact data are great levellers of hierarchy. If the factual data available is relevant to a decision, then all data is equal, wherever it originates in the team. Thus, leadership’s subjective opinion has lesser force. Replacing intuition with data as the paramount model of decision-making changes the power dynamic that would have previously privileged seniority, authority, reputation and other power-based factors.

Share Success

Successful digital change, with the services and products that they generate, is rarely the work of lone champions or geniuses. However, this is how we often tell these stories. It is vital to respect and celebrate the roles of everyone in the teams and communities that develop ideas and bring them to fruition. Making any digital initiative work requires many people's coordinated actions and commitment. Sharing success and recognising their accomplishments will generate increased commitment if they feel ownership.

Note

This content is an edited extract from Simon Tanner's book: Delivering Impact with Digital Resources: Planning your Strategy in the Attention Economy.