What is Digital Fluency? (Hint: we've been thinking about digital wrong)

To lead in a digital world, we need more than catchphrases and buzzwords. We must become truly fluent in the language of digital business by increasing our Digital Fluency across five pillars: thinking, data, business models, tools, and skills.

Digital technologies are transforming the world. To stay successful, businesses must test new, exponential ways of thinking and working while keeping the lights on with traditional, incremental business functions.?

How can we balance old with new and choose the path to modernization that's right for us??

Digital Fluency includes words, culture, ways of thinking, and a lot of practice. Similarly, effective digital strategies require more than a cursory knowledge of tech terms—they must bridge the gaps between technological and human elements of change. We must decode the technical stuff to help business leaders understand their tech counterparts. And we must help IT leaders and developers understand the changing world their business counterparts are facing by connecting the dots between emerging technologies and their impact on markets and organizations.

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Five Pillars of Digital Fluency

Thinking

The mental models of the last century won't allow us to see the future clearly.

New technologies require new ways of thinking.

Before we can learn new ways of thinking, we must first unlearn some of our old ways. Think of this as freeing up space on your hard drive to make room for new files and applications.

For example, when invented around 1900, people had no frame of reference for 'automobiles.' They became known as 'horseless carriages' because when people needed transportation, they thought of horses. So, for a while, we had to view the future through the lens of the past until people eventually stopped framing transport with horses, whether physically present or notable in their absence.

This is 'unlearning': before a new way of doing things with advanced technology can be realized, we usually need time to identify and let go of existing mindsets and practices.

As we upgrade our technology, we must also upgrade our thinking.

More, better, faster?

Advanced technologies may not look impressive until our thinking catches up with their potential. The language of "more, better, faster" lets us know when we are approaching technology with a limiting, analog mindset and indicates that we need to raise the minimum level of fluency to see what's possible.

For example, early users thought of the internet as an incremental improvement on analog ways of doing things: more information (online newspapers), a better way to promote products (banner advertisements), and a faster postal system (e-mail).?

Most people couldn't foresee what the internet makes possible today (like social networks, the metaverse, remote robotic surgery, etc.) until a critical mass of people became fluent and discovered new ways of thinking.

Data

To create digital value, we must understand how data is structured and how it moves from system to system. Otherwise, we can't know if we can monetize it and if doing so would be ethical.

To do this, we must examine the three stages of the data supply chain:

1. Disclosure, whether by a person or a sensor or a system;
2. Manipulation, where we process data and analyze it in some way; and
3. Use (consumption), where stakeholders use data or feed it back to users as insights.

At each phase, critical implications and handoffs have to happen that ensure that ethics are preserved, efficiencies occur, and the data is still accurate.

Digital thinkers ask questions about data, such as:?

• What data exists or could exist in our ecosystem??
• How could datasets connect to create new value??
• How are we managing informed consent and ensuring our data use doesn't harm our partners or customers?

Business Models

Digital business models and value propositions require new thinking about where value is created—or co-created—and how it's delivered.

Assets & Things

This model asks the question, "what are our assets and how do we best protect and leverage them?" That might be tangible assets like real estate and money or products a company manufactures.

People & Services

This model asks, "how do we engage the best talent and deliver the best experiences?" Customers, employees, and partners are the primary creators of value.?

Ideas & Technologies

This model asks, "how do we create and share intellectual property? How do we build exponential value with machines and data?"

For example, tech companies like Nvidia and Intel create something replicable and protectable like a patent, a piece of hardware, or an algorithm that they can use over and over again.

Ideas and technologies have an exponential return because they've created something evergreen that can be used repeatedly.

Network & Connections

This model asks, "how do we enable and amplify the exchange of value between parties?"

eBay, Amazon Marketplace, and Apple's app store are great examples. They bring together social networks and engage in matchmaking activities.?

While building these networks takes a very long time, they have a significant degree of stickiness and a low cost of doing business relative to the total value.

Tools

Tools are another vital part of the conversation. We need specialized tools for digital value creation. Selecting the best ones is not as easy as it might seem because tools embody ways of thinking, including bias towards certain ways of working and creating value. For each business area, digital tool sets can connect past and future mindsets.?

A well-designed pilot of a new tool can spark new thinking and be a way to introduce tomorrow's exponential mindset into an organization at the same time as solving today's incremental problem.

Stacks

It can be helpful to think of tools organized into stacks—collections of components that solve problems for a business function. Examples of common stacks include finance, [software] development operations, marketing, and collaboration.

Skills

Digital transformation requires learning and developing entirely new skills.

Technical Skills

Many technical skills are based on software that is updated annually, monthly, or even daily. This rate of change requires us to update our technical skills regularly; this is why many software platforms offer on-demand 'universities' for their products' features.

Intellectual skills

Developing the ability to identify new opportunities rapidly and to create decision principles that enable agility to co-exist with alignment.

Interpersonal skills

The ways we interact are changing with the digital age. New norms are needed for distributed teams, expressing emotion in written form, and video and online document etiquette.

Leadership skills

As leaders, we must upgrade our ability to work quickly in real time. To be more agile, we need to learn to share our power in new ways—including updating old habits around control, professionalism, and perfection.

Together, these five pillars can increase the Digital Fluency of an organization and allow the creation of exciting new types of value.?

What's the first pillar you're focusing on?

Read more on the Causeit digitalfluency.guide, attend a free event, or chat with us to co-create your Digital Fluency journey.