The National Lottery Heritage Fund: aiming to make impactful grants into a society that is pervasively digital.
studies the shift is enormous. People in Britain went from spending zero minutes a day interacting with online services in the 1990s to many hours a day on average. It’s a shift of behaviour change that’s transformed how people work, how they play, even how they meet and get married. Every grant a funder makes now has to be aware of digital implications, and every choice needs to be informed by an under- standing of how digital has shifted behaviours, opportunities and risks. Perhaps the most tricky thing for funders to adapt to is the idea that a funding application that comes in that contains zero digital terms or concepts is still being made into a digital society, and our colleagues need to be able to see what’s missing, not just what’s present.” Before leaving the Big Lottery Fund, Tom was responsible for the research, design and initial delivery of its dedicated £15m Digital Fund.
“Of course the major part of the Digital Fund was to help ensure that Britain’s civil society sector has within it great organisations that really know how to use digital approaches and tools to create significant impact. We chose to focus on both pre-existing organisations that needed to learn how to adapt, and brand new organisations that were ‘born digital’ because it seems clear that the UK is going to need both in the decades ahead. “However, to some extent the Digital Fund was a change programme for that Funder itself. It was an excuse to expose many grant-making colleagues to digital issues and decisions for the first time, and to give a range of people practical experience of making choices about highly
22 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
digital projects. In the long-run, there doesn’t need to be a permanent digital fund at that funder. What is needed is individual grant-makers who have the skills and knowledge to understand how some digitally enabled projects are vital and worth supporting in the long-run, even though they might not look at all like traditional projects that would tradition- ally attract grant money.”
The role of digital in the leadership team
Tom sees the current moment in public institutions as a transitional one, a mo- ment between two phases rather than an era in its own right.
“Digital change and transformation in institutions is often being led by people like myself, with job titles like ‘digital transfor- mation lead’ or similar, reporting (as I do) directly to the CEO of whatever organisation we’re considering. However, despite being a recent and positive innovation – putting digital on the top team – this is not a permanent state or a permanent role. Instead it reflects the fact that institutions have to pass through a period when the skills which senior leaders need are changing faster than those leadership teams themselves are turning over. “Today we expect that all senior leaders can type and use a computer competently. These weren’t skills we expected our top team members to have in the past, but they’re now so unremarkable that they barely merit inclusion on a list of essential skills for leaders.
“There’s now a set of key digital skills that will soon be held by virtually everyone on a top management team of virtually any
organisation of any size. These skills will include an understanding of what digital tools can do and what they can’t do, what sorts of staff you need to employ to make use of them, and what sorts of project management and leadership approaches are required to stop it all blowing up. But it’s going to be a transition period of perhaps ten to 30 years to get most organisations there, so in the meantime we need a range of stopgap interventions. One such intervention is appointing senior digital specialists who sit on senior teams for maybe the next five years but who then eventually disappear and see their roles phased out. It also looks like very intensive coaching and prac- tical skills experience, which only the more open-minded senior leaders will embrace with enthusiasm.” Ultimately, Tom is optimistic about digital change in public institutions. “I think that the single most important thing that the digital revolution has brought to such organisations is actually not the tech itself, but an epochal mindset change in favour of the public. It used to be that the top aspiration for a public servant was to be a sort of philosopher king, the smartest person in the room. I think the ideal of public servants has really been shifting recently, and increasingly the ideal is now to be the most human, the most responsive, the most willing to admit mistakes and learn from mistakes, all in the pursuit of great services for users. If it takes a bunch of boxes filled with circuits to bring about this very values-based change, I can live with that.” IP
April-May 2019
Interview Steinberg
pp20-22.indd 6
25/04/2019 12:48
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
