It’s not enough to adapt to a new tech-driven world; you have to become good at adapting constantly. Who has that job at your organization?
After spending six months deeply studying a large, established international NGO, I was ready to give them my recommendations about how to become more powerful. Suggestion number one: hire a senior executive whose job is to think about using technology more effectively. Meanwhile, 3,000 miles away, my good friend Dirk Slater had just finished his own six-month study of a very different international NGO — and had come to essentially the identical conclusion.
Next up on my project list, another international NGO which is struggling with using tech tools to advance their mission, with nobody thinking about it every day. What’s going on here?
It’s cliche to say “the world is changing”, but, well… it is. More importantly, the pace of the change is itself changing. It’s speeding up. The famous inventor Ray Kurzweil, now Director of Engineering at Google, put it this way: “Technology, like the evolution of life-forms that spawned it, is inherently an accelerating process.”
What does that have to do with running your organization today and next week? It means that it’s not enough to adapt to a new tech-driven world; you have to become good at constantly adapting.
Let’s make this real, with some concrete examples of some tools nearly any organization uses to communicate every day. Start with the realization that what you as an NGO manager think of as “new technology” is probably not new at all.
A new technology is considered to have “matured” when it makes the leap from being used only by early adopters to being used by about 40% of households. It took personal computers almost 15 years to make that leap, the Internet only about five, and social media networks less than three years. The hottest new team collaboration tool, Slack, didn’t even exist 2 1/2 years ago but now has more than 2 million users a day, and workers all over the place are clamoring to get on board. By the time the Executive Director has heard about a thing, the staff have probably already gotten tired of wondering if the organization will ever try it out.
Here’s why you care: if you stand still while all this evolution is happening, your staff will simply go around you and use the new tools anyway. At the organization I studied, different teams had adopted three different kinds of project-management software, which created an inefficient mess when people needed to work across teams. In Dirk’s study people were using three different file-sharing tools, all to work around limits of the fourth official tool supported by the home office. Staff had to rely on personal knowledge and oral tradition to know where to even begin looking for a file they needed.
There are all sorts of costs here. There’s the inefficiency of so many competing tools, as just described. There’s also the proliferation of new information security holes — nearly always part of a new product — that you don’t even know about. And there’s the cost of adopting tools that are so difficult to maintain that they end up stealing time from your staff’s work instead of accelerating it. But less obviously, there is the risk of missing something really great that could help your organization better carry out it’s mission.
The presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders has had huge success organizing young activists with new text messaging tools, replacing traditional phone calls. The ACLU of Missouri took on the problem of capturing evidence of police misconduct with their “Mobile Justice” app, which automatically sends video of a police interaction to the agency before it can be confiscated. There is a constant stream of other opportunities like that to advance your mission, whether it’s with faster staff communication, cheaper ways to store and publish your data, or new techniques for reaching your stakeholders. How will you be aware of your steadily increasing opportunities unless someone is focused on watching for them?
You might call this person a Chief Technical Officer (CTO), or not. People use that title to mean different things . You usually find someone with that on their business card at larger organizations; I’ll go out on a limb and say if you’ve got more than, say, 50 staff, yes you should probably have someone called a CTO. But the important thing is not the title, it’s the job.
What I’m talking about here is a decision-maker who thoroughly understands the mission and strategy of the organization, is in constant touch with what the staff needs, and keeps aware of how technological tools are being used effectively by other organizations. They don’t need to know how to write code, but they do need to be the sort of person who enjoys reading BusinessWeek’s “What is Code?“.
If you’re a large NGO like the Sierra Club in the U.S. with a staff of 600, you can have a full-time Chief Innovation Officer. If you’re an up-and-coming campaigning group like SumOfUs, with a few dozen staff, you might have both a software development chief and also a technology-minded campaign director taking the lead. If you’re a scrappy 5-person shop like Other98, it’s probably the executive director or another senior leader who needs to think about the technology horizon, or more likely bring in a circuit rider from time to time to give an outside perspective.
Whoever you decide to have thinking these thoughts, remember that it’s a job for a strategist, not necessarily a technologist. The successful examples prove the point: Greenpeace didn’t invent the technology of inflatable motorboats and handheld videocameras, they just invented a new strategy for using them to generate worldwide media attention. Charity:water didn’t invent online donations or crowdfunding, but they are wildly successful at motivating their supporters to run fundraising campaigns for the organization using those tools.
So, what opportunities to supercharge your mission are waiting out there? And who on your team is going to find them?
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