Building digital capabilities within a culture of devolved decision making

In this post I’m exploring what the role of a digital, data or technology function could be in a charity which has a culture and structure based on local autonomy, devolved decision-making and a small core which seeks always to support and empower, rather than dictate or oversee.

My thoughts on this come from some work I did with Volunteering Matters in 2021 to understand where they were with digital and technology, and what they should do next. The challenge I faced (and it was a great challenge) was that my go-to recommendations just wouldn’t have been right for this organisation.

My go-to way of thinking about the role of a digital function

I spent 18 years in one organisation. The model I developed there will be very familiar to many (especially those who’ve been through the last decade+ in the charity digital world!).

The journey went something like this:

1. Learn as much as you can about what ‘good’ looks like in digital. Look at GDS. Enviously follow the great stuff being done by big digital teams in big charities. Try to understand what ‘multidiscipinary team’ means in a much smaller context.
2. Secure investment, design some new roles, try some stuff out — let’s do user research, let’s try to think about product management rather than project management, let’s work out what’s best from Agile methodologies and grapple with where it bumps up against traditional governance and management…
3. Have some success. Show what good content design or product development can deliver. Build stronger relationships with some colleagues across the organisation. Work in partnership with them bringing digital expertise together with subject matter expertise to achieve some great things. Shift understanding of digital at a leadership level.

I’m really proud of what we achieved at NCVO and what the current team continues to achieve.

Looking back, there are some assumptions underpinning the approach I took at NCVO. These are that:

• There are developing/developed professions within digital and ‘right’ or ‘best’ ways of doing things. Hiring people that know (or can learn) how to do these things is the best way to have a greater impact.
• A core part of digital practice is working in partnership with colleagues delivering services. Their understanding of users’ needs and the context in which they’re working is just as critical to achieving impact. But they have busy roles and it’s most effective and more fulfilling for them to work in partnership with digital ‘experts’.

This worked in an organisation of 80–100 staff, primarily (back then!) co-located in one office. It worked because, despite all the usual concerns in an organisation of that size about working in silos, we were increasingly planning well together as one organisation, with a healthy debate about priorities and where we invested our time and resource.

Thinking differently

My first instinct of building up a stronger core team wasn’t going to land with Volunteering Matters.

The Volunteering Matters strategy is:

We bring people together to overcome society’s most complex issues, building stronger communities through the power of volunteering.

We work with local communities, turning local knowledge and energy into action and progress. And because we’re a national charity, we do this at scale.

They take a place-based approach. They aim to be embedded in communities, working alongside people and partners there. They create spaces and opportunities for people to decide what change they want to make and how to make it.

This plays out in their organisational design and culture through a continual focus on and reflection on decision making. Their aspiration is for decisions to be made by those best placed to make them — this is not just about paid members of staff, it’s also about the communities they work within and alongside. Their approach is to create frameworks to guide people to do things well, and by their values, but to create enough freedom for people to find a way that works for them in their context. For them, success means solutions and projects emerging from and being developed by the community.

So, in this context, when it comes to building digital, data and tech capabilities, the starting point needed to be:

how can we empower teams to build their confidence and knowledge, improve their practice, take ownership and lead?

And therefore, what is needed from a core?

Four roles of a core function

In this context, I think there are four roles of a core function.

1. Expertise and guidance

Sometimes there are decisions which require some specialist expertise.

For example:

• What technology should we use to build something?
• How do we make sure this data is secure?

It’s not always possible to have all the expertise in-house, but someone needs to build the networks and connections to access expertise.

2. Support and encouragement

If the goal is for teams to have greater confidence and knowledge, then that needs really good support and continual encouragement.

This can take the form of:

• Training
• Internal communications
• 121 support, coaching or advice

Doing this really well is more resource intensive than growing a specialist function to take the lead. Training takes time to design well and time to deliver. Taking someone through a process rather than fixing it quickly yourself — for example, helping someone to understand why a report isn’t showing them what they want or expect, supporting them to fix it themselves and feel confident to tackle similar issues in the future — takes time.

Supporting others while always having a focus on building their confidence requires a mindset shift for many, especially when they feel that they have too much to do and need to deliver results quickly.

3. Community building

Part of the answer to the challenge above is to build peer learning and communities so that as people learn and grow in confidence, they support each other. Building and nurturing communities is an art form in itself. It includes

• Creating and maintaining a welcoming space
• Encouraging sharing and participation
• Connecting people for peer support
• Sharing helpful and interesting content and modelling how to do that
• Organising learning and sharing events

4. Co-ordination

In an organisation where teams have freedom to find their own solutions, there’s also occasionally a need for co-ordination. For example, in the Volunteering Matters context:

• to establish data standards
• to design across and with multiple self-managed teams to tackle big opportunities that cut across the organisation’s work.

A flexible approach

There were six priority areas for development of digital and technology at Volunteering Matters. The role of the core would need to be different for different priorities. In some cases, far more central leadership and support was required. In others, more power could be distributed. The four main roles of the core would need to be dialled up or down depending on the context.

Getting the right approach for the right context is important. There is therefore one final overarching role for the core:

to continually reflect and ensure that the right balance is struck between activity being core-led and locally-led

What does good look like?

How could we know if the core function was working well? I thought about this in terms of how it should feel for teams around the country.

If a core is effective, other teams should feel that:

• They have someone to turn to when they hit a problem
• They are supported to learn new skills and to experiment
• What they’ve learned and done is of interest and important to others
• They are supported and encouraged to experiment, and to be aware of any risks that they’re expected to manage (‘good enough for now, safe enough to try’)
• They understand what the organisation is prioritising and why

If you are building digital, data and design capabilities in organisations with a similar culture and approach, it would be great to hear from you.

About me

I work with charities and social sector organisations to tackle tricky problems, supporting groups to understand where they want to get to, and how to get there. I like to work with curious, caring, and ambitious people, who value working in the open, sharing and collaborating.

Read more about my values and ways of working in my user manual for Megan.

You can get in touch at megan@megangray.consulting, LinkedIn or on twitter at @meggriffithgray.