Conversations with digital folks: October edition

Here's a round-up from the fourth session (third month) of the monthly conversations for people doing digital work in and around cultural organisations.

It was a small group this month, which made for a good conversation. As ever we tried to cover too much in an hour because digital is a lot.

Biggest challenges

We started by hearing about each person’s biggest current challenge, and a few themes came up more than once.

• Shared definitions. Getting people to mean the same thing when they say things like “technology”, “digital” or “product”, this issue seems particularly present in conversations with senior stakeholders. The same issue seems to be cropping up in and around a lot of my own client work at the moment.
• Translation between teams. Getting, for example, content and curatorial colleagues and digital colleagues to talk to each other, when they might come at the idea (and definition) of engagement from potentially very different directions.
• Too much at once. Having to move quickly from one thing to the next, and hoping that the quick decisions you have to make turn out to be good ones.
• The essential but unseen wraparound. Things like hosting, data protection and the bureaucracy around them take a large proportion of the time on any project, and people rarely account for it (see: hidden work).
• The leadership gap. There is still a significant gap between what leaders assume digital work involves and what it actually takes to deliver it. There was some optimism that colleagues in other departments are getting more digitally literate, but the incentive for senior leaders to catch up still feels fairly weak and inconsistent.

What made the best recent work good

After talking about challenges we switched to discuss the best thing we had worked on recently, and what made it so good.

Almost everything people described came down to having space (either time, money or trust). One example was a project that finally got the funding to do an idea properly, though with the recognition that this kind of funding is rare (and unlikely to be repeated). Another was a podcast with a famous host, with enough lead time to do it properly, and a team that really understood the medium. A third was a team trusted to make significant changes without having to drag every decision through an onerous, bureaucratic process.

Agility

The group voted to spend the last part of the session discussing agility (in every possible way you could choose to interpret that term), and a few things stood out.

• “Agile” in many organisations seems to often actually mean “flexible” or “willing to compromise”. That is a good thing, but it isn’t the same, really, as agile, and nobody spends the time defining what they actually mean (linking back to the point above).
• Things often start out as iterative and then plateau.
• Procurement, finance and legal structures are set up for a fully scoped project. Very few contracts anticipate an iterative one, so for agile work to be able to happen more regularly it needs potentially quite significant change in parts of the organisation that may not be open to it.
• Performing arts organisations are comfortable with devised work and scratch performances, yet the bar for digital to count as “finished enough” is much higher.

GEO and AI answer engines

We had a (very) short conversation about GEO. One organisation has seen a sharp drop in traffic against some of the metrics it was funded on. There was a suggestion that deeper, more specialist content may now be the thing to focus on.

I’d add that email is still under-used as an owned channel, and that niche audiences can be served with the depth and expertise cultural organisations already hold.

How we felt at the end

I always close these sessions by asking everyone for one word on how they’re feeling. This month’s answers included better, positive, heard, challenged and curious

I’ll take that as a decent outcome for an hour at the end of a Monday. “Heard” in particular is what I hope these sessions offer people, a small pocket of time with other folks who are facing similar challenges in different contexts.

The next session will be in the week of 14 December, with another in January. Sign up to the newsletter to get an invite.