The value and danger of digital confidence

Lots of things are emerging from the hidden labour research that I'm currently doing, not least the importance (and impact) of digital confidence - more specifically, how unevenly it's understood, and how much invisible work that misunderstanding generates.

Digital confidence can cause problems in two main ways. A lack of digital confidence leads people to shy away from anything perceived as technical and defer to specialist colleagues, which is the point when unexpected work has a habit of appearing. But misplaced digital confidence is, if anything, more damaging because then digital work gets commissioned or engaged with without any real understanding of what it actually involves.

But what does 'digital confidence' involve? Existing frameworks like the European Commission's digital competence framework DigComp and Jisc's Digital Capabilities Framework provide useful reference points, but they are primarily skills-oriented.

I think a useful working definition of digital confidence in a cultural organisation comprises two distinct characteristics.

The first I'd call digital fluency, which is the ability to understand technical concepts, explain them appropriately, and comfortably work with tools as needed. This is what I think most people mean when they say 'digital confidence', and it's what existing frameworks like the Jisc framework encompass reasonably well.

The second is less regularly talked about, and that's a digital mindset. This is thinking grounded in user needs rather than organisational assumptions, being comfortable with uncertainty rather than demanding fixed answers, and an orientation toward iterative working rather than seeing delivery as an end point to be ticked off and moved on from. It's where I've observed the cultural sector is often weakest and is where, it turns out, an awful lot of hidden work stems from.

Where fluency is about understanding and communicating, mindset is about how you actually work.

When someone is strong in both of these areas, the difference is visible and (and this is perhaps stating the obvious) really useful. They can talk to a board about digital investment without either oversimplifying or disappearing into the weeds with technical detail. When a project hits uncertainty (which it will) they don't demand false certainty or push for premature decisions. They create the conditions for iterative, user-centred work to happen, and they help people around them, who might otherwise find it uncomfortable, to understand why it works.

The issue is when someone is at a different level across these two areas.

That might be someone who feels uncertain with technological concepts or doesn't have the confidence to try to use tools, but has a high level of user-centred behaviour - for example they're interested in user needs, motivations, and frustrations (even if they don't use this language), and are naturally iterative and reflective in their approach. These people need support and opportunities to grow their comfort zone. I suspect there are a large number of these 'high potential' individuals within the cultural sector.

More dangerous is the person who has a high degree of literacy and confidence, but whose 'digital mindset' is at a much lower level. Based on the hidden labour work I'm doing it is often these people who can cause some of the most difficult-to-resolve types of hidden work. They can speak the language of digital, and will have opinions about platforms and outputs, but at the same time they hold a fundamentally delivery-oriented mindset. This means that they demand certainty, and things like fixed, upfront specifications, and they will be unfamiliar with user-centred practice, sceptical of it, or both. In turn this consistently generates what I'm calling 'hidden translation labour' for the digital practitioners working beneath them, that's the (usually unacknowledged) work of converting an iterative, uncertain, user-centred process into something that looks like the tidy project that their manager expects.

Last year's Beyond the Promise report into digital failure found exactly these characteristics showing up in lots of failure situations. When someone treats a go-live as the ultimate goal and the moment the work is finished, then the consequences are pretty predictable - usually an expectation of certainty that can't be met, and little appetite for understanding users before a project gets underway. Those are the conditions that all but guarantee a project will disappoint, if not fail outright.

What this points to, I think, is that the cultural sector's digital confidence problem isn't primarily a skills gap. It's actually a question of disposition - partly to do with how people think about digital work, but also how comfortable they are with the uncertainty inherent to it.

And this is genuinely difficult because the cultural sector is already precarious, and uncertainty is rarely welcome in the operational and administrative conversations where a lot of digital work exists.

Asking people to sit comfortably with not-knowing, in organisations that are often under financial pressure and accountable to boards who want answers, is a really difficult thing. This 'disposition gap' exists in a wider context that actively discourages the behaviours that would close it, but I don't think that is a good enough reason to just accept it - and the research I'm doing shows that it is causing real, and significant issues.

This gap also seems to sit disproportionately at the top of organisations, among people who are probably already confident enough in their work more generally that they're unlikely to seek out help. This is one of the parts of this issue that I'm most interested in (and most uncertain about how to address at present). I'll be returning to it as the hidden labour research develops, alongside a simple diagnostic scale that I'm working on to help individuals and teams map where they sit across these two dimensions.

If you're seeing versions of this issue in your own organisation, I'd be curious to hear from you.