Introducing our new digital strategy playbook

At our DigiNext conference in September, we launched a new beta product: our digital strategy playbook. It’s a conversation guide to help you facilitate open, honest and focused conversations across your team about digital strategy. This resource grew out of our earlier thinking on ‘why we don’t share digital strategy templates’. The short answer is, every organisation needs to do some of their own thinking on this topic. Otherwise you could end up with a strategy that contains irrelevant or unattainable goals.

Here are some of the principles behind our new playbook:

Evolution, not transformation

We’ve always framed digital change as ‘evolution’ not ‘transformation’. That is a very deliberate choice. ‘Transformation’ often gets people thinking about one-off, big budget change processes. In reality, most organisations will need to go through multiple cycles of digital change, continually improving over time. This may sound intimidating, but it also means that there is no bad place to start for digital change – you can start changing and optimising your organisation right here, right now.

Optimistic realism

This leads on to a mindset that I call being an optimistic realist. This means that we are realistic and honest about where things are at just now. We don’t kid ourselves. In some areas, important work might be stuck, and we might be well behind our peers. But we’re optimists, too. We recognise that with ambition and persistence we can make things better. A better digital organisation is possible, and we have the capability to get there.

Conversations, not speculation: strategy is a team sport

We’ve framed this resource as a ‘playbook’ because we believe in the wisdom of the room. Organisations that are in a good place with digital strategy spend time and energy getting their whole team committed and involved. Our playbook is designed to help people right across organisations play a meaningful part in conversations about digital, even if they don’t have a technical background. This should then lead to digital goals and plans that are understood and owned by your whole team.

Solid grounding as a springboard

You’ll see that most of the prompts in the playbook are designed to help you question and reflect on your current digital capability. This is important because many strategies fail when they misrepresent the organisation’s current situation or culture. Making assumptions or missing important stuff means your strategy will probably lead you in the wrong direction. A good strategy uses a solid, tested baseline as a springboard to jump forward.

The future is open (and depends on your context)

One key reason that we’ve avoided templates or rigid guides is that the future is open and constantly evolving, especially when it comes to digital. The most important investments or time commitments for your organisation will be different depending on which challenges you are trying to meet. A strategy is about agreeing some medium-term staging posts to guide your shared efforts in the coming months or years. So our playbook gives you questions and prompts to help you find those waypoints, rather than steering you towards assumptions.

How might you use this playbook in practice?

We’ve developed the playbook as a set of conversation prompts across 5 broad digital themes. It’s a PDF that you could print out or share as a slide deck. Ideally you should convene these conversations in-person, but online could also work.

We suggest that you don’t try to cover every thematic area in one session, but work on one or two each time. Most of your discussion and reflection will be an honest assessment of where you are now – the good, the bad and the ugly. Then you can distil this down into some key next steps and priorities for each area.

For most organisations, you may end up spotting more challenges and blockers than you can tackle in one strategy cycle. That’s OK! You can build a longlist of challenges and then prioritise.

You can also use the playbook in tandem with our digital checkup service which will give you a more detailed picture of your current digital capability.

Finally, a reminder that this playbook is a beta resource. That means we’re keen to hear how people get on with it. Get in touch and share your experiences, good, bad or ugly.