We need to talk about technology and fear.

It’s a real shame, because this fear is unnecessary, and it’s holding many organisations back from making the most of the technology tools that are available. Enormous value could be created if we could overcome it.

A particular focus of my work for the last 12 years or so has been the development of digital literacy for myself and those around me, and this offers some pointers to overcoming fear. The term is used a lot, along with more or less identical terms such as digital capability, digital fluency or digital mindset. But what does it actually mean?

One of the most comprehensive definitions was offered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in its information paper, Global Framework of Reference on Digital Literacy Skills:

“The ability to access, manage, understand, integrate, communicate, evaluate and create information safely and appropriately through digital technologies for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship. It includes competences that are variously referred to as computer literacy, ICT literacy, information literacy and media literacy.”

What should be clear from this is that digital literacy is not the ability to use certain software tools (as important though this may be), rather the way we embed digital tools into our practice and our life.

It also does not mean using every available piece of software at every opportunity – it’s more about thoughtful decision-making about which particular technology to use and how. As the information paper also emphasises, these skills are critical to the future success of individuals, organisations and nations. As well as thinking about what digital literacy is, it is helpful to understand the process by which digital literacy develops.

Access and awareness are prerequisites for developing your digital literacy, followed by learning specific skills (how to carry out tasks). These skills can then be incorporated into your practice, helping you achieve your goals in your work and life.

Developing your practices then encourages you to think of yourself as someone who is good with technology, which, in turn, gives you the confidence to further develop your practices and learn more skills. In this way you can move both ‘up’ and ‘down’ the pyramid.

To take a very simple example, you may decide that, like most of us, you need to get better at working without distractions (practice) and to do this you want to turn off email alerts, perhaps setting an exception for your boss and other key stakeholders.

To achieve this, you need to find out how to change your email alerts to be more specific and learn the skill of doing so. You can then apply this to your practice and improve your control over distractions.

If you do this sort of thing often enough you may start to see yourself as being good with technology, or at least someone who knows how to find things out. This change in identity encourages you to look for other ways you can use technology to achieve your goals, and look for other practices you can improve and skills you can learn. Over time, this can be transformational and reduces fear.

All of this may sound obvious but, in my experience, almost all initiatives about digital literacy operate at the level of skills and occasionally practices. That will limit their impact.

So if you and your team want to move beyond these basics and overcome this fear, where is a good place to start? My answer will depend on the situation and likely benefits, but the most common answer I give is – data. As we are constantly reminded, data is growing, it has fuelled incredible business success for many organisations already, and it is only going to be become more critical going forward that an organisation can manage and exploit its data well. The business case for investing in data is overwhelming.

If it’s so obvious, what’s the problem? Why isn’t every organisation seeing huge benefits from use of data? The problem is certainly not lack of tools. There are now readily available tools which have breath-taking capabilities – our old friend Excel can do more than ever, and PowerBI offers easy ways to visualise and analyse vast data sets. There are low code/no code tools like Alteryx and Tableau which can do almost anything with data, and programming tools like Python and R which can do the rest, limited only by what you can think of.

The fundamental problem, I think, is a lack of confidence and skills for people to make best use of these tools. Of course, there may well be organisational issues too around quality of and access to data, but a group of people sufficiently skilled and motivated will usually work out solutions to these.

It is not as if the tools are especially difficult to use, or require years of training before you can get started. They have been designed to be user-friendly and I believe that the vast majority of people in most organisations are perfectly capable of using them if given a bit of training and support. Of course, full mastery does take years, but significant benefits will be seen long before that.

We are back to that confidence issue, though. As long as they believe it’s very difficult to use these tools, a mental block will stay in place and organisational benefits will not be gained.

So how to break this block? When I’m talking to organisations about this, I usually advise to start simple, start small and start where the benefits will be seen quickly. For data, that usually means starting with Excel, a tool used by millions every day, but only to a small fraction of its capabilities.

Something as simple as improving Excel skills can lead to change happening at the level of identity. We have seen extraordinary results from gradually learning new skills – quick increases in capability, productivity and confidence. And people wanting to know what is next, really getting started on their data journey.

Conversely, I am still astonished at the number of professionals I hear saying things like “I’m not very good with technology”, which in the modern world is an incredibly self-limiting belief.

Changing these beliefs doesn’t mean a lot with introspection; what it means is trying out some new things and then reflecting on whether it changes the way you think about yourself. This is not a quick fix, but over time the results can be very powerful.

So, ask yourself a question – what’s my experience of developing digital literacy? Whether it has gone well or badly? If my future success relies on great use of data, how am I and my organisation going to get started building the necessary skills, or continue down that path if you already have? What is my next step forward?

Author: Daniel Clark. Head of Technology Professional Development w BPP School of Technology

Article published in FOCUS ON Business magazine March-April 2020 issue