Lawrie Phipps and Donna Lanclose standing in front of a screen. The Screens reads: "Niether (effective) leadership; nor (effective) social media is a popularity contest"

Thinking Differently about Digital Leadership

Donna Lanclos and Lawrie Phipps

It’s been seven years since we started designing Jisc’s first digital leaders course.

We wanted to help facilitate thinking more deeply about how those of us working in education were transforming our practices in the context of the abundance of digital tools, platforms, and places. The phrase “digital leadership” became shorthand for digital transformation and change management. In our discussions of “digital leadership” we were also getting rid of a few concepts, such as the idea that the important thing about “digital” was what list of tools you used.

We (along with James Clay and David White), focused in that iteration of the course on two key pillars: what does digital practice look like in a role that requires an element of leadership, and how does someone lead a digitally enabled organisation?

Digital Leadership as we approach it does not live within a specific institutional role, but rather is a concept, an idea emerging from the work of ensuring that people with a responsibility to lead any part of an institution, or curricula, or team, had the ability and knowledge to leverage the benefits of digital. Those same people also need to be capable of recognizing when using digital might be a barrier, to change, to practice, and to people engaging.

Across those early digital leadership courses we had participants focus on understanding their own individual practices.  We worked to dispel misconceptions about digital (for instance, the notion that how much time you spent with a tool or platform signalled its importance to you).  We spent a lot of time discussing how to make change happen in digital projects.  The sector deals with change management all the time, and emphasizing the importance of those change processes in digital contexts – digital transformation – is now somewhat taken for granted.  At the time, early in the leadership course, digital change management was still artificially separated from all of the other change management processes.  At the time, digital anything was often treated separately from the core work of the institution, with individual roles being labelled as “digital” without much consideration for how digital permeates much of the work at every level.  Some of the work of the course was reckoning with the ubiquity of digital, and the challenge of identifying “leadership” in such a diffused situation.  Who leads, when all of us have to do the work somehow?  What does “leading” mean, then?

We recently wrote up several of the component parts of those change management and digital transformation workshops in a book chapter.

It’s now 2023, and seven years is a long time (especially these past seven years). We’ve become more aware of the climate crisis, and within the last seven years, two of the hottest years globally have occurred (2016 and 2020) and in the UK 2022 looks set to be the hottest since records began. We have also seen increases in poverty and inequalities in Global North countries, with the UK poverty gap widening much more than some of its European counterparts. Surveillance technology has become big business; analytics systems, attendance monitoring, and digital proctoring have all become hot topics, and in some cases legal battle grounds.  And, of course, the COVID pandemic which, while not being reported widely in the press anymore, is still ravaging populations globally.

What next?

Throughout those seven years, we have continued to research people’s behaviours in academia: students, and staff. When we sat down and started thinking about what a digital leadership course could look like in 2023, we drew upon a lot of that fieldwork, realising that people have moved on in their practices and understanding, and also that there are different issues that we need to be thinking about. We no longer encounter as many people in workshop contexts who have the option of not engaging with digital.  We no longer encounter people who believe that “digital” is a separate job that only a few people in an organization should have.

We also need to recognize that models of leadership wherein one person gets to tell people what to do, making them the “leader,” were never really very effective and resulted in a net loss of engaged work from people who had their own ideas and contributions to make.  “Leadership” can’t look like one monolithic thing, and should increasingly be a mode that supports and facilitates work, rather than dictating and mandating.  Institutional visions need to be collective, not individual.  People in positions of power and authority need to share that power rather than wield it. 

That is not to say that the things we covered previously aren’t valid, or still valued.  But now we think there is an opportunity to build on what has gone before, not simply repeat it. In every role across an institution, there is a role for digital. We collectively need to be responsible with our digital use, and there are identifiable ways to use digital to facilitate not necessarily more work, but better and more effective, engaged and equitable work. 

Our previous focus in the leadership course was helping people contextualize their individual practices within the larger landscape of institutional presence and practice. The work that we see before us is connecting the work within education to the wider world, explicitly linking the collective practices (digital and otherwise) within universities and colleges to the networks and processes in which they are embedded. The educational sector has never existed in isolation from politics, economics, and structures of race and class. We think in particular that digital leadership in 2023 must view the entirety of their work (and that of their institutions) with the following lenses.

  1. Social justice and equity,
  1. Ethics, privacy, security, and intellectual property
  1. Environmental impact and sustainability of using Edtech (and tech generally) in education

These are the relevant challenges for leadership in digital– these should be the urgent priorities for people concerned with meeting and anticipating the needs of their organizations, and the people working within them. We have started to discuss and workshop these ideas with colleagues across Canada, Ireland, Australia and the US, and are currently writing workshops based on scenario planning, and Future Happens to co-design this content, examine the issues in greater depth, and suggest ways to bring about change.

Get in touch. We can’t do the work alone.

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