Change is inevitable, and it can challenge your ministry’s focus on its digital strategy. Some change is cataclysmic—founders retire or funding dries up some years. Other change is less dramatic—key staff seek greener pastures or the landscape shifts around your ministry initiatives.
Whether big or small, change threatens the work to discover, document, and pursue your organization’s digital strategy. How can you identify the risks? How can you help shore up your digital strategy in order to mitigate those risks? Let’s look at what happens when change comes to your ministry, and how “futureproofing” can ensure your digital strategy stays on track.
What’s really at stake
Your initial strategy process may be a full-fledged Discovery session or an informal series of conversations. Either way, it will produce some work that helps define your project’s purpose. This work might include user research, product roadmaps, personas, and other formal documents. Or you might only have a few decisions as to what the project is generally supposed to look like. Whether documents or decisions, what happens to your project’s direction when, say, a key leader at your ministry leaves?
If you fail to protect that strategic work, it’s more likely to fall by the wayside when situations change. It might be overlooked by new leadership, lose its guiding force in keeping your project on task, or simply be lost. Any project that abandons its strategic goals is far more likely to end up in failure, either in execution or relevance. As such, losing this focus can deliver a critical blow to your project.
What is “futureproofing”?
Futureproofing simply means protecting something against future threats. It makes your work more robust by anticipating future challenges and designing a process to deal with them. Futureproofing works when you prepare your response in advance, rather than during a crisis when it is more difficult to make rational, measured decisions.
Start by asking yourself the (rather morbid) question, “What happens to my work if I get hit by a bus?” When I was working in systems architecture, my tendency was to hold a lot of information in my head. It allowed me to move fast and spend time doing things rather than talking about the things I needed to do or documenting the things I’d already done.
However, that approach didn’t prepare us for any major shifts in our organization. With new hires, we realized we didn’t have good documentation to show them how we do things. When I looked at taking some time off, we realized there were areas of our business where I was the only one who knew how everything worked.
Preparing ourselves for my absence was an important start to maturing and protecting our organization. We realized I had to get all of that information into documentation and share responsibilities with others. We decided to futureproof our organization knowing that I will not be around forever.
How futureproofing helps your ministry, partners, and staff
Your ministry can only achieve its purpose if it continues to exist. To that end, futureproofing your digital strategy first and foremost ensures your organization’s long-term health and viability. That’s not to say futureproofing only helps your ministry as an organization. However, focusing initially on the organizational benefits will also make it easier to build consensus. Most of your ministry’s staff and donors have chosen to partner together because of a shared belief in the vision and work. They will want to invest in preserving your digital strategy precisely in order to preserve the ministry itself.
Futureproofing also reduces personal anxiety among your ministry partners and staff during challenging times. Having organizational commitment to your digital strategy helps staff members know their work isn’t dependent on any one individual. It helps them know that restarting work after a disruption doesn’t mean they have to rework everything they’ve already done.
Specific to your donors, futureproofing your digital strategy helps them understand the future of the work they’re funding. They can rest assured that their investment in your ministry’s work won’t evaporate at the first sight of uncertainty.
What does futureproofing look like?
For most organizations, the heart of futureproofing is communication. Communication is how you take knowledge out of your head and make it timeless. Communication is how you stop being a lone wolf and build teams. A few simple techniques will help futureproof your digital strategy to make it robust enough to weather most storms.
Communicate early and often: get people involved
In marketing, the “rule of seven” states consumers need to hear something at least seven times before they “get it”. (Of course, an older rule suggests it requires at least 77 times!) We all need to hear things more than we think in order to really absorb the message. You need frequent communication, both with leadership and staff, to continue offering reassurances that everyone is on the same page.
Communicating early in your project life cycle also invites your ministry partners to share an investment in the digital strategy. One way Agathon practices this type of collaboration is by involving designers and developers throughout Discovery. These builders bring great value to make the process more robust by offering unique insights during this planning stage.
It also lets them hear, firsthand, the strategic goals for the ministry. This helps protect against burnout or confusion when they’re months into the project and focused on “how” something is being done. They can look back on the early and frequent strategic communication, the “why” something is being done, and be assured of the purpose and direction they themselves helped establish.
Communicate consistently and intentionally: schedule times to check-in
In the heat of a project, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds and forget the overall roadmap and the goals you established. And despite involving ministry partners in the digital strategy, it’s important not to leave it up to them to let you know if their goals are changing. Rather, you must communicate intentionally and schedule times to step back and make sure you’re still on track.
Communicating consistently and intentionally reinforces your commitment to the strategy and the people that make it happen. Agathon practices this by conducting regular project management meetings apart from any normal developer meetings or standups. This shows our clients that their strategy is important enough on its own to warrant its own space. It also gives us permission to step back from daily work to think about the bigger picture. We can revisit the roadmap we designed together at the start of the project.
This sort of regular meeting ensures we’re continuing on the right track throughout the project’s life cycle. It also provides a framework to invite new staff and leaders into an existing, robust process for communicating that strategy.
Use centralized communication
The “when” and “how” of communication are not the only important factors in futureproofing your digital strategy; the “where” is also vital. Too often, we rely on Slack, phone calls, emails, and other similar communication channels to discuss strategy. These are fine for many purposes. But if you’re aiming to safeguard the strategic decisions that flow from those discussions, you have to move those decisions into a centralized communication tool.
Agathon uses Confluence as a centralized tool to communicate internally and to our clients. New team members can get up to speed with a project’s purpose by reading through “always available” strategic documents. Current team members can refer back to those documents periodically to ensure tactical decisions support the strategy direction. And you can ensure your communication is, indeed, consistent without having to fish through old chat logs or archived emails.
Hold on to the results with a loose grip
I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth
— 1 Corinthians 3:6
In the end, you can plan for nearly everything to mitigate the effects of change… but you can never be 100% sure of the results. Futureproofing your digital strategy is not about guaranteeing success; likewise, don’t assume failure if plans go through unexpected upheaval in the end. It’s up to you to plant the seeds, water the seedlings, feed the soil, and prune dead branches. But sometimes God has bigger changes in mind, so keep a loose grip on any expectation of a specific result after all of your planning.
A better approach than making something perfect is to make it better than when you found it. Going back to when I worked in systems architecture, I often found a script or configuration that wasn’t working quite right. In those situations, I had to choose: make it perfect and document absolutely everything? Or make it better and document enough to hopefully give the next person a shot at understanding it. More often than not, I had to ensure the “perfect” was not the enemy of the “good” and prioritize my time accordingly.
Similarly, futureproofing your digital strategy is not an “all or nothing” endeavor. Don’t insist on your vision, in its entirety, for your ministry’s digital strategy. Rather, build consensus with your team and work for the best outcome you can reasonably achieve. Plan for the worst, pray for the best, and work with the results you get, not the results you wish you had.
Change rarely shows up at your doorstep without its friends: fear, uncertainty, and doubt. But often, hiding behind those visceral emotions, change also brings opportunity. The prospect of an organizational shift can serve as the catalyst to solidify your digital strategy and build consensus, for now and the future, to protect those plans. Your investment in futureproofing your digital strategy will make your organization better prepared to meet that (inevitable!) change with a clear path forward for continued ministry.