If someone handed you a huge check to start an organization today, what percentage of your staff would you dedicate to technology? Really. Settle on an approximate fraction before you read on…
My answer would be somewhere between ⅓ and ½. A third to a half of the org chart. I realize that might sound crazy, but I’m serious.
Ten or fifteen years from now I’m betting this will be obvious. Someone will have tried it and reaped the rewards, and others will follow. But many of today’s organizations are either going to be dragged there kicking and screaming, or more likely they wont, and will perish along the way.
New organizations will be born this way and never bat an eye.
Funders will not only not be shocked by seeing an organization with that high of a technology ratio in their org chart, but they will demand it, as proof that the organization is serious in its ambitions.
~
Why? Because even the most casual sports fans know that any team that wants to win games needs to have both an effective offense and an effective defense.
But when it comes to technology, most organizations have neither. First they’re getting their asses handed to them because they’re not playing defense. And then they’re leaving massive opportunity on the table because they’re not playing offense.
~
Let’s say you have an incredible staff-person in charge of a content area – say programs, or communications, or fundraising. You hired them because they are incredible. They have energy, they have ideas, they are the magic in your organization. They are your most precious resource.
The normal pattern is that eventually that person gets up to “capacity” and you have to hire someone else to help them. That seems normal enough, right? Happens all the time. That probably feels like a sign of success.
But did you consider that this person might not actually be at capacity? Or rather that they’re at capacity of their time but not their capability? Chances are you are wasting a solid portion of this person’s magic on lack of – and inefficiency in – technology systems. On wrestling with suboptimal systems and even technical headaches. On bottlenecking their ideas.
We’ve heard from people at hundreds of organizations at this point, and it is abundantly clear that the status quo is that every single staff person at every organization is held back by the organization’s technology, almost every minute of every day. Take a second to contemplate the scale of that.
Many people are so accustomed to dysfunction around technology that they don’t even consider that it could be any different. They just accept that staff don’t have the best, most optimized tools they need. That they won’t have adequate training and support on the tools they do have. That they don’t have anywhere to turn with their ideas for improvement or new capabilities that would make their work stronger. That everyone is repeating work, losing out on game-changing insights, storing critical organizational knowledge in their heads and shadow systems, to eventually be lost to role changes, computer meltdowns, and job transitions.
They’re also accepting that staff don’t have technology translators and allies who they can turn to for help. They don’t have people proactively monitoring for issues, jumping in with solutions, dedicated to helping them do their work better every day.
All of this adds up to entire org charts of staff who are accomplishing only a fraction of what they could be.
None of this should be expected or acceptable. It’s the first level of what an appropriately-constructed technology product team can address. That is playing defense, and it’s a game-changer in itself. This is exactly why you need a technology team to start with, and it requires a substantial head count – not just a reluctantly allocated hire or two – if you ever want to turn the corner from reactive and overwhelmed to proactive and high-functioning.
~
Of course, defense is only half of the picture. What about offense?
What about not just solving and preventing problems, but harnessing your staff’s amazing ideas? What about helping your content-side staff pivot, spot and grasp new insights and new opportunities? And when they come up with ambitious new ideas, what about giving them a crew of technology problem solvers who can help actually make those ideas happen in the world?
Your greatest content-side people have so much more potential than they are being allowed to manifest. They have dreams and ideas, amazing ones. They’re coming in raring to go, spotting opportunities out there that others can’t see. They are capable of helping your organization grasp greatness.
But what great programmatic ideas exist these days that don’t have some significant technology component to executing them at a high level? Most, or maybe all, do.
So once your staff is on board for a while, your dreamers and do-ers rarely dare to dream anymore, because it’s all just too impossible. It’s too far of a leap. They’ve hidden those great ideas away, or tossed them into the someday pile, because they can never realistically happen, given the way things are.
Periodically we will coax someone to start to believe in the future enough to dig back up hopes and dreams that have been buried by an organization’s lack of technology capacity. They are amazing visions – inspiring, transformative, game changing ideas. Remember what you were excited about when you hired that person? They were going to help take you to a new level, you were sure of it.
And maybe they have in many ways, but once they got enmeshed in the day-to-day realities, they eventually realized they couldn’t do any of that truly visionary stuff. They realized that everyone was just trying their best to untie their own shoelaces, let alone having a solid enough foundation to entertain ambitious new hopes and dreams. They wouldn’t even know where to start.
That's what you would solve with a truly ambitious scale of technology product team. That’s playing offense.
~
Hire the right kind of technology-side people and the rest of your staff become more powerful, more efficient, more happy, more satisfied, more impactful. Probably 10 times more powerful over a handful of years, and that upwards curve never stops. What an insanely huge return on investment that is for every technology person you just hired. Can you start to envision how future organizations will be rushing to unlock this level of potential?
This is not an argument for greater efficiency; it’s not about making people into better robots. It’s an argument for removing people’s frustrations, for letting them do their work unencumbered and supercharged. For giving them tools and weapons that make them more effective, more powerful at the work they are trying to do. For doing the work of today better, and for grasping the opportunities of tomorrow.
Your first level of scale of product team helps you play defense, solving the rampant pain points that hold everyone back, every minute of every day. The next level of scale allows you to play offense, and to become more powerful and impactful than you can even quite imagine from where you sit today.
But to do that you need more technology people. Many, many more than you ever considered. This will only be accomplished by a scale of technology investment that we are simply not seeing today. A visionary leader starting a visionary organization right now would peek around the corner and understand where we’re headed.
~
Because a visionary organization right now – and visionary funders too – would be all in on technology’s ability to power, to support, to optimize, and to multiply. It’s not actually technology’s power. It’s the power of technology people. We’ve written quite a bit about which types of people, in which types of roles and structures.
The organizations of tomorrow will use technology to play both offense and defense. They will understand that the right kind of technology people – not so much technical masters, but strategic-minded problem-solvers and make-it-happeners – are the most highly leveraged investment their organizations could make.
Successful organizations of the future are going to understand this implicitly. And someone, soon, is going to be bold and visionary enough to try it and reap the rewards.
Are you?