Guest speaker Tim Lockie from The Human Stack in a workshop focused on smaller nonprofits struggling to manage IT.
In pt 1, Tim describes the tactical issues nonprofits face in trying to work with tech tools. In pt 2, Tim walks through the different mis-alignments that leadership and "boots on the ground" staff can have, and ways to overcome them. He gives a roadmap of where to start and how to keep going.
Tim Lockie has been in nonprofits and tech for over 20 years. Over the last decade, he founded Now IT Matters and The Human Stack, dedicated to helping small nonprofits succeed with their technology.
View this webinar on nonprofit digital health, for anyone who needs to manage nonprofit IT.
Humans first, then technology
Tim wants to change the narrative on nonprofit IT by showing how even the smallest nonprofits can get a handle on their tech AND human stack. This workshop is centered on people – how the people at your organization FEEL about technology is going to be fundamental to how you are able to USE technology.
As with all our webinars, this presentation is appropriate for an audience of varied IT experience.
_______________________________
Start a conversation :)
Thanks for listening.
Guest speaker Tim Lockie from The Human Stack in a workshop focused on smaller nonprofits struggling to manage IT.
In pt 1, Tim describes the tactical issues nonprofits face in trying to work with tech tools. In pt 2, Tim walks through the different mis-alignments that leadership and "boots on the ground" staff can have, and ways to overcome them. He gives a roadmap of where to start and how to keep going.
Tim Lockie has been in nonprofits and tech for over 20 years. Over the last decade, he founded Now IT Matters and The Human Stack, dedicated to helping small nonprofits succeed with their technology.
View this webinar on nonprofit digital health, for anyone who needs to manage nonprofit IT.
Humans first, then technology
Tim wants to change the narrative on nonprofit IT by showing how even the smallest nonprofits can get a handle on their tech AND human stack. This workshop is centered on people – how the people at your organization FEEL about technology is going to be fundamental to how you are able to USE technology.
As with all our webinars, this presentation is appropriate for an audience of varied IT experience.
_______________________________
Start a conversation :)
Thanks for listening.
Hello, and welcome to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics Podcast, where we discuss nonprofit technology, cybersecurity, tech project implementation, strategic planning, and nonprofit IT careers. Find us at communityit.com.
Thank you for joining this Community IT Podcast, Part 2. You can find Part 1 in your podcast feed if you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
Thank you so much for joining us. We are presenting today a nonprofit digital health workshop with Tim Lockie from Human Stack. So my name is Carolyn Woodard.
I'm the Outreach Director for Community IT, and I'm the moderator today. So I want to quick touch on our learning objectives. At the end of the session today, we hope that you can diagnose your organization through a free digital health quiz.
We want to help you understand the human behaviors and needs that are at the root of IT management at nonprofits, learn the basics of nonprofit tech decision making strategies, and learn the order steps to take to gain decision making confidence.
My name is Tim Lockie. I live in Bozeman, Montana, and I'm really excited to talk with you today. I've been working in nonprofits since I was 18 and care a lot about making the world better. And I think we could leverage technology to create so much more impact with the same humans and the same resources.
The URL for that quiz is the humanstack.com/quiz
First up, humanstack vitals. So there are three systems, sustainability, digital strategy, and accountability. I'm going to tell these or talk about them by looking at my logo.
The next part of the podcast is a little bit visual. Tim's logo is a stylized A. If you can imagine, the bottom half of the A is the boots on the ground, the two little legs, and that represents the driver that he talks about.
And the top of the A is a triangle that represents the leader. And those two items can be misaligned in various ways that he talks about over the next minute or so. If you are visual and want to have a look at the slides, you can find them on our website at communityit.com/webinar-nonprofit-digital-health-workshop.
And the first thing to say is, we’re not talking about individual use of technology. We’re talking about an organization’s use of technology. And just like the tech stack is a community of technologies, the human stack is a community of humans that use tech together. And when you’re working on the human stack, there’s always a leader that is accountable, strategic, and a driver who is boots on the ground, responsible and tactical.
So, one way of thinking about this is that it only takes one human to imagine a better world. That’s easy. But to actually make a better world, you need more than one person. You need a stack. So, two people is the smallest you can have a human stack with.
Digital Strategy
And the first one of those is digital strategy. Digital strategy, you should think of as alignment. The leader (should be) very aligned with the driver.
This is a starter digital strategy. If you don’t have a road map, you’re not sure what your strategy is, make this your strategy. Figure out your digital health, find out who is driving. Figure out who is leading and then make a monthly plan. If it’s helpful to join Digital Drivers Ed, which is our online course, great, glad to have you. But you don’t need to. You can get going with this right here. So, that can be a starter digital strategy.
If your strategy is not in alignment, it won’t work. I work with so many organizations that want tech, they’ve budgeted for it, they’ve done all this work, all these RFPs, all of this other stuff, and did not take care of this piece right here, which is to make sure that their tactical team and their leadership team are in alignment and ready to go.
And it’s not the whole team, it is a person and a person. There is a strategic person and a tactical person. All of technology success boils down to the relationship between these two people.
Accountability
Accountability is a facet of that relationship. It’s attention plus power. That’s what I call accountability. And when I look at my logo and I think about accountability, it’s the gap between the leader and the driver. It needs to be close enough to collaborate, but not overlapping so there’s micromanaging.
Accountability has three different forms.
And especially, I don’t know if anybody has paid attention to the report around retention in nonprofits that came out late recently, but one of the main causes of churn or of people leaving organizations is the relationship between their supervisor and themselves. And that’s not different in technology. So, when it comes to accountability, if you’re not aligned, that’s one issue, here is digital strategy. But also, this doesn’t work if they’re not close enough to each other, or if you’re working with someone who just ignores you, that’s the worst.
Another version of this can be if there’s static in between. So, if there’s constant conflict between the leader and the driver, you’re going to run into issues with your technology.
And the last one is that there’s a wide gap. You can never get any questions answered. You’ve met like two times in the year to talk about technology. Anytime your leader needs something, they’re coming to you about it, but they won’t answer your question. That’s what it feels like. And then you end up feeling really small and distant.
System Sustainability
System sustainability. This is, are you creating relevant, ongoing system improvements? And the way I think about this is, are people complaining? Complaining is a sign of hope.
And what you want to do in a system is get people to feel comfortable enough to complain, because if they will, then you can keep shaping the data in the systems so that they are improving and working.
Keep things proportional. When people say, hey, this isn’t working for me, you can grow. You can grow the system out in that area so that it will work.
This is where the human stack missed leg day. And then you can have the opposite too, where you’ve got like a full stack developer under somebody that doesn’t really know what to do with them, and that can create a lot of problems.
One time, when my daughter was very young, she went on a trip with her grandmother and everything went wrong. Wrong destination, flights canceled, just everything went wrong. And my daughter held it together all day because her grandmother said, “When you get to where you’re going, I’m going to get you chocolate ice cream.” And when they got to where they were going, got to the front of the counter and ordered chocolate ice cream, the man said, “We’re out.” And my daughter just dropped to the floor, heap of tears, big mess. Because humans can only handle so much change, right?
So, when it comes to sustainability, one of the biggest issues in technology is this idea that you have to pay attention to how much disruption you’re creating by making these adjustments, and how much capacity for change people have.
And that’s not how much tech capacity for change, that is organizationally how much does this person have. And just like my daughter had a negative reaction to being disappointed in hitting a level of change that she just couldn’t deal with, that one last thing, when humans hit high levels of change saturation over and over, they respond negatively and they associate that negativity to whatever caused it.
So, if we’re implementing a CRM, which I did lots of times and created disruption and change saturation for months on end for people, at the end of that, they were not happy with that CRM, even if it made their jobs easier. They turn to the one thing that would give them mastery and autonomy, which is spreadsheets. So, if we’re implementing systems and we’re not paying attention to change saturation, we’re going to run into issues.
Carolyn Woodard: I feel like that’s also like a cultural issue as well, that capacity for change. I just heard this recently; you’ve got to really read the room. If you’re an organization that has a top-down culture, then telling people this is how we’re doing it now, may be fine for you change-wise. That’s what people are used to.
If you’re more entrepreneurial, people need to ask why are we doing it this way? Who is going to do it, how are we going to do it then? If you’re just telling them, we’re going to do it this way, it’s going to be a misfit. So, you need to be aware of that. Like with your daughter, read the room.
Tim Lockie: And one of the reasons I say complaining is a sign of hope is because you and I have both seen organizations swap out massive systems unnecessarily. And if they would have just solved some of the lower-case issues, then actually they would be using the system just fine. But instead, they’ve delayed. They’re going to spend 18 months getting the same spot with the new system and spend six figures getting there. They haven’t practiced the art of saying what’s not working and fixing those things incrementally.
And so, that’s why I put change saturation under system sustainability. How do you create regular small amounts of change that are effective for specific users?
So, all of these are different ways that the human stack can be shaped in the wrong way. There’s only one way that it looks right. That’s 10 out of 10 on all three of those factors.
It’s more understandable what’s happening on the tech stack side of things than the human stack side.
The one take away that I want to leave people with is how stacks are formed.
When I was a consultant, I felt like anybody that didn’t have a CRM didn’t have a legit tech stack. That was a really stuck-up way of thinking, because actually a lot of small nonprofits don’t.
The first one, the starter website and the financial operations, all of those are legitimate tech stacks. And there are about 34 boxes on here. So, when your team says we’ve got too many systems, just keep in mind, there’s 34 types of systems. If you double up any of them, you have more than 34.
That’s all just to say, in modern workforces, you’re going to have a lot of systems. Every time you have a meeting to reduce the number of systems, you’ll have a new system at the end of that meeting. I guarantee it, it’s just the way it works, every single time. The issue isn’t if you have too many systems, it’s whether you’re using them effectively and whether you know who is supposed to be using them.
Data Quality
Data quality, here is what I want to say on data quality. This is a six-word theory of change about data. Data is plural for a thing called datum by the way, which I didn’t even know, but I keep finding out. Data turns into information and information turns into insight.
If you do not have data that you trust, you should not be using that to make decisions. The big reason that organizations don’t use their data to make decisions is that they know better. They’ve seen how it’s made.
And so, organizations really need to start treating data as an asset base, especially in a world of AI because the AI differentiator is basically the quality of your own data and what you know.
It’s not to say staff aren’t insightful, that’s not the point here.
What happens is that directors become the bottleneck. They need to find out from executives what insights do we need, and they need to pair that with the available trusted data. When they don’t find that data, they need to make changes or they need to clean up the data.
So, that’s a six-word theory of change. If you really dig into that, it will change so much about how you’re working with systems.
Utilization
The last one is utilization. Are you using the systems as intended? And that’s actually all I’m going to say about that.
Digital Health Strategy – How To
All right. So, picking up the story with Jennifer, what happened with Jennifer and her team was that they actually did their own work on understanding their organization, counting up their systems. They were using 48 systems. And by the time they were done, they were using 49 systems. And it wasn’t too many. It was what it took. They did do Digital Drivers Ed.
The four skills that we taught Jennifer are:
If Digital Drivers Ed sounds interesting to you, I’m glad to talk with you about it. The main point is that it’s possible for someone like Jennifer working about two days a month on data and information systems to actually feel confident, and for Bridget to spend one hour a month meeting with Jennifer to hear what’s going on with the system. That’s really the kind of oversight that we’re talking about. So, that’s what we did with Digital Drivers Ed. My dad joke on Digital Drivers Ed is learn to drive your tech before your tech drives you crazy.
Q and A
Can we collaborate with Community IT to support our needs with no in-house tech person?
Carolyn Woodard: For outsourced IT, as a managed service provider, that is really, really, really difficult. It’s very difficult for us to work with an organization that is not aligned, as you were talking about, Tim, with the different pieces going in different ways. Our heart just goes out to them.
It’s like an intern calling us and they’ll say, “We’re using donated laptops; I really think that the executive director needs to do this and that.” It’s so difficult until you have that executive buy-in and you start doing the alignment and building up that maturity and ability. You need the ability within your organization before you can get external IT support to function.
We talked about how you landed on helping smaller nonprofits develop the skills within, to be able to manage their IT. Can you talk a little bit more about it?
Tim Lockie: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve structured that in, and this was really intentional because we did so much support work over the years as a consultant. Inside Skill Zone Three, which is managing requests, the first thing to say is, “Never fix something that wasn’t requested.”
Technologists have a really bad habit of fixing things nobody wanted fixed in the 1st place. So, always wait for there to be a request. And it can be the intern that’s making the request. That’s fine.
There are six buckets, six queues that we teach our drivers to put them in. And the intern, by the way, is a great use case for Digital Drivers Ed. That’s why we built it, so that that intern can say, okay, here’s the training nobody in that organization can give them.
One of the queues is called the Consultant queue. What happens is that they go to a Conversation queue first and then to The Human Stack community and say, hey, does anybody know how to solve this?
And if neither of those are working and it’s important, it needs to be solved, it goes into the Consultant queue. That’s where it would be ready for a service provider like Community IT Innovators to come along and say, okay, right, this is really clear. You’ve thought it through, you’ve got it prioritized, you’ve got all of the questions answered already. So, now we know what to do with it.
And a lot of that is you’ll spend half your time with the consultant figuring out what you don’t know in order to find out what you need. All of that could be done without charging hundreds per hour.
Carolyn Woodard: (It’s done) ahead of time to really figure out what the business need is. I love that.
Would you say The Human Stack is a way to set up a data tech governance method and engagement?
Tim Lockie: I love the word engagement there. We don’t have an adoption problem, actually. We don’t have a change management problem. And I don’t think we mostly have governance problems, although sometimes we do. Adoption is actually accountability. Change management is actually habits. And when it comes to governance, those are meaningful conversations that are relevant.
One of the queues is called the Conversation queue. That is specifically for governance questions, and it rolls up to a monthly meeting. For larger organizations, we have this built inside of a full-scale white glove methodology. And in that methodology both engagement and governance are part of what that methodology was built to handle. It’s a great question.
Carolyn Woodard: That makes sense, because like you were saying, you might be queuing up that Consultant ask, and it’s for a database consultant, or there’s a specific piece of the tech stack that you need outside expertise on. That makes sense.
Learning Objective Recap
I want to thank you, Tim, so much for joining us today.