Digital Common Sense: and how to get IT

By Bob Barker

The internet and digital technology require us to redefine ourselves, manage ourselves, educate ourselves, upgrade ourselves, integrate ourselves and quantify ourselves in order to do well – at work and at home. But what does 'good' look like? And who shows you how to do it? Digital Common Sense answers these questions by guiding readers through a set of common-sense activities, some of which they may already be doing, but others they probably won't.

The second core theme of the book focuses on the need for those who grew up before the digital age to become more 'digitally curious', and how to 'get' IT. The only way we can keep up with digital natives and learn how people are achieving new ways of working in the digital world is by asking them, so we need to develop that muscle. It's just digital common sense.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098302566

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

I have taken a keen interest in digital technology and how to incorporate it into my working and personal life for the past 20 years. In all that time as a senior executive, I haven’t been able to find the book, the course or the coach to help me upgrade my personal digital capability to a level of confidence where I felt comfortable, with a good level of digital common sense, in the rapidly changing modern workplace. So, I had to create what I needed.

If you look for digital skills training, you’ll find it covers a huge range of capability with the focus largely on digital marketing skills, coding skills or skills for small businesses. It’s never the basic common sense skills of how, as a corporate executive, you can find out how to use a computer better, how to set one up for success, what you should be using and what you should not.

These are things we are all just supposed to know.

It’s true that we all have a pretty good handle on technology already: we carry supercomputers in our pockets that we use every day. But we can waste a huge amount of our time if we don’t know how to use IT devices well, or don’t understand their capability. At the very least, every one of us could increase our effectiveness in how we use them and save a few minutes a day. The challenge, now that technology has become so core to how we operate in business and at home, and there is so much choice and change to keep up with, is finding a course that will be relevant and personal.

But there is an answer to that, and it is a core part of the teaching in this book: the only way we can keep up and learn how to use IT is to learn from each other. This blinding flash of the obvious is of course how all the millennials learnt to use their devices when in school, and it’s how my brother-in-law learns too.

He is the Chief Constable of Sussex Police and also advises on many of the digital policing initiatives around the country. Big job, big staff, big challenges, loads of technology. On a podcast I did with him in 2018, I asked him how he keeps up. He said: "That’s simple. I play OneAppManship". This is no more than asking to see someone’s apps that might be of interest (on the phone or desktop) in exchange for seeing yours. It’s a reciprocal social exchange. He is curious and just asks people how they do things digitally; they show him, and he shares what he is doing. I am suggesting that’s what you do too. As this book’s full title suggests, it’s how you will get IT (information technology) and build digital common sense in the process. Become more digitally curious.

Our phone and laptop screens are pretty personal and private. They are all different; we all have a story to tell. When someone’s laptop screen is projected on the big screen before they gone into presentation mode, don’t you have a quick scan of the icons in their tool bars and wonder what some of them are or why there are so many? If their email is open, don’t you look at how they have organized it? And don’t you look at the image on their digital wallpaper and wonder what the story is behind it? We want to know more about how and why people do stuff, but we never ask.

But you need a bit of structure just to define what digital is these days. This book uses the seven common sense areas we feel are worth looking at to make sure you are keeping up with how the world and modern workplace works. I say ‘we’ because this book is based on five years of research and teaching that I have done at Leading Edge Forum with some of the largest organizations in the world. Thousands have already used this model to help give them an insight into where they sit across these seven areas and improve their capability as executives in the 21st century.

Figure 1 - The 21st Century Human Capability Model © Leading Edge Forum

This is a ‘how to’ book. The content is based on the many workshops and individual coaching sessions I have done, looking at the data and feedback in the key areas people are struggling with. It’s about being more digital, or rather, having more digital common sense to achieve more. As a current Microsoft video says: You have more power at your fingertips than entire generations that came before you ... So here’s the question: What will you do with it?

You have more power at your fingertips than entire generations that came before you ... So here’s the question: What will you do with it?

Microsoft video

There is a lot of coverage these days about how we need to be less digital and get off our devices. I don’t disagree with that, but my position is that if we knew how to use our personal technology better, we would know what tools to use when, how to optimize our time and reduce our digital distraction.

Some may flick through the book and say: I know all that already, it’s all common sense. If so, well done for having a high level of digital common sense, but I still suggest you start playing OneAppManship with people.

Having worked with executives for many years, I know there is a need for this kind of guide to give people a structure, measures and tools to help motivate them to upgrade their digital capabilities. I’ve also seen a clear need for continuous digital future sensing to track what is emerging that might affect our jobs and our lives. This foundational digital common sense is covered in chapter four.

The book’s outcomes are all about marginal gains and personal growth. If you learn just one or two new things – a time-saving approach, a better way to operate – that will contribute to a better you. If you embrace all the ideas within this book, they will act as a set of digital tools to support your personal growth in terms of your career, your visibility, your time management, your relationships and even your health. To help you keep track of your progress, download at www.DigitalCommonSense.com our Digital Decision Sheet to record your decisions, measures and actions as you go through each chapter.

Let’s get started and see what you need to upgrade. It’s common sense.

CHAPTER ONE

My (self) Leadership

Technology has changed so much in the workplace that unless we change too, our careers will suffer. First came the internet and networked computing, then Google searches and Amazon eCommerce; then social media, the iPhone, apps, the cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality… and that’s just the start. The workplace has been transformed since those of us over 40 entered it, and the transformations continue. Unless we upgrade ourselves and become digitally competent and confident, we’ll be left behind. We need to develop digital common sense and think about how we appear online, and change how we manage ourselves, filter information, process tasks, communicate and even quantify our health and happiness. If we don’t, we’ll go the way of the dinosaurs.

If you are pre-millennial and grew up before the digital age, you are what the UK’s Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, calls the last of the innocents – people who grew up before the popularization of digital culture. Michael Harris in his book The End of Absence calls them digital immigrants, which he defines as those who have lived both with and without the crowded connectivity of online life. You won’t be a digital native – someone who grew up communicating using technology, so is digitally confident, which is an advantage in the world of work today.

Young people coming into the job market today have had 10,000 hours of using smartphones, iPads and laptops while they were