Never start with the tech

Regrets abound in careers of 20+ years. I bet you’ve got a few.

Even though I’ve spent so much time working at the intersection of technology and for-purpose organisations, one thing I’ve never regretted is listening to practitioners. They have the real insight about how tech helps and harms. When it’s clear that the tech, or process, or system is getting in the way of what they do, my job is to get it out of the way.

When I was helping an organisation update their onboarding software, I was privileged to be trusted by practitioners who told me they had real problems with it.They were tasked with entering data into a stock, standard database while interviewing clients about what brought them to the service - painful and revealing conversations that left the client vulnerable.

One practitioner really let me in.

“When I’m sitting with the client and typing on my laptop I feel really uncomfortable. Someone typing on a laptop and entering data about them just repeats the experiences they’ve had with the police, incarceration, even just the bank. All the places where they’ve been made to feel small, or bad, or just excluded.”

It wasn’t the software. It was the laptop. The client can’t see what you’re writing about them and you’ve put up a literal wall between you.

I asked the last practitioner what she’d done in the past that had worked. When had she been able to onboard clients in a way that made everyone feel comfortable? She told me about a creative intake document she’d used. It was printed on an actual piece of paper that she could put on the table between herself and the client. They could see what was written, contribute, use colour, add non-written expressions (aka doodles 😉). The document facilitated collecting strengths as well as their needs and problems.

We started talking about what it might look like to use an iPad to fill in an intake form. NOW I could get excited about the tech! We could use OCR to collect writing from different parts of the document and feed them into the fields of the database. The document could be printed so the client could walk away with their own record of the interview. They could return to the document to see what had changed, or what strengths remained and had shone through in the intervening time. Imagine pulling up a client’s database record and asking them to reflect on their strengths and challenges. I don’t think so.

Hopefully you’re feeling pretty excited about this idea right now. But, it’s time to get to my regret.

I left the organisation before we could even begin to implement this idea. Nobody who remained understood the vision, so the insight was abandoned.

I’m writing about it now so that one day you or I, if we're lucky, may have a chance to follow through on this kind of insight. When a passionate practitioner lets you in on the things that are getting in their way, dig in to the insight.

Never start with the tech. Especially if it’s a database.