Digital Leadership: Innovation & Intersecting Crises

Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] Sophie: I wrote a paper about this. I can share with you that I presented at museums and the web uh, earlier this year about digital courage. it drew very heavily on this theorist called Everett.

[00:00:11] Sophie: who in the 1950s wrote a book called diffusion of innovation and it was actually based on agricultural reform in the Southern states of America. and about the choice to use pesticides and not use pesticides, basically how innovation was playing out across all these farming communities.

[00:00:25] Sophie: And he spent many years studying this and he found out that new innovation really is only successful through word of mouth and through social interactions. And for me, I think that's what digital courage is as well. It's through just talking to each other and working out what's most useful for the things that you do.

[00:00:46] Isotta: This is Art Is… a podcast for artists where we brainstormed the future of the art world and the creative industries. Today I'm sharing part two of my conversation with Sophie Frost, researcher, writer, and academic. If you haven't listened to part one of our conversation, I recommend you go back to season three, episode eight before listening to.

[00:01:05] Isotta: I also highly recommend you check out Sophie's podcast. People change museums, which forms the basis for much of the topics we cover in this episode today. Sophie delves into how digital literacy and digital courage are expanding across the art and cultural.

[00:01:20] Isotta: She shares her views on the need for symbiosis, between physical and digital museum spaces and the importance of critical thinking when it comes to evaluating the impact and future role of tech tools and digital services in the arts and cultural sector.

[00:01:35] Isotta: this episode was recorded in December, 2021. So when we say last year, we mean 20.

[00:01:42] Isotta: I really enjoyed talking to Sophie. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as. Also, I would really appreciate it. If you took a moment to reflect on who in your life might also benefit from listening to this podcast,

[00:01:54] Isotta: When you do, please share art is a podcast for artists with them. So we can continue to grow the show and brainstorm the future of the art world.

[00:02:03] Sophie: I'm Sophie.

[00:02:04] Sophie: I'm. Up for an opportunity to talk about all things, our tech digital future skills. So thank you.

[00:02:13] Isotta: One of the goals of your podcast. People change museums was to draw a line in the sand and take the temperature of the current moment. In 2020,

[00:02:22] Isotta: I listened to the podcast in 2021 with sort of a reflective lens. So I was wondering, now, looking back since the last episode, what has changed? And Could you share some of those key learnings or moments with us?

[00:02:36] Sophie: I think things have changed a lot as you pointed out, I really liked that. You said, you listened to it, reflectively looking back. It was a very much like live research moment. You know, there were people I interviewed in that episode, this one woman Angie based in New Zealand who, she was, it was really nice.

[00:02:52] Sophie: She was like, I'm recording this in my cupboard because it's the only place I can make sure I'm away from my dogs. So we're going a bit mental outside and,You know, we were, we were very much in that moment and I know we potentially are moving back into it, but I think we have a different, attitude and set of feelings around working online now than we did seven months ago.

[00:03:08] Sophie: You know? So I think my first answer to your question would be, I think times have changed. I think that was very much,As you said, capturing a certain moment, I think there was an intensity and a kind of, pressure. There's a sense of pressure at that time, which I think now we've had to climatize to and adjust to, and we've slightly calmed down.

[00:03:30] Sophie: Um, I think there's a combination of reasons for that. One of them is I think, the great thing about last year, if there's anything that could be possibly deemed as great from it is that there is now much broader. Consensus across the sector in leadership positions. And I'm talking about people like on boards of trustees and executives, people at the top of, cultural organizations that digital matters and it's important and it needs proper strategy and it's a way forward.

[00:03:58] Sophie: and I think that wasn't really existing so much or so strongly seven months ago when I was making people change museums, I think there was still a lot of like reluctance and. Kind of antipathy to it. And now I think there's much broader, like cross the board acknowledgement. this is what life is going to look like now for some time to come.

[00:04:17] Sophie: And we may well, never go back to how it was before. I mean, this, really excites me and it's the result of my current work on one by one, which we'll come on to is that I think now having been in that very reactive period that we were in last year and when I was doing these interviews, it was actually, yeah, it was over a year ago now.

[00:04:33] Sophie: So a lot of those interviews were done around October, November time. Last year, things felt very reactive, very highly charged, very much like with sticking plasters. Problems. We don't really know the solution. I fail now. There's a real desire for richer, deeper, slower engagement and understanding of what digital technology can and can't do for us.

[00:04:53] Sophie: I also just think we've got more educated. Like I just think in the last year we've got much more. Sophisticated understandings of technology. And I say that I'm thinking that technology is, and I really am keen to.

[00:05:06] Sophie: make this point because I don't think I realized a year ago, technology. Isn't just a tool.

[00:05:10] Sophie: Like technology also is not impartial. It can have massive bias, it can be problematic. There's things like algorithmic behavior modification that I've been learning about recently. social media can be hugely detrimental. People thought that before, but I think their understanding of that's changed.

[00:05:25] Sophie: there's obviously been huge amounts of information now about fake news and how platforms like Facebook can be hugely detrimental to whole societies and communities. So I think we are more educated now about the role of technology.

[00:05:39] Isotta: this is a really exciting topic for me, especially since the third season of art is, has the underlying theme of artists leveraging.

[00:05:46] Isotta: On this podcast, we often discuss how many artists can be put off by tech or worried that the tech tools, which are supposed to help them instead intimidate them or overseeing their work. So in light of the thesis question, you posed in your podcast, which was what is the role of the museum in defining our human values in 2020?

[00:06:05] Isotta: And how does technology help or hinder this project? How do you see digital literacy and digital courage evolving into the cultural and arts sectors,

[00:06:14] Sophie: I worry a little bit that while innovation and tech is hugely exciting and it can offer all new means of engagement and broadening access and all of this. I do worry that we are replicating. Inequalities in society and just subtle, but very repetitive ways.

[00:06:31] Sophie: So basically I'd say the flip side of digital courage, what happens on the other side of that? If that's on the, like the good end of the barometer, I'd say at the other end is digital inequality. The digital divide. Digital poverty, wherever you want to call it. It's called something slightly different across the world.

[00:06:47] Sophie: But I think we have never understood or recognized such high quantities of digital inequalities. And that includes, I think, struggles with digital literacy and digital skills. and I think this is a very real issue and I I actually think, arts organizations have a role to play in that.

[00:07:03] Sophie: But so to all social, like public institutions, you know, our schools, our health system, our government, our local council, they all have a role to play in thinking about digital equality, because we're finding in the UK at least that there are still pretty high numbers of people that don't have. They might have internet access.

[00:07:19] Sophie: They might have a smartphone, but they don't really know what to do with these things. and so existing social inequalities are repeating themselves in digital inequality. So I just wanted to say that like I'm under No.

[00:07:29] Sophie: illusions. the, in, in lots of ways, we're just continuing to keep certain people out the door because we've moved online.

[00:07:35] Sophie: And I think that's a real worry and there's no straightforward answer at the moment. Then to talk about digital courage. So actually I wrote a paper about this. I can share with you that I presented at museums and the web uh, earlier this year about digital courage. for me, it drew very heavily on this theorist called Everett.

[00:07:53] Sophie: who in the 1950s wrote a book called diffusion of innovation and he, and it was actually based on agricultural reform in the Southern states of America. and about the choice to use pesticides and not use pesticides, basically how innovation was playing out across all these farming communities.

[00:08:07] Sophie: And he spent many years studying this and he found out that new innovation really is only successful through word of mouth and through social interactions. And for me, I think that's what digital courage is as well. It's through just talking to each other and working out what's most useful for the things that you do.

[00:08:24] Sophie: It's not about thinking, all right, everyone's talking about VR or AI or machine learning. So I'm going to just, you know, I'm just going to go and that's what I need to know. And then feeling very desperate about it is thinking well, can we lift everyone up, but also have really open-ended conversations about how can we use this technology in interesting, cool ways that are useful to me, you know, and not trying to like over again, but I think there's something else with digital courage as well.

[00:08:45] Sophie: What I liked about it is that I think, it's the idea of using technology as an Equalizer as a means of having agency and your situation and it as a means of kind of overcoming elitist or hierarchies within your situation. So I think, you know, I talked about the voices podcast for me, that was quite a good example of digital courage because through a really simple piece of tech.

[00:09:07] Sophie: Lots more people felt confident to speak, and to have some agency over the work that they did. And so that's what I mean by digital courage. And I use courage rather than confidence, because I feel like confidence is quite a kind of Americanized individualized. Actually like a very individual, business leadership skills type word, whereas courage I think is much more collective.

[00:09:29] Sophie: And that's what I'm talking about. It's a real shared commitment to lifting us all up to thinking more proactively about what conditional do for each other and how we have a role in society and how we are valued.

[00:09:39] Sophie: at the moment, unfortunately, there's a lot of siloed working. There's a lot of intergenerational complication. There's a lot of old school kind of institutional slash establishment thinking and mindsets. Basically what I'm saying is there's a lot of blockers within museums.

[00:09:56] Sophie: It's not their fault. It's just kind oflegacy. There's lots of legacy, which means the opportunities for digital courage are a bit, few and far between, and it's often about the emotional labor and. Pursuit and perseverance of a couple of key individuals who helped lift up workforces and lift up communities.

[00:10:16] Sophie: I think there's loads of opportunity, but I think there are still lots of missing links and missing aspirations. And that's why I'm very interested in museums as kind of a site of research, because I think they are exemplary of quite a lot of other public institutions.

[00:10:31] Sophie: And I'm also thinking about, say like the education system or government or legal services potentially, although I can't claim to know anything about them. who's still based on extremely, Previous, hierarchical quite often, quite gendered, you know, often with all sorts of other intersectional biases, ways of thinking, which mean that digital courage isn't really possible.

[00:10:53] Isotta: in the people change museums podcast, you really spoke to a wide range of individuals, curators and leaders from the Smithsonian and the science museum. But also smaller institutions like the egg museum.

[00:11:06] Isotta: How did you feel about hearing so many individuals discuss their own institutional commitments to change in light of these intersecting crises that you've described.

[00:11:14] Sophie: I was hugely lucky that I did get to talk to such a breadth of people. And what I discovered was that like really, it's often down to the individualcharisma of certain individuals about how successful using technology and innovation have been in their job roles. Like a lot down to them as people, and how much enthusiasm and dynamism and self-belief and motivation and all the other things they had.

[00:11:37] Sophie: Some of my biggest observations, where they're often the most exciting kind of radical moments of digital courage that were happening were in smaller institutions where people actually could get away with more because they weren't being seen monitored. And so there was an opportunity for lots more experimentalists and say, Steven, for example, I'm at a museum who you're talking about, Stephen could do much more radical, exciting things with the museum's Twitter account.

[00:12:03] Sophie: You know, the social media officer at the Smithsonian American art museum. And that's, no kind of, that's no criticism to Smithsonian American art museum is just the, in some ways Stephen could, because he had a smaller audience and the stakes were lower. and so it meant that in terms of didn't quite, forward-thinking.

[00:12:20] Sophie: things were more possible that he didn't have to go through as many kind of, institutional procedures in order to get something passed off. So I think that was really interesting I think, why I love working in the cultural sector and why we'll always work in it. even though there were some hard days, it's just because there is so much so work that happens in the arts, you know, people care so much about what they do.

[00:12:41] Sophie: It's so much part of their personality. And I think that's something that strikes. 90% of the time when I interviewed people change museums and still is that people really passionately care about their work they do, and the role of their institution. and it will never cease to amaze me like the kind of personal commitment. That people have to working in these contexts, like in adversity. But the final thing I want to say actually is about digital leadership, just in terms of your point, because I noticed that while obviously it involved a lot of emotional labor and advocacy and kind of personal charisma to do some exciting staff, those institutions that were achieving more in terms of digital transformation.

[00:13:20] Sophie: Um, on digital maturity would generally those who prioritize digital leadership at every level and within every department of the organization. So they didn't just say there was one digital officer and one digital team. They said, no, it's our collective responsibility to think. more laterally and in more dynamic, exciting ways about what digital can do for our service.

[00:13:44] Sophie: they empowered their staff be actively thinking about that and thinking about how they could use technology to continue to tell the story of the museum. so yeah, I think those institutions that were more forward thinking are the ones that are saying they, digital leadership is a collective responsibility.

[00:13:58] Sophie: It's not the job of one person.

[00:14:00] Isotta: how do you see the hybrid model of online and offline moving forward in the museum space? There was a great conversation in episode four of people that change museums.

[00:14:09] Isotta: with Kelly Doyle about the need to continue fostering a symbiotic relationship between how museums represent themselves in person and in the digital world. And I found that really exciting. Could you share your thoughts on this

[00:14:23] Sophie: it's like the million dollar question, isn't it? I'm not sure how I feel about the term hybrid, because I feel like as soon as you use that term,I mean, I don't know about anyone else, but I have my mind. It's the idea that there's like an event on, in a gallery space, but then there'll be someone zooming in to observe it at the same time.

[00:14:40] Sophie: It's that kind of, and then you have the sense of it's going to be quite clunky and there's going to be an in person audience. And then, you know,it can feel. it just feels like an opportunity for kind of bad, but

[00:14:49] Isotta: Yeah.

[00:14:50] Sophie: not always. And I, and I think it's important to say that there are some very sophisticated, cool hybrid activities and events being run in the art space right now.

[00:15:00] Sophie: I think definitely the role of the virtual museum space, the virtual gallery space is here to stay. and I think that many institutions, it's a good thing that they've started to see their digital presence as. and alternative site to the museum. say for example, I'm doing a big project with science museum group at the moment, and they have five museums across England, plus a, the national collection center, which is in which we'll open to the public in 2022.

[00:15:29] Sophie: And they are starting to talk more and more about that digital presence as their seventh site. I think that's going to be the case really for all institutions going forward. So in that sense, I think this kind of acknowledgement that the role of the virtual is really important and it's here to stay.

[00:15:44] Sophie: I think in terms of investment in hybrid events hybrid to hybrid talks, hybrid exhibition showings, in my opinion, quite a lot of the time with the exception of talks. Cause I think talks can work pretty well online. I think they often involve high levels of investment from the museum or the heritage or cultural organization and the rewards.

[00:16:03] Sophie: Aren't great. And I also think in terms of enabling access, we do not have any robust data yet, which is showing that we are actually attracting any audiences much beyond the ones that were already coming to the physical store. And so I don't believe again, it's that silver bullet thing that like by becoming hybrid, we're going to now increase our potential for access in massive ways.

[00:16:24] Sophie: And I think these themes are continent onto that, that she hybrid doesn't offer them much more.

[00:16:28] Isotta: I guess the major pitfall is institutions trying to replicate the physical online.

[00:16:33] Isotta: Rather than understanding how the digital space offers new. Interesting, and perhaps more nuanced ways of engagement.

[00:16:40] Sophie: I'm sure that's in people change museums. And there was definitely a few off the record meetings I had with, members of like the digital engagement team at the Smithsonian. For example, they were like, curators come to me, literally with the length of an elephant in text to put online.

[00:16:55] Sophie: Now we've closed. We just put this content online. And I remember this poor social media officer saying. There's just no point because no one is going to read the length of an elephant. They're not going to scroll down that on their phone, reading content. Like it's, there's no point replicating,

[00:17:08] Isotta: I think it's taken a while and we're not there yet in, arts organizations, quite cottoned onto the fact that if they want to do hybrid it, can't just look like an event that you have in your exhibition space.

[00:17:18] Sophie: It's got to be something different.

[00:17:19] Sophie: I'm not an Instagram or I have to say, so I'm on Twitter, very on Twitter at, so under school frosty, I have a LinkedIn page and then also you can. Find people change museums. The best source for it is on Spotify or apple book costs. and likewise with voices, the rope of it in the museums.

[00:17:40] Sophie: And you can find more about one by one on a

[00:17:43] Sophie: One by one, the UK,I mean always up for more chats, and feel free. Anyone gets in contact, he's been interested by anything I've said or just wants to actually debate it.

[00:17:52] Sophie: Welcome that to.

[00:17:53] Isotta: Thank you for listening to art is a podcast for artists.

[00:17:57] Isotta: This episode. I'd like to thank Sophie frost for sharing her expertise with us. Stay tuned to hear part three, the final part of our conversation coming later on in season three

[00:18:07] Isotta: please leave Art Is… a podcast for artists, a rating and review on apple podcasts.

[00:18:11] Isotta: It really helps others find us. You can support the work I do by subscribing wherever you. And by donating to the podcast, the link to do so is in the episode description. Okay. That's it for now. Thanks so much and see you next Wednesday