Defy fear in 2016

Last week I published a series of posts to LinkedIn about common fears and anxieties I’ve heard about and come up against in my ten or so years working with public services and all things digital. You can read the roundup here and link to each post from there too.

I feel really frustrated that these fears and barriers are so intrenched in organisational culture that I am having the same conversations with people I had a decade ago. But it keeps me in work.

The amount of contact I’ve had on the back of the posts is significant. Some people want to privately thank me for being open about these ‘open secrets’ and strangers are contacting me to talk more. So what is it about these fears being so common and resonating so much with different people that no one is actually making any progress against them? We can talk about it and senior types will continue to pontificate about them at conferences and such but why isn’t anyone DOING meaningful work to introduce larger scale change in the use of digital in public services? Answers on a postcard please (or we can discuss here).