John Sheridan, Digital Director at The National Archives, discusses how some organisations will need to reform their leadership if they want to remain relevant in an age of rampant technological change.

Information Professional (IP): In a previous interview (link) you said that new working practices come with new technology and these are becoming harder to avoid. Does this include a new type of leadership?

John Sheridan (JS): There’s a really deep issue for any leader of a digital team which is how do you create the culture that allows you to see the opportunities afforded by new technologies. That challenge requires a new kind of leadership and careful reflection on your organisational culture. You find yourself shifting emphasis from just delivering the thing that you’ve been asked to do, to seeing delivery as being about learning. You put a much greater premium on learning so you can take advantage of all things that are available in an era of technological change. The job of the leader is to facilitate that and create a culture that supports that kind of learning.

IP: How do you do this?

JS: For example, something we’ve tried here is a technique called Appreciative Inquiry. Instead of seeing the world through the lens of problems that you set out to fix, you see your organisation as having core strengths that you want to build. We had an Appreciative inquiry into learning that asked “when did you have an amazing experience about learning?” It was an energising conversation and developed a different attitude to being focused on delivery. Another example was a two-day hackathon on artificial intelligence last year, with no objectives. The result was some brilliant short projects: Could we use AI in our web archiving government to identify government twitter accounts versus other twitter accounts? Could we use artificial intelligence to marry research guides against catalogue descriptions? Could we use artificial intelligence to identify where code has been written in Python rather than in Java? Three projects and, along the way, we can learn about applying machine learning to our work as an archive.

IP: Why is this a leadership issue?

JS: Things that were fundamentally not solvable five or six years ago are now relatively tractable so long as you have got the ability to learn the technique and apply it in your context. You have to respond to the reality that so much is possible. For us it’s about how does a memory organisation respond to rampant technological change. How do we take advantage of that potential and apply it? A recognition of the pace of technological change and the need for a culture that allows us to take advantage of radical new disruptive technologies, bring them into our business and achieve business value.

IP: Why is facilitating learning a leadership function?

JS: As a leader you are trying to create a vision for the future to inspire people but you are also trying to open possibility and potential through the signalling that you give. This is not management. Management is more about “you need to do this, or you need to do that”. With signalling we are saying here is something that’s important. If you make time for learning you will have support. So through the signalling you shape the culture and other leaders’ decision making, people’s behaviours and priorities. My focus is not to come up with a plan for who needs to learn what, it is to create a culture where people view learning as an integral part of their work. You create this through conversations and the signals that you give, the actions that you take and the beliefs people have. It’s really important that people believe that if they take time to learn something that the culture here will support that. Not just “I need to add this feature to the website and if I’m not adding it I’m not working.” Yes, you need to add the feature to the website but you also need to take some time to learn about a new method that we can apply to solve whatever problem you are working on.

IP: Are there any other factors driving the leadership focus on learning?

JS: Being a computer scientist in an archive is different from where most computing and IT people find themselves. I can look back a long way and also look forwards a long way. That opportunity to have the archivist’s long look back and forwards is terrific. My first experience with a computer was aged ten so I’ve seen and worked with generations of technology. When we’re dealing with file formats that are long obsolete I’m thinking “Oh yes, I remember when they were introduced!” so I have an inkling about what it means for us, as a digital archive, to sustain digital records through generations of technology to come. It does get you thinking about technology quite carefully, in a very personal way. I think my generation is particularly blessed. We started when a computer was a thing in the home but raw enough that you had to know how the damn thing worked. It’s made it easier to follow the technology story. It may be why the people that worry most about our digital legacy are people who have decades of experience in technology. A brilliant example is Vint Cerf who co created the internet in the 70s. Today he’s one of the best known advocates and evangelists for safeguarding our digital legacy. Why is that? It’s because he has that perspective. It comes down to this question for digital archives, what do we need to do to be effective through generations of technological change? This informs our strategic thinking. It becomes the mission, your ability to apply to serve that mission.

IP: How much can you disrupt the existing model before you disrupt your mission?

JS: The economist Schumpeter talks about creative destruction. He posits that because organisations aren’t radical enough, different approaches come a long and supplant what came before. I think archives have a huge amount to offer but we need to be disruptive in terms of our practice and embrace technological change in order to thrive. That’s what it means to be a digital archive, and it’s one of the ways in which being a digital archive is uncomfortable. The physical archive wasn’t under that same pressure to disrupt its practice and capability as the digital archive is. So, for a digital archive, as the archive of government, new technology poses two questions. Firstly, when a new technology is picked-up in government we need to understand it well enough to identify it, preserve it and make it available. If government is creating neural networks (link), we need to be able to answer a whole bunch of questions. How do I know whether a neural network is a public record? How do I preserve it? How do I make it available? That’s the core of our business, as the archive of a digital government. The second question that we have to ask and answer is “how can we deploy this in furtherance of our mission?” In other words, could this technology inform the business of preserving, contextualising or providing access to public records? In both cases you’ve got to know something about it. To do this you have to horizon scan and make choices about what looks interesting. We’re very fortunate at The National Archives because we’re also an independent research organisation that does Research Council funded investigation into radical disruptive new technology, like blockchain. We’re not looking to deploy blockchain now but we are deeply invested into researching it. We have funding and we’re woking with partners like the University of Surrey and the Open Data Institute to research the potential of that technology to our work as an archive. That research component is a really important part of how you respond, as is your capacity to learn.

IP: Your successful implementation of a NoSQL database for Discovery resulted in a big change of audience opening it up to new archive users. Was that a change of mission as a result of disruptive technology?

JS: Our strategy, Archives Inspire, has at root bottom a strong belief that The National Archives have huge potential public value that we’re in the business of trying to release. Technology, in this case the world wide web, has made it convenient and easy for people who never used archives to get answers to their questions. Suddenly the archive is realising some value and that’s the opportunity. Who is to say that The National Archives is just for academic historians? It is for academic historians but its value is for everybody. So I don’t see a contradiction there. We think carefully, as a leadership team, about the public value of the national archives and it’s a big part of our strategy to reach and engage with new audiences and to change how people think about archives.

IP: Is it a natural fit for a computer scientist to be working on an organisation’s most public interactions?

JS: I have a particular focus and mission around the digital archive. Our current strategy has an audience focus but it puts digital at the heart of that. So that means that I spend my time thinking about our public audience, our academic audience, our government audience, and our relationship and work with other archives. I have to lead for all of that. But I suppose the bits I get to think uniquely about are how the organisation equips itself with the capability to thrive in an era of rampant technological change. For me the key thing about working practice is the importance of having and creating multidisciplinary teams of people with different outlooks and skills to work together. It means having people who have the skills to understand and empathise with users, to appreciate their needs and what product or service will best cater for that need. This exists alongside someone with the ability to write the computer code that will allow that need to be met. And we’re very clear, my directorate is based on multidisciplinary, product oriented teams. That’s something that people need to get used to. It wasn’t that long ago that all of the software developers at the National Archive worked in one team and that is no longer the case.

IP: If the real impact of implementing technology products is unforeseeable, does it mean that the moral and social implications are also unforeseeable? How do leaders maintain an ethical position when there is so much uncertainty?

JS: Having and retaining public trust is hugely important for us as an institution. Developing practice that allows us to retain trust, particularly about being transparent, about working in the open, and enabling the digital archive to be held to account, that’s really key. And when we’re looking at any new technology, we bring in the ethical dimension, so when we had a two day seminar with the International Council on Archives we had external speakers talking about the ethics of using artificial intelligence. It provided an ethical canvas for how you might think about the ethical application of that technology. It’s hugely important for the archive to have an ethical dimension and concern in its application of any type of technology. That’s an integral part of anything we do and again it speaks to the importance of learning – about the technology and its ethical use. We had Professor Floridi (link) come and do our annual digital lecture, one of the UK’s leading ethicists and we try to bring those influences into our world and develop our thinking. Part of how you do that is having those conversation and learning from people who are thinking hard. Leading digital transformation is difficult and I am continually learning. It’s not “here’s a recipe book, do this” and you’re not going to have the capability that you need through the old-fashioned hierarchical command and control approach. That’s not going to work, so you have to think hard about your leadership style. You have to create a more networked organisation. You have to create constructs that push the networked approach over the hierarchical approach. It’s hugely important that you view your desired way of working as people collaborating, working effectively together rather than through a hierarchical organisational design.

IP: But is that effectively an end of leadership?

JS: I think the leader spends much less time managing and much more time talking about the future and opening possibilities and creating connections. And supporting people to learn.

IP: ow does this work in a crisis? JS: My aim is to operate as a leader in a developmental mode with a coaching approach and style. But sometimes you need to get something done and shift to situational leadership. My aim is to be in developmental mode, and that is my normal mode but I have situational leadership in my locker. I will make a conscious decision to apply that style and will signal it to people so they understand what is going on. The important thing is to signal this is what you are doing and why because the risk is that you undermine your core approach. And it’s interesting because sometimes people really like it: “Ah great! You’re telling us what to do and I just have to do it, that’s easy!” Unfortunately, most of the time our problems are much more difficult.