Driving Digital Diplomacy

Feb 27, 2014

McKinsey identify six types of ‘digital leader’:

– the Producer, who creates content that makes people ‘lean forward’
– the Distributor, who allows co-creation and necessary anarchy
– the Recipient, who manages information overflow
– the Orchestrator, who drives and mentors social media use
– the Architect, who creates the right infrastructure
– the Analyst, who tries to stay ahead of the curve

As this blog (Naked Diplomat) has argued, successful diplomats will now need to do all of this, pretty much all of the time. Foreign Ministries have to recruit and empower digital natives to whom it comes naturally; and train/equip the rest of us. There are growing threats from engagement: the smartphone with which I do core parts of my job is also the means by which terrorists track my movements. But the biggest risk is not to engage.

Good diplomats were already Producers before social media gave them a means to amplify the product on such a scale: envoys tried to create influential and interesting content long before they became e-nvoys. Traditionally this was read by a handful of fellow diplomats. Now, to have influence, we have to produce for an entirely different group (not audience). A recent FCO innovation that measures how many colleagues read our internal reports has driven many to refocus on public content – this post is openly available rather than an internal memo. There should be no set rules on how we do this – with authenticity the key, individuals need to find their own tempo and their own voice. I’ve posted elsewhere on this site ideas on how to do it. (http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/tomfletcher/2013/11/29/waves-arguments-and-cliffhangers-ten-ways-diplomats-can-communicate-better/)

The hardest of the six attributes for traditional Foreign Ministries will be the Distributor. Encouraging a ‘certain level of anarchy’ will bring out the smelling salts in corners of most civil services, designed over centuries to do precisely the opposite. But co-creation and horizontal collaboration are more straightforward for bureaucracies – traditionally even the simplest minute or telegram was co-created, in the sense of being seen and commented on by numerous, often too many, people. We’ll need to find our inner anarchists, and crowd source more policy… MORE