DailyPost 2327
A DIGITALLY CHALLENGED LEADERSHIP
The world lives with 21st century technology, exponentially growing, with 20th century institutions and mindsets of the 19th century. Democracy came to into existence to bring real time dynamism into leadership with churning happening every five years. India democracy has developed a freaky knack of sucking professionals and transforming them into pure political animals. Not many professionals anyway get into politics. We know of the poverty line and how it impacts the people below it. We also know the functional and real literacy lines and how the population below it is impacted in multifarious ways. The most recent one in known as the digital divide, with very serious implications.
By literacy we understand education, it is not one skill, it the platform which makes everything happen in today’s world. Education we can safely say is directly proportional to your success. With digital technology becoming the mainstream, a digital divide has now been created, depending on which side of digital capability you are. As in education, if you are on wrong side of the digital divide, you can be safely termed as digitally challenged. The digitally challenged face any number of issues in their day-to-day existence. Digital expertise, acumen, understanding and vision are the key to today’s existence.
Full and proper digital enablement is the only way to propel oneself, system, ecosystem and country further. Not even being able to navigate the digital world is showing up everywhere in this country. What percentage of our leaders political or bureaucratic are digitally challenged? You have to be a practitioner of digital technology to a considerable degree, to be ahead of the curve. All our public domain discourse at the governance; both bureaucratic and political executive level, is just a play of a few facts and figures and some forced narrative peppered into it, called the national narrative. With political waters reaching the nose level and no worthwhile tech, information and data input, where does the leadership go from here.
While the world is swiftly moving of the machine learning and artificial intelligence paradigm, we are still struggling with actionable intelligence. That the leadership is digitally challenged does not require any debate. Can a digitally challenged leadership manage the most complex human challenge of democratic decision making? What they would deliver with this skewed decision making model has been there for all of us to see. Unlike the educated and uneducated, digital world is no nuanced, that even after having everything, you might feel you don’t have anything, because you don’t the skill to use the data around. The political narrative is yours and some make believe data of whatever veracity is pulled together to provide a semblance of the rational decision making. That has brought us to this morass, it is taking to us to a self-propelled nemesis.
DECISION MAKING CANNOT HAPPEN ON DIGITAL CRUTCHES.
Sanjay Sahay