All Hands on Tech

15Guidance

Citizen development is done by people. Any successful digital strategy is at its core a successful human strategy. When digital initiatives fail, it is often due to a lack of emphasis on human considerations. It’s rarely the technology that causes failure.

With governance structures in place, we now turn to elements that we classify under the umbrella of “guidance.” Guidance includes the training and support an enterprise offers its citizens and the development of formal and informal communities.

These next forks explore the level of autonomy and exploration that citizens are afforded as they learn. While principles can be laid by organizations, your individuals will tell you what types of guidance actually resonate with them. We suggest you listen.

Fork 7: Solo or in Teams

Do you trust citizens to innovate on their own? Do you have the capacity for citizens to work in teams? The following examples illustrate both the individual and collective ends of the citizen collaboration spectrum, but this decision need not be a zero-sum game.

Go Alone

Arcadis is the second largest architecture firm in the world. They have more than 4,000 citizen developers, primarily focused on delivering services on projects to improve the quality of life in cities and communities. Each one of these citizen developers is an island. “If you build something, you’re accountable for it,” says Freek Matheij, Arcadis’s global platform director.

At the moment, there are few fusion teams—collaborations ...