CIOs who want to prosper in the future must escape a less-than-celebrated present.
Technology in general has slipped out of favor. Science fiction has been taken over by dystopia and apocalyptic scenarios. Public discourse frequently devolves into argumentation over end times. Everyone appears to think that the future is going to suck.
Long gone are the good feelings engendered by IT enabling the remote work that kept food on the table and the economy going during the pandemic. In many minds, IT has been demoted to the little brother who can’t keep up.
According to Mark Andreessen, sometime between 2006 and 2013, incoming freshmen at Harvard bought into the mantra that “tech is evil.” This has trickled into the general IT mindset.
For many outside the profession, IT resembles the portfolio of televised advertisements during Super Bowl LIX: “very little creativity,” “not much in the way of simple, effective storytelling,” “not worth the money,” and “not targeted at me.”
IT’s brighter future starts with stakeholders
The other day I saw a bumper sticker that read, “Your company culture is not words on your website or posters on the wall. It’s how your people feel on a Sunday night.” On Sunday night, are stakeholders thinking positively about putting their hands back on your systems?
Anthropologists and futurists have long known that “It is harder to think than it is to feel.” How do people “feel” about IT?
In Ryan J. Reilly’s Sedition Hunters: How January 6th Broke the Justice System, we learn the unofficial motto of the IT department at the Federal Bureau of Investigation was “The FBI’s information technology (IT) offerings — yesterday’s technology tomorrow.” Not the greatest endorsement.
CIOs need to win back the hearts and minds of stakeholders, cease being meretricious — i.e., dazzling footwork on issues of no real importance — and start positively impacting the work-life experience of customers and employees.
At first glance, one might think “winning hearts and minds” requires a new narrative strategy. Before you can write the story, you have to understand the reader.
CIOs can use a simple collaborative Cartesian exercise to kick-start deep stakeholder understanding. Begin by drawing a four-box matrix. The horizontal axis plots an item’s urgency. The vertical axis plots an item’s importance. Thus Quadrant 1 (“High Urgency, High Importance”) requires action. Quadrant 2 (“High Importance, Low Urgency”) requires planning. Quadrant 3 (“High Urgency, Low Importance”) can be delegated to staff. Quadrant 4 (“Low Urgency, Low Importance”) can be deleted.
Bringing key stakeholders into the same room and positioning critical IT resource allocations on the matrix is always an illuminating exercise. CIOs tell me that every day is a knife fight to move items out of Quadrant 1, items that don’t really need to be there.
Successful CIOs live in Quadrants 1 and 2, farm out Quadrant 3 to their team, and Quadrant 4 items don’t consume precious resources. Success isn’t just a matter of whether a CIO can do the tasks they choose to take on, but also of whether they choose to take on the right tasks.
Defining a problem is the key to solving it. It’s good to start by determining whether there is a problem, and if there is, determining how big a problem it is it. Perceptions may vary. CIOs need to surface these perceptual differences and enable a consensus to emerge.
Shifting focus from frustration to anticipation
We live in an angry age. Pundits claim there is a “grievance industrial complex” designed to heighten unhappiness. Rather than “embracing the cringe,” CIOs need to recognize that anger is a signal that needs to be interpreted and acted upon. CIOs must help stakeholders get beyond anger at whatever might be bothering them in the present and move to anticipating what they want to happen in the future.
As President Eisenhower told us, “Anger cannot win. It cannot even think clearly.”
The challenge is people are very certain about what they don’t like about the status quo. They are less certain about what they really want in the future.
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Source: News