The only CIO resolution that matters

In many communities, December is a month set aside for reflection. To wit, across nearly every discipline, one finds magnum opuses entitled “Lessons Learned” or “The Year in Review” as the year draws to a close.

Such exercises are valuable but anachronistic. Perhaps in an age when our forebears huddled around campfires waiting for warmer weather annual reviews were the optimal way to accumulate knowledge and empower human agency. Today, not so much.

Instead, at the end of the year, CIOs should be looking forward not backward. In fact, continuous real-time learning must become an IT leadership priority. Here’s what that means and how to achieve it.

A real-time world needs real-time learning

In our hyper-accelerated age, lessons need to be assimilated as they happen. The digital world is locked in a cognitive dogfight — i.e., a multidimensional, high-speed arena where supranormal value is returned to those who understand first and act effectively fastest. US Air Force Colonel John Boyd captured this aviation combat concept through the OODA loop, in which decision-making is a continuous cycle of observe, orient, decide, and act.

CIOs need to own, or at the very least contribute substantively to, the overarching narrative regarding IT’s business context — what is going on, what has gone right, what has gone wrong, which technology developments require action, and so on. Ideally, the office of the CIO would brief the enterprise on a systemic basis on these matters. I am thinking of something similar to the President’s Daily Brief.

Four critical decisions need to be made to establish such a brief: what form should the briefing to take, what subject areas should we keep an eye on, which constituencies need to be briefed, and what time frame should we use. Once those decisions have been made, a systemic program of insight capture must also be instituted for the briefings to be effective. Such a learning process — observe, orient — can’t be left to chance.

The CIO could assign an individual or set of deputies responsible for enumerating and sharing targeted insights to critical constituencies on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. This knowledge wrangling — and ignorance vanquishing — operation could work at a departmental or group level and rotate around the staff on an episodic basis.

As a first step toward reducing uncertainty and surprise in 2024, I suggest CIOs take baby steps to operationalize learning by leaning into this briefing structure. Begin simply by replicating the Today Show’s“Weekly Download,” Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway’s Pivot “Wins & Losses,” or Sports Center’s“Top Ten” for your organization’s technology context, within and outside the enterprise.

Uncertainty is Certain

A key reason to do this is because uncertainty abounds. In fact, as I conduct my year-end walkabout in the C-Suite, I sense a much higher than normal sense of confusion and uncertainty. Michael Gapen, chief US economist at Bank of America, summed things up commenting, “We’re kind of at peak uncertainty.”

There are a wide range of possible outcomes in 2024. But make no mistake, there is a wide range of possible outcomes every year because there is always uncertainty looking forward.

Still, CIOs need to make sure the entire organization is certain about two things: that 2024 is going to be better than 2023; and that IT/digital is not part of the problem, it is part of the solution.

Sharp and timely briefings, honed by continually learning process, can help achieve this.

Make technology ‘Good’ again

As a futurist I feel comfortable forecasting that technology is not going to be Time’s man, woman, person, or thing of the year — as it was in 1982 — in the foreseeable future.

Attitudinal surveys indicate that the near universal belief in the inherent “goodness” of technology is most definitely a thing of the past.

One of the faint signals futurists track is how technology is being portrayed in arts and literature. One would be hard pressed to find a novel — e.g., Dave Eggers’ The Circle;Naomi Alderman’s The Future; Joanne McNeil’s Wrong Way — or work of art that portrays technology favorably. Stated simply, people are worried about technology and don’t trust its use.

CIOs need to act aggressively to thwart this creeping techno-skepticism. Throughout history, humans have struggled to do the right thing. CIOs need to act such that key executives believe that doing technology the right way is the right thing to do.

Create a list of the top 10 individuals in your ecosystem and measure their attitudes regarding technology. CIOs need to insert themselves into the headspace of these colleagues, knowing what outcomes they desire to achieve in 2024 and what nightmares they want to avoid.

Using this data as raw material CIOs need to sculpt a persuasive and personally relevant picture of what the 2024 technology landscape might look like. This “Tech 2024” vision must reek of human juices — i.e., reflect the hopes and fears of the top 10 execs — and be utterly devoid of the drab sameness of anodyne pro-AI, anti-hacker blubberings that characterize so much tech speak currently.

Establishing such a vision will also strongly inform your briefing strategy.