Today’s best CIOs are strategy wranglers

When we started this century the buzz in IT was “everything is going to have a chip.” Twenty-plus years in, CIOs have discovered that, when it comes to IT, everything is going to need a strategy.

As CIO, you need a data strategy. You need a cloud strategy. You need a security strategy. If you want to sell anything to anyone under 40, you will need a compellingly composed and authentically executed sustainability strategy. And with 85% of the workforce considering changing jobs and skill sets for jobs changing 25% since 2015, you definitely need a talent and skills strategy.

Just this past year another strategy must-have arrived to upend nearly every organization. And no, “AI” is not a strategy for artificial intelligence.

In the aughts (2000s), the leadership focus for IT was “strategic alignment” — that is, linking IT’s strategy to the business. In the 2020s, we are wrestling with “alignment of strategies,” with IT and business leaders working in concert to get all organizational strategies to work harmoniously together.

2024 is going to be a big year for political, economic, and technology decisions. Yet many organizations are sleepwalking into the future, allowing themselves to be propelled by inertial forces rather than strategic intent. For example, a recent BCG survey of senior executives uncovered an “absence of a strategy for responsible AI in 42% of respondents.”

What strategy really means

Strategy is not just a course in business school. Strategy is not a label you stick on what you are doing. Strategy is not even something that aims to answer every question. And strategy is most definitely not a “Well, we have a PowerPoint deck and a spreadsheet, so we are done” situation.

Strategy is a hotly debated, explicitly articulated set of actions and resources designed to deliver a specific set of results. CIOs have to make sure that the strategic “debate” happens and that all key stakeholders participate. Emerging from such debates should be a will to act.

Strategy today cannot be the top-down, C-suite exclusive exercise it has been in the past. Strategy is not an intellectual game of chess played by operationally naïve senior executives blithely manipulating human pawns. Sir Philip Armand Hamilton Gibbs KBE, who served as one of five official British reporters during the First World War, famously classified strategy as “a fetish of elementary ideas raised to the nth degree of pomposity.” Today’s strategy must have much less pomp and be reflective of on-the-ground behavioral and attitudinal circumstance.

In other words, strategy must be inclusive, and it must work bottom-up, reflecting the dreams and fears, as well as the various mental universes, of all stakeholders.

Putting strategy to work

Two and a half thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Protagoras concluded, “Man is the measure of all things.” Behavioral economists tell us self-interest lies at the root of human motivation. Strategy — even and especially technology strategy — must reek of human juices. Strategy must be a “We the People” kind of thing — not so much a “Song of My Tech Stuff” along the lines of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

Leon Panetta, former chairman of the House Budget Committee, White House chief of staff, director of the CIA, and defense secretary, was able to craft effective strategies working with diverse constituencies by encircling friends and foes with their common interests. An important first step of strategy is to determine, “What can we all agree on?”

One of the things we need to agree on is the facts. CIOs need to understand and assist the entire organization in grokking the current technological realities and emerging new forces driving the economy. CIOs need to aggressively debunk “alternative facts,” a concept introduced by American political consultant and pollster Kellyanne Conway. CIOs need to be very proactive in shaping the information environment in which strategic decisions are made. At its simplest, strategy is problem-solving, not tool/technology selection. Organizations need to decide what problems they want to solve.

When speaking with Paul Roehrig, chief strategy and marketing officer at Ascendion and author of What To Do When Machines Do Everything: How To Get Ahead in a World of AI, Algorithms, Bots, and Big Data,about strategy we concluded that a company is not a thing. It is a bunch of people who decide to do something together. Strategy is the operating system for “what is that.”

Strategy is not a synonym for “plan.” A strategy that does not specify results is not a strategy.

Maintaining a fact-based, not-tainted-by-FOMO-hysteria strategic perspective is difficult in a world awash with seemingly infinite venture capital money — a world facing what Philip Kotler, best-selling marketing author, consultant, and professor emeritus, describes as a “Malthusian specter of product overpopulation.”

But it is what today’s CIOs need to do in service of their companies — in other words, their totality of collective stakeholders. And they must do it in a way that the resulting, myriad strategies are orchestrated to work together harmoniously.