before, you are wise;
after, you are wise;
in between, you are otherwise.
David Zindell
We may never look at the phrase “hindsight is 2020” the same way ever again.
Being a futurist is weary work indeed; prophets have been known to be stoned. Occupational hazard aside, the CIO is the official futurist of the C-Suite. You are expected to know what is coming and to know what to do about it.
At the same time, you are to not make too big of waves or demand too much of budget. Good luck with that.
It’s also critical to not get lost in the buzzwords or the hot trends. Or worse, to think that because you are attending to the hot trends, you are on top of the future. The CIO as futurist needs to make hard decisions based on deep convictions while employing them with fluidity and flexibility.
The CIO is about getting it done.
As I have been watching the aftershocks of 2020, I’ve noticed six convictions that will better serve the CIO as a strategic futurist.
1 Hire experience.
Peep Laja, founder of growth experts CXL, recently wrote that 10 years ago, he would have said, “Hire for talent, train for skill.” Today, he practices “Hire the most experienced person I can afford.”
Why? “You just move so much faster and get way higher quality with people who know what they’re doing and know what great looks like.”
You might be bucking the hot trend of recruiting young talent, but you will be moving solidly and more confidently into the future.
2 Know the customer better than anyone else in the room.
Marketing has the information. They can tell you all kinds of things about the customer. But they can’t tell anyone else how to build the bridge to their experience. That’s the CIO role. That’s technology.
You must know the one thing about the customer no one else knows: how to remove customer barriers. Marketing may know what the barriers are; you know how to address them. Build product and strategy around the barriers.
3 Budget differently.
CIOs must speak up about the budget process and function. What is working, keep. What is not, change. Are you better served by a rolling budget with quarterly reviews?
Obviously, partnership with the CFO is critical, and alignment with the Board is essential. But the CIO deals with a different “spend-animal.” It’s not enough to forecast. Tech has to be responsive to strategic business shifts more than any other department. It’s ocean waves, not calm lakes.
4 Don’t build data farms. Build intelligence factories.
We know that data is king. But use of data is queen. She has all the strategic moves on the board.
The CIO leads the way in how to think with what is had. Your communication and collaboration is focused around “So what?”
You are the Queen of “If that, then this.”
It begins by treating your teams as intelligence harvesters, and then translating those insights into strategic considerations for your peers and stakeholders.
Again, it doesn’t matter that people know what you know. It matters that they know what to do about it. That is the CIO.
5 Be open and reasonable.
Businesses are becoming more open with information. Employees are getting better access to what is happening, and it needs to be communicated with “reasons” behind it. Collaboration and innovation require more than knowledge, but also the thinking behind the knowledge.
Open but fixed defeats the purpose. And we have been there. We know what it is like to be told but not invited.
The CIO is in the perfect place to provide what is happening and the rationale behind it, so that input and collaboration feels not like a tug of war of ideas but an orchestration of contributions.
You fight on so many battlefronts. Infighting, outside competition, market shifts. Today has enough trouble of its own. But: The core identity of a CIO is as a futurist. You are the only one who knows first what can be done next. Whether it should be done is a corporate decision. How and why is your sweet spot.
