Today’s best CIOs are strategy wranglers

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.