How 'The Accidental CIO' book can help CTO/CIOs (and a giveaway!)
Scott Millett's journey to CIO is not too dissimilar to my own. A new role with new expectations and responsibilities led to learning. Let's explore some of the insights from his book.
After reading an advance reader copy of Scott Millett's ‘The Accidental CIO’, I’ve concluded that this book is a spiritual relative to my publication, Great CTOs Focus on Outcomes, and, thus, an important resource to increase its visibility with my readers. We could describe it as a literary ‘brother’ from another ‘father’ 😂. Let me explain the points of connection and more importantly, why this could be a great reference book to keep handy for CTOs, CIOs and other executive technology leaders.
The importance of context in CTO decision-making
Scott’s book has a foreword by Simon Wardley, whose work has influenced my thinking and helped me navigate challenges as a CTO and CIO*. One of Wardley’s themes is the importance of context for determining what options to consider when facing challenges. Wardley is known for his mapping approach, which strategic leaders can use to collaboratively assess with their peers and teams what the current situation was and what options may be adjacent to their current position that might present an opportunity for progress and even competitive advantage.
The critical axes of Wardley’s maps are the proximity of a given component to the user and the degree of evolution in terms of commodification the component possesses, i.e., is the component in question newly invented, custom-built by the organisation, acquired as a product from the marketplace, or available with the sorts of guarantees we might expect of a utility? The degree of commodification comes down to how well the problems (“user needs”) and potential solutions (“components”) are known and how well the market can provide services that meet those needs.
Scott also refers to VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) and CYNEFIN, two other frameworks that assess a situation's context and inform the nature of the response.
I’ve written about the context of decision-making numerous times in this publication, such as in this post:
Experience shapes our tendencies
From my coaching, I observe that many CIOs and CTOs struggle to use context to inform which approaches are appropriate. This can be explained by tendencies shaped by their prior experience. Suppose they come from a software development or IT background. In that case, either background can overly influence their choices as executives, compromising a significant proportion of their decisions by being inappropriate to the context. Such biases can impact the quality of decision-making and, in turn, the results the CTO/CIO can achieve.
These biases can be strongly ingrained as they are often responses to issues that affected us previously and which had served us well many times before. For instance, those with IT backgrounds apply controls to reduce the variance users experience in areas that need flexibility. Those with software development experience may apply practices that suit the adaptability required when exploring the problem space in areas where reliability and predictability of service are more important. Starting with this foreword told me that Scott had experienced these challenges and, like me, learned the importance of understanding better what stage of understanding we are at with a given problem domain and how that might influence the appropriate responses. More on this later.
I covered these drivers of the need for adaptability in my post:
So regardless of these tendencies of those depending on software development or IT operations experience, all Technology leaders need a more adaptive toolkit to meet today’s demands because of the degree of disruptive change and rising expectations.
Lean and agile practices are more relevant today.
Scott has explicitly subtitled his book A Lean and Agile Playbook for IT, and initially, I wondered whether this conflicted with the idea of context-informed decision-making. After all, Wardley talks about how lean and agile are the most appropriate in particular contexts and how other approaches, such as more traditional project management, ITIL, Six Sigma, and other IT practices, are better fit in other contexts also likely to be within the scope and responsibility of CTOs/CIOs.
It was self-affirming for me to see Scott make a similar observation: The amount of digital change and rise of expectations has led to an unprecedented need for adaptability in IT. More often than ever, even in a narrower IT-focused CIO role, you would face problems that needed more responsive approaches than before - hence the value of an Agile and Lean Playbook for IT.
This doesn’t mean you apply lean and agile concepts in all areas what is most important is the availability of the service and the confidence with which it can be leveraged. In these cases, you would select practices that optimise for these attributes and avoid practices that might diminish these.
In other contexts, however, you may notice that user friction is higher because the range of problems they face has widened. The variety of solutions they must deploy to address these have evolved or widened. This could indicate that agile, lean or design-related practices may be most appropriate. I work with several executives who are finding themselves in new territory as their users’ needs are bifurcating due to the complexity increasing in their domains, and the users’ expectations of the sophistication of the solutions are also increasing because of what they have experienced in other work contexts or even in their personal lives.
How do leaders lead in this new environment?
Scott identifies design thinking, lean thinking, agile, and Wardley Mapping as key philosophies that provide a starting point for developing models for approaching modern demands and challenges of technology and information systems. I’ve used each of these approaches extensively. I am not exactly sure what elevates these four concepts above other useful concepts CIOs can apply (the vast majority he provides some coverage of throughout the book) beyond the fact that they are probably the four technology leaders would use the most. I would say concepts such as Beyond Budgeting (bbrt.org) and CYNEFIN (thecynefin.co) - both of which Scott also covers in the book - might have been almost as widely applied by me in my CTO/CIO roles. Still, if I were forced to identify a top 4, I probably would have arrived at the same four he did.
Scott almost immediately also introduces ideas from Eric Rees’ The Lean Startup and Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, two other adjacent or overlapping bodies of knowledge that are also up there in terms of influencing my thinking and helping lead my leadership team to workable models when confronted by the nature of the challenges described earlier. He also cites a lesser-known resource from Simon Wardley, which, in some ways, maybe a more immediately practical resource than Wardley mapping, and that is the Wardley Doctrine. I’ve mentioned the Wardley Doctrine in this publication before, but I certainly should write more about how I’ve leveraged it in the future. The layperson way I describe the purpose of the Wardley Doctrine is to answer, ‘What would an organisation need to follow a strategy?’
The Accidental CIO covers a workable description of each of these areas and an explanation of key concepts such that the reader, whether familiar with these ideas or not, will be able to engage with the later chapters and a basis for how these ideas could help shape a model an organisation helps define for itself.
The operating model and different operating models for different classes of problem
‘The Accidental CIO’ lays out the attributes of an operating model for meeting the demands of a modern technology organisation as how we:
are organised.
govern.
work.
source and manage talent.
lead.
Consistent with the discussion of context above, he highlights that depending on the nature of the work for different responsibilities or purposes of the part of the technology organisation, the approach to each of these elements may differ. For instance, is the problem one in uncharted areas, optimisation of more known problems or where competition and refinement have led to a highly commoditised set of established solutions?
All of this resonates with my journeys as a technology leader. Most of these conclusions were shaped by first tackling the problems with the wrong approaches and, through failure, finding these alternative philosophies listed above as a way to think differently about the problem and find a way forward.
Across the operating model, Scott describes four themes which have all been covered extensively in this publication:
outcomes over output
intrinsic motivation
being agile, not ‘doing’ agile
Manage the flow of work, not people
How IT leaders can develop mental models to help their organisation succeed
The Accidental CIO does an excellent job surveying all the concepts that are likely to be relevant should the CIO need to become more strategic and more responsive to the needs of their organisations. As the book and this publication make the case, the conditions most organisations find themselves in see technology permeating more aspects of the business, disruptive change occurring at a higher rate, and consumer expectations bleeding into corporate expectations, leading to more friction with users.
These concepts can be applied to assess the organisation's state and needs and identify the operating model(s) needed to respond to those needs. Scott recommends starting with new mental models and leading leaders and teams to different conclusions.
Specifically, he calls out shifting from linear thinking to systems thinking - a topic I frequently cover. He also recommends adopting the principles of Beyond Budgeting to shift from command and control leadership. As these principles suggest, providing transparency and agency enables a great step in change. Still, I don’t think alone is sufficient to bring about this change. Nonetheless, throughout the book, I note he shares many complementary approaches that can support this shift, so I think this is more a function of the unenviable task of trying to organise all this information, which may be potentially new to the reader and combined in myriad ways.
In summary…
The Accidental CIO provides an excellent survey of the methods and practices that CTOs and CIOs should familiarise themselves with to meet the new challenges of this technology era. He does a great job of providing an introduction to all of these ideas but, more importantly, provides some framework for where and how they might be applied and how they might be incorporated into the new approach to work. For this reason alone, this book is a great reference for CTOs, CIOs and other technology executives. These ideas are fast becoming expected knowledge for these roles and, more importantly, as evidenced by my experiences, Scott’s experiences and many other leaders I have worked with, are key ideas that are instrumental in helping us navigate the challenges of today and likely the challenges of tomorrow, too.
I heartily recommend technology leaders get a copy of this book if you are grappling with any of the challenges described above. If you want to be confident, you are aware of the most useful frames of thinking when confronting these challenges and have a starting point for how they coincide and work together to help you The Accidental CIO provides the most comprehensive starting point I’ve read.
The Giveaway!
Scott has kindly offered readers of ‘Great CTOs Focus on Outcomes’ two free copies of The Accidental CIO by Scott Millett. I am introducing Group CTO coaching cohorts that are friendly to multiple time zones worldwide, starting with Southeast Asia. Sign up for more information about these coaching opportunities to enter the draw for these books.
What I can offer you with Group CTO/CIO coaching:
Move from surviving to thriving - from fire-fighting to strategic leadership that provides your organisation a competitive advantage.
A Group coaching format - you get coaching and advice from me as well as the other CTO/CIOs in the group.
I am an experienced CTO, CIO, and CPTO leading multinational SaaS market leading companies.
I offer both coaching AND mentorship. As a coach, I can help you clarify your thinking, stay focused, and commit to what is important. As a mentor, I share relevant experiences leading global technology teams.
Sign up to learn more about Group CTO/CIO coaching in your timezone and go into the draw for one of the copies of The Accidental CIO
Do you have any key philosophies, mental models, frameworks, or other concepts that have helped you navigate modern challenges and achieve success? Share your experiences in the comments.
* There isn’t a standard agreed definition of CTO or CIO; in many organisations, the senior-most executive technology role may be titled either. Many organisations feature both roles and most often, this maps to the CTO being responsible for the organisation's software or R&D and the CIO being responsible for the organisation's information systems.