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CIOs must have the 'beginner's mind'

Matthew Burbidge
By Matthew Burbidge
Johannesburg, 27 Sept 2016
Gartner's Raskin urged CIOs to have the 'beginner's mind' - a concept borrowed from the late Zen master Shunryu Suzuki.
Gartner's Raskin urged CIOs to have the 'beginner's mind' - a concept borrowed from the late Zen master Shunryu Suzuki.

Gartner fellows had sage advice for CIOs at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2016 in Cape Town this week, telling them it's still vital to develop a bimodal style of leadership.

Gartner has long held that a bimodal approach to work - running stable day-to-day operations while delivering innovation - is a vital ingredient to business success.

Peter Sondergaard, a senior vice president Gartner Research, told reporters that while by its count 40% of organisations had some kind of structural bimodality, it remained an issue of some 'complexity' for many CIOs.

"It's about deciding whether you run dual structures, or a single structure with dual purposes. How do you set the right kind of metrics for the organisation that determines success, both in running scalable operations that are secure, and delivering change?"

He said he had not seen the adoption, at scale, of the bimodal approach. That said, many companies were experimenting with it in some way or another, perhaps with an agile project or two.

Diversity in the team

Mark Raskino, a vice president and Gartner fellow in the Digital Business Leadership research team, outlined steps CIOs could take to improve their bimodal leadership decisions.

He suggested that CIOs should establish diversity within their teams and they should be looking for individuals with different ways of thinking. He said creating a 'team of rivals' was far harder than forming a team of people who all thought alike and shared a common cognitive style.

He said a team of rivals are competitive, emotional, argumentative and inquisitive. In such a team there would be a 'diversity of thought guided by a unity or purpose' and as a leader, the challenge would be in ensuring that 'everything didn't explode' and that team members stayed productive.

The magic of bimodal leadership, having experienced hands, but a beginners' mind at the same time.

Mark Raskino

Raskino urged CIOs to copy emerging digital business techniques, ideas and experiments from other industries. He pointed to examples such as blockchain in the banking industry, mass customisation from the automotive industry, or the Internet of things from consumer electronics.

Raskino then waxed philosophical, introducing the concept of the 'beginner's mind', borrowed from the late Zen master Shunryu Suzuki.

In his landmark work Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Suzuki wrote: "If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few."

Raskino urged CIOs to 'set aside all the experience you have built and do that over and over again'.

"This is the magic of bimodal leadership, having experienced hands, but a beginners' mind at the same time".

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