9 June 2014 · Originally published on blog.gardeviance.org

[Archive] On capabilities

Jay Fry is doing a grand job of tweeting some choice quotes from the Gartner CIO survey. I've already commented on the

'top ten challenges for I&O leaders' but this is another scorcher.

Ok, here's my problem with the quote. Unless you've mapped out the environment and created a meaningful strategy based upon this and gameplay then how do these companies know what capabilities they'll need? 

I more than understand that most strategy is simply 'backward causality' (i.e. copying others) and hence if you produce a list based on this - digital first, agile, big data, cloud, social media etc - then you can come up with a fairly uniform list of missing skills. But this doesn't mean you actually need those capabilities. It's more than likely that any strategy based upon 'what 67% of other generals do' is the wrong strategy.

In fact, I have quite a bit of evidence to point to this and how lack of situational awareness (a key element to strategic gameplay) is correlated with poor market performance (see figure 1)

Figure 1 - Market Cap impact of Strategic Gameplay

figure 1)

So, how exactly do these CIOs know what capability they need? Certainly the list of top ten challenges doesn't give me confidence or maybe I just inhabit a completely different world.

Originally published on blog.gardeviance.org.