Why hope is a CIO leadership skill

CIOs spend so much time preparing for what could go wrong that they can lose sight of what could go right.

Futurist Nikolas Badminton argues that CIOs have an important role in helping their organizations envision a positive future as AI reshapes workflows. Data, he says, is the "wild frontier." As AI gives people new ways to work with data, CIOs must help create a culture around its use and get data scientists, analysts and all other employees on the same page.

Badminton's new book, The Hope Engineer's Playbook, offers CIOs one way to approach that challenge. The book combines futures thinking -- the practice of exploring possible future scenarios -- with what Badminton calls "hope engineering": setting bold goals, finding multiple paths forward and giving teams the agency to act.

In this Q&A, Badminton explains how CIOs can use that approach to lead teams and prepare for what comes next.

Editor's note: The following transcript was edited for brevity and clarity.

What is a hope engineer, and what do they do?

Nikolas Badminton: It's someone who builds hope in an organization. It's about building bigger and bolder visions of where we could go -- that's the futurist angle. Looking out 10 or 20 years helps us identify possibilities ahead of our competition.

Also, the hope engineer piece is realizing that hope and a high-hope leadership mindset motivates teams to be more productive, cohesive and entrepreneurial. It's about vision and delivery. I started using the term "hope engineer" four or five years ago when I was writing my last book, because it exemplified what we needed in the modern world: a big vision and the ability to deliver, rather than treating the two as separate.

How can CIOs benefit from being hope engineers?

Badminton: Data is the wild frontier, and it's likely to always be. More data is created every year than the year before, so managing it will always be complex and challenging.

The systems that will need to link together and share data will be significant. So far, CIOs have had to handle the governance piece, but now it's shifting toward the culture around data, because even your CEO is using LLMs. Suddenly, everyone's a data scientist, and that's a real challenge. The CIO is under immense pressure to deliver something that's magical and instantaneous, which is very difficult.

So, it's important to get those teams on the same page -- not only the data scientists, analysts and people who work with data, but people across the organization. That makes the CIO an even more pivotal role.

Why do you believe hope is such a key ingredient to business strategy?

Badminton: Multiple studies have found this. Gallup did a study across 52 different countries and found that hope was more important than trust in an organization. And it's not only hope that something's going to go right, but something systemic.

Hope theory -- the psychology of how people pursue goals -- tells us to set audacious goals and then find three or four ways to deliver on them. We should also give our team agency. Put decision-making at the sharp end of the project. This helps people feel that they are contributing directly to the vision and creating an outcome that benefits the end user, client or organization.

How can business leaders distinguish between practical hope and blind optimism?

Badminton: Blind optimism is when we just hope we can deliver against the list of tasks we need to do. Practical hope is about checking in with the team daily and weekly to ensure they have enough power to do their work without having to go through reams of bureaucracy.

Make sure decision-making doesn't just live at the program director, vice president or CIO level.

Give teams agency, and if something gets challenging, have pathways thought out as a team. Make sure decision-making doesn't just live at the program director, vice president or CIO level. It should live within the team.

Practical hope is understanding the goals and the possible pathways to achieve them, while having the flexibility to change course. But most importantly, having the agency to make those decisions quickly.

What can CIOs do to give their teams a compelling vision of the future and motivate them to work toward it?

Badminton: When we map out our organization's future, it often comes from a mission statement, the big strategy or our values, and then it's dictated down through the organization. We need to federate that -- give that ability to every part of the organization. Teams should be able to look at the signals of change, see the trends and then pass them around and brainstorm, because ideas are bigger when you share them.

Ideas about how the organization can deliver in new scenarios help us understand the dynamics, which helps us understand strategy. If everyone feels like they can have a say in the organization's future, things evolve, and they evolve against market pressures, but ahead of competition.

A 2018 study found that organizations that undertake futures work are more profitable, grow faster and have twice the market capitalization of those that don't. Organizations that don't do it are at a disadvantage in terms of vision and will fail in the long term.

Are a lot of companies and their leaders resistant to futures work?

Badminton: We're in a reactionary phase of business. Pre-pandemic, a lot of organizations were leaning into the idea of building out a long-term vision, and suddenly reality snapped that back to three to 18 months.

I was in a room with 1,000 people who work in board governance -- the people who organize the CIOs, CTOs and CEOs. I asked them, "Who here plans for their own futures, like for their kids' college education? Who here plans for their retirement?" Everyone raised their hands. I then asked, "Who's got a five or 10-year plan?" There were only about 15 people.

We've got a poverty of imagination around what comes next.

So, we've got a poverty of imagination around what comes next. That is very limiting for an organization that's trying to prove shareholder value as well as value to clients. Making people believe in what you will deliver -- being able to tell a story of 20 years from where you are, about your relevance and big vision -- is incredibly compelling.

How can CIOs convince skeptical executives that futures thinking is a practical tool rather than a meaningless exercise in speculation?

Badminton: People often catastrophize during pitches. They make a catastrophe of the possibility that competition's going to come for us or we're going to become less relevant. That's been a normal mode. When you change the viewpoint to a more hopeful vision of the future, we start to unravel possibilities we never saw before, the unknown risks we never considered, and we gain a bigger, more vibrant picture of what we can deliver.

I just worked with a midsize insurance company that created a strong competitive moat and was underwriting incredibly risky situations. For example, they realized a bigger player could easily, within a year, take all their business. That organization, within a day of working through the signals, trends and scenarios and building their future story, decided to change their business model and start a roadmap to deliver technology that would help them build more frictionless relationships with self-service very quickly. So, very practical things happen when you do this work in line with the company's bigger vision.

A decent portion of your book is about the hopeful futures framework. What is it and how can CIOs apply it?

Badminton: There are three parts. The first is around exploration. We reflect on how we got where we are, and then build big, bold, hopeful visions of the futures we want to deliver and where we want to play.

The second stage is about empowering teams so they understand the bigger goals, the pathways forward and how we can deliver on them.

The third piece is about execution, giving teams agency in decision-making and giving them clear actions. When we must shift pathways or pay attention to changes in signals or trends, we should actually have the flexibility to do so.

What's one piece of leadership advice you would give to CIOs right now?

Badminton: Recognize that wisdom within an organization is the most valuable asset you have. This isn't data, information and knowledge. It's the lessons from what we've done right, what we've done wrong and what we've understood about the industry that we've lived in for decades. We need constant energy to analyze, evaluate and have bigger conversations across teams.

That wisdom piece is the huge differentiator. We live in a world where everyone's talking about AI and data, but the wisdom and the wisdom economy we're building are the most vibrant and important pieces for an organization.

Tim Murphy is a site editor and writer for the IT Strategy team at TechTarget.