Dr. Knapton is currently the CIO at Progrexion. His expertise is in big data, agile processes and enterprise security.
Predicting the future is a thankless effort, but tech leaders regularly find themselves in the role of prognosticators. Given the significant amount of technical debt building up with aging infrastructures, most CIOs and tech leaders are well aware of the growing systemic risk they face. Convincing other executives to address that risk takes great skill. Too many tech leaders are lacking in the art of persuasion and mistakenly think that others see the same risks and simply accept them. The reality is that most other executives don’t understand the systemic risk because tech leaders haven’t clearly quantified it.
I recently wrote an article explaining how to quantify tech debt and, thus, express the systemic risk facing your organization. That is only the first step toward mitigating that risk. The next step is to explain that risk in a persuasive manner. To do so, we must understand our power base.
Finch and Raven defined five bases of power as follows:
1. Coercive power, which is based on fear and the threat of punishment.
2. Reward power, which is based on the ability to give rewards or incentives.
3. Legitimate power, which is based on formal position or authority.
4. Expert power, which is based on knowledge, skills or expertise.
5. Referent power, which is based on personal characteristics or charisma.
IT executives can use this understanding to influence other executives to address technical debt and systemic risk. For example, coercive power would be used when explaining the threat of system failure and potential financial loss. Legitimate power is using their position within the organization to push for addressing tech debt. Hopefully, they have both expert and referent power by the nature of their background and experience, upon which they can draw to educate others on the consequences of not addressing the systemic risk posed by tech debt. Misunderstanding their base of power can lead to a lack of persuasive arguments for both quantifying and addressing systemic risk.
For a recent example, we need to look no further than the recent issues facing Southwest airlines. While they were affected by the same winter storms as every other airline, their operations were hit much harder than their competition. While other airlines canceled less than 20% of their flights, Southwest canceled more than 70%. Other airlines had recovered in days while Southwest took weeks. Southwest stock dropped by 16%, and they reported over $800 million loss, including over $400 million in cash. The root cause was pure tech debt: Their lack of attention to the modernization of their scheduling technology was a known problem for years. Why was it not addressed? No one was able to make a persuasive case for spending the time and money to fix something that seemed to be working.
Many years ago, I experienced a similar circumstance. I was CIO for a company during an acquisition. As part of our due diligence, I determined that we needed to replace most of the hardware. Their systems were not up to our standards, and it was clear that they had extended their upgrade timelines because they knew they were looking to be acquired. It was clear to me that if we didn’t replace these systems during our acquisition, we would be forced to replace them in very short order. Replacing them now would make for a much smoother overall transition.
Our CEO did not want to incur the large expense of upgrading the hardware and felt that my assessment was biased. He thought I just wanted everything to be the same hardware because it was “just how we do it.” I mistakenly thought that I was operating from a base of expert and referent power, but I had not established this level of trust with him yet. He sought out other opinions and found plenty of people who agreed with him that this was not a needed expense at this time.
Eventually, we made our cases to the owner of the company. The CEO was clearly operating from his legitimate power base, and the owner made it clear that this was an operational decision and that my role as the tech leader was to implement the technology plan in the way that the CEO wanted.
As we began onboarding this company, their systems failed, and the transition was quite bumpy. We ended up having to replace all of the hardware, just as I had predicted. The operations were significantly affected, and we did not make a good first impression as the acquiring company.
As we were dealing with the operational fallout and unexpected financial costs of this upgrade, the owner came to my office to discuss the situation. I thought that he was coming to tell me that he recognized that I had been right, and I was hopeful that this would build trust for future similar situations. I was surprised to find that this was not the case. He made it very clear that I was to blame for this debacle and stated that I should have been more persuasive in articulating the risk associated with ignoring this tech debt. He indicated that I should not have allowed him to decide in the CEO’s favor. This was a key learning moment for me. I recognized that being right has no value if I cannot be persuasive.
IT leaders tend to see potential systemic risk long before other executives. The Southwest technology team certainly knew that their system would fail and that their workarounds would not scale in the event of a large-scale outage. Being right about predicting such systemic failure is not enough. As IT leaders, we need to become experts in the art of persuasion. When we take our seats at the executive table and in the boardroom, being right is not enough; we need to be persuasive. Understanding the base of power from which we are operating can help us become persuasive strategic influencers.
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