'Your real challenge is not tech': The modern leader's approach

Stop thinking through a technical lens, says CTO Kingsley Hibbert

IT leaders tend to look on technology as a solution to every problem, but for real success you need to go deeper.

The technology industry has a habit of getting very excited about technology. Hardly surprising, but not helpful when it's the only lens you can see through to solve business challenges.

Kingsley Hibbert, CTO of digital agency Sagittarius, says for the classic challenge of business process change, the solution always starts with people.

"Weird from a CTO, right? People are like, ‘You're the tech guy, why are you talking about people?'"

Thinking about "that new shiny thing" when going through a period of transformation is perfectly natural, but ignoring the people who'll use that shiny thing means "it's never going to succeed."

You need to understand your people and their capabilities, he argues. Once you've done that, you can start to look at the tech.

That does, admittedly, skip over a lot of the work it takes to reach that understanding, but Kingsley stands by his strategy versus what he calls "the traditional CTO approach":

"That may just be like, ‘Right, you need a brand-new System X because it's going to do that.' Which is equally important, right? But the people part is the key for me, and these are things that are common across industries and sectors."

People, he argues, have to be the starting point for any transformation:

"If you are looking at a people shift [to] change your organisation, because you're bringing in automation or some AI-type things, you start to leverage that in terms of the capabilities you have within your people force. How does that adapt in this new world you want to get to?

"Some people think it's an overnight thing and it doesn't quite work like that. It's almost like incremental steps to get there. And that's challenging for some businesses."

Even the board expects - sometimes even hopes - the CTO will suggest a technical answer to all their problems: a situation Kingsley has encountered before. But, he says, "the realisation is I'm not looking at that solution. I'm looking at your particular niche problem, your particular niche challenges, your aspirations, before even I'm considering a tech solution to it."

That's because, on a broad level, "your real challenge is not tech," though it might be part of it.

Kingsley believes executives should stop looking to IT leaders for a technical solution to non-technical problems.

"It's a shift for the board, where it is, ‘Right, I just want that solution thing that's going to solve that'. It's like, let's dig deeper now. That's the intelligence CTOs and CIOs bring, in a language that you know the board and investors understand.

"That is always the key, because they're looking for their returns, looking for that change, looking for that margin, looking for reduction of costs, whatever it may be. It's actually leveraging that in terms of the whole package that makes sense and resonates with them, rather than putting in a brand-new CMS system [and saying it] is going to change their whole organisation. It may only touch a small part of that, but there's bigger things to consider."