Back in January 2014, I wrote Things that didn’t happen, and what it means, reflecting on things that didn’t happen in 2013. Specifically, I argued that the work management marketplace hadn’t consolidated:

There is no ‘winner’ in the work management (social business) marketplace. There are dozens of competitors — IBM, Microsoft, Jive, Podio — with amazingly similar approaches to what they call ‘collaboration’ — the context-based (projects, groups, departments, teams, etc.) sharing of digital assets, perhaps including some sort of ‘apps’, and perhaps supporting some sort of following of individuals, tags, or contexts — but we have not matured to the point where a few dominate 90% of the marketplace.

Perhaps that is a sign of the early days in the market, but I think it’s something more. I think there is a mismatch between the collaboration model and the actual way that work is getting done today. And the mismatch is one of the reasons that the idea of social business is causing anxiety in the enterprise. As McLuhan said,

Anxiety occurs when people try to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools.

In 2014 we saw the meteoric rise of Slack — the fastest ‘unicorn’ to reach a $1 billion valuation — and the beginning of a defection from ‘social collaboration’ style tools organized around larger social scale to smaller socially scaled chat tools. This trend will continue, I bet.

In April, I wrote Shape your work, not the other way around, which was about ‘job crafting’ as explained by researchers Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane E. Dutton, an approach to shaping our work to make it a better source of meaning and purpose. As I summarized,

The authors made the idea of ‘sharpening your own shovel’ very tangible, with a practical technique: job crafting. And the best advice is that you can — and should — do this for yourself. The authors also touch on the trickier issues of socializing a shift of job focus, making concrete recommendations:

1. Focus on building strengths that will benefit others and the organization as a whole.
2. Build trust with others that will be impacted by a shift in activities, like your manager, reports, or co-workers.
3. Align your job-crafting activities with others who are most likely to support a shifting of your work’ center of gravity.

And remember the cardinal rule: shape your own work, instead of being shaped by your job.

I wrote Work skills of the future: constructive uncertainty in August, which dug into the concept as explained by author Howard Ross as a way to counter our cognitive biases:

It is helpful to begin to practice what I call constructive uncertainty. Learning to slow down decision-making, especially when it affects other people, can help reduce the impact of bias. This can be particularly important when we are in circumstances that make us feel awkward or uncomfortable.

As I wrote,

In effect, Ross is suggesting that we slow down so that our preference and social biases don’t take over, because we are deferring decision making, and are instead gathering information. We may even go so far as to intentionally dissent with the perspectives and observations that we would normally make, but surfacing them in our thinking, not letting them just happen to us.

The idea of constructive uncertainty is not predicated on eliminating our biases: they are as built into our minds as language and lust. On the contrary, constructive uncertainty is based on the notion that we are confronted with the need to make decisions based on incomplete information. More than ever before, learning trumps ‘knowing’, since we are learning from the cognitive scientists that a lot of what we ‘know’ isn’t so: it’s just biased decision making acting like a short circuit, and blocking real learning from taking place.

I explored the role of the CIO in When is that digital transformation finally going to happen? in February, writing

In the early 1900s, when electricity was a brand new technology, companies had VPs of Electricity. Just so, when computers and networks became available, companies went outside and hired a geek with an appropriate degree and a pocket protector, and made him (or her) CIO. Those days are past. We no longer see any VP of Electricity, and in a world where ‘computication’ is the bloodstream and nervous system of the business the premise of an IT department makes no sense. It’s like having a department of human language, or rational thought. These can’t be sequestered to a group a wizards in the basement, and neither can IT.

So, we are seeing the continued rise of the Chief Digital Officer (CDO), as I wrote about last year (see Leading digital (and social) change in the business). The stark truth is that CIOs have the wrong mindset to transform businesses to meet the challenges of today’s world, and it may be a mistake to imagine that they should. But is is clear that making the transition to a new way of operations is critical.

This week, I read a piece in the Wall Street Journal that pointed out that 70% of CIOs tend to fall into the personality type called ISTJ in the Myers-Briggs approach. As the author, Rachel King, points out

This personality type describes people who are introverts rather than extraverts, who perceive the world through their senses rather than intuition and those who base decisions on thoughts rather than feelings. The last letter means that the person prefers to use judgment rather than perception, meaning that he or she focuses on predictability, planning and control rather than perception, which is the ability to be adaptable, spontaneous and flexible. Some have said that the fictional character Spock from Star Trek is an ISTJ.

And this creates conflicts because other C-suite players are more likely to be ENTJ or INTJ and that N for intuition instead of the ISTJ’s sensing matters greatly. CIOs are commonly considered to the too focused on the present or immediate past, and today it’s important to have a vision of the future. King quotes Katherine Graham Shannon of Heidrick & Struggles

When you see CMOs cooking up their own IT organizations it’s because they need to move fast and they’re not going to wait.