The CXO dilemma
Leaders struggle with the X role. Is it them or their experience?
Visualize a pine tree. Can you describe it? The image in your head probably looks like a pine tree, in reality there are 111 varieties of pine tree and they are all different.
Welcome to today’s CXO role.
In general the businesses relationship with “X” (aka: experience) has been dysfunctional at best. It’s a winding road of definitions; technical CXO?, operational CXO? design CXO? change management CXO? …and every shade in between. In truth, it can be a catch basin of all the things companies need to be good at but can’t assign to one department.
Years ago, before there were CXO’s, I led a large team responsible for creating complex eCommerce websites for major global retail brands. There were anywhere from 150 to 400 people developing experiences for brands and their customers. We touched everything from in-store, to interface, to infrastructure in the relationship with the client. It was a job full of opportunities for innovation and with that …challenges.
Our front end technology group did a lot of things that frankly, pissed off our backend technology people and yet somehow the design group was to blame. This created an almost daily occurrence of escalations, heated conference calls and in-person meetings. What helped us was that our clients were in the fashion industries and expected that design must ‘elevate the experience’ . It was critical to their brand and thusly, their financial success. Designing the experience was supposed to answer that ask …not end an argument.
After that I spent some time at a different technology company that clearly needed help with understanding the importance of experience. This was a huge teaching moment for me, I had the impression that big technology companies were warming to design as detente between clients and their ham-handed use of experience and design principles inherent in their technology platforms.
I was completely wrong.
What I observed was a latent jealousy of “X” in technology companies. They didn’t hate it…they just wanted a relationship with design as a side hustle; not respecting or acknowledging it openly while only making a ‘booty call’ when other, non-design things weren’t going well.
These stories of cultural animus confirm the underlying discomfort and bias that many non-designers have for the CXO role. It’s not their fault, but they are at fault if they deny it’s there.
In business, controlling risk, diminishing waste, synthesizing and reducing creative problem-solving to a simple set of production tasks looks good on the balance sheet, but not very good in terms of transformative change. Though touted as a growing trend in HBR’s Why Every Company Needs a CXO, the oxygen-starved, dysfunctional corporate environment of a CXO faces greater resistance than other roles that can be more easily understood.
Today it appears that in so many ways, ignorance, bias, contradiction, dysfunction and animus are in direct conflict with opportunity, innovation, transformation and growth.
Why does this behavior exist for the CXO?
First, you can actually see experience work, you can judge it and appreciate it simultaneously. This work is an easy target for ridicule, opinion and control. It’s a reinforcing behavior. It’s also limiting. Focusing only on CX and EX is a big miss, the role should consider the design of everything, not only specific, transactional audiences.
How can it be fixed?
Companies need to start at the top. Too many in the C-suite they see the role of “X” as an inherent responsibility of their leadership. They have a well founded belief that they embody the direction of the company brand and culture whether they inherited it or created it. It’s part of their job, steering the wagon train down the right road to success.
Ironically, very few C-level people have developed a true understanding of the untapped power that “X”can bring them. Or for that matter have even a foundational idea about design and what it can do. They, like many, appreciate the beauty and mystery of a well executed experience, not truly knowing what it took to get there. Addressing these gaps can solve a lot of unanswered questions for the C-level and stimulate the growth in any business.
The first steps for any company is to embrace the uncomfortable and start focusing on catalytic actions. Here are a few.
1. Executive CXO training that will create business opportunities.
Design is experience. That’s an easy concept to understand but executing it is incredibly difficult and underleveraged. A series of progressive training modules in short sprints that would start on basic principles and methods of work, then move to defining disciplines and end on studies on design that elevated a place, person or business and some that failed.
Sessions like these are energizing and start minds buzzing.
2. Creating big moves in transformation.
Don’t boil the ocean …or anything for that matter. Consultancies make money recapturing and re-expressing a lot of ‘knowns’ …don’t waste time on that, move quickly in on your opportunity zones and then operationalize them.
I’ve seen companies labor for years on charting everything out so they can present a business case and get funding, sometimes it took so long the business changed.
This isn’t a call to be hasty, more of a call to use some tested methods (Agile, Design Thinking, etc.) to analyze and assess where you should focus people’s time and determine the best team to do it.
Focus on the critical, fixable tasks, not just the easy ones.
3. Getting the Role Right.
There are so many things a CXO can do. Yet enterprises will continue to leave little or no space for the role in a company. Some make the job description too narrow, or obtuse, or simply make the responsibilities toothless.
If we rethink “X” as a design-centric, innovation-focused discipline, focused on elevating any experience that our brand is expressed in …then you have a beginning! Start with a clear and simple foundation that builds a strong hub and spoke model and then allow it evolve over time. Then the world of creating ‘cost take-out’ as the defining benefit of transformation would fade into tactic land.
The eCommerce teams who I worked with created fantastic web, mobile, virtual and experiential retail. It happened because the multi-disciplinary team had a simple charter and very few limitations. They did a lot of great stuff because they had clarity and in this instance, the CXO role had definition and purpose. It was a win-win.
“X” isn’t in need of a rebellion, it needs to be an equal partner in opportunity, risk and success. Leadership needs to transcend inherent biases and integrate the “X” role in the top tiers of their organizations. This, along with a lot of humility, will start genuine, profitable transformations in the 21st century world of business.
Businesses know they can’t shrink their way to success, technology is changing opportunities so rapidly that companies must take calculated leaps …while getting comfortable with the uncomfortable and rethinking everything and anything.
Funny thing. CXO’s do that all day.
Let me know what you think. Visit my Linkedin and connect. Let’s talk!
