They've Been a CIO Before. But Have They Done "This" CIO Job Before?

"Must have previous CIO experience."

It's one of the most common lines in a CIO brief, and on the face of it, it makes perfect sense. If you're about to make one of the most important appointments in the business, hiring someone who's held the title before feels like a sensible way to reduce risk.

Except there's a problem.

There isn't really one version of the CIO job.

A CIO brought in to stabilise a complex estate, improve resilience and take out cost isn't doing the same job as one asked to build digital products, exploit data and find new growth.

The title is identical. The work isn't. And that makes "previous CIO experience" a far less precise criterion than it first appears.

The research on this has made me think differently about what we mean when we call someone's experience "relevant". Experience matters. Sometimes enormously. But so does the context in which that experience was gained, and the context into which you're trying to transfer it.

What does "CIO experience" actually tell us?

Studies of CIO appointments suggest the value of a CIO's background depends heavily on what the organisation is trying to achieve.

Research has found that firms pursuing cost leadership tend to appoint business-oriented CIOs, while firms pursuing differentiation lean towards technically oriented CIOs. When the CIO's background was misaligned with the company's strategy, the market reacted negatively to the appointment.

Other CIO research distinguishes between supply-side leadership, focused on exploiting existing technology capabilities and operational efficiency, and demand-side leadership, where technology is used to create new business opportunities.

Same title. Very different job.

This is why I think a CIO search that starts with the candidate profile has probably started one step too late.

Five years as a CIO. Same industry. Similar size role. Major transformation experience.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

All very useful.

But what did they actually transform? What was broken when they arrived? What did the strategy require from technology? How much authority did they have? What kind of CEO were they working for? What team did they inherit? What stage was the business at? Was it an investor ownded business?

And how similar is any of that to the situation they're about to walk into in their new role?

Experience doesn't travel alone

A systematic review of organisational experience and performance found that experience doesn't automatically produce better results. Its usefulness depends partly on how similar the previous task and context are to the new ones.

It sounds fairly obvious when you say it out loud. I'm just not convinced our hiring processes always behave as though it's true.

We tend to treat experience as something people accumulate and carry around with them.

Ten years here. Five years there. Three transformations. A $300m budget. A global team of 1,000.

But experience isn't just time accumulated in a role. It's acquired under particular conditions.

And those conditions matter.

Importantly, none of this means narrower or more technical experience is somehow a disadvantage. Some CIO research has associated technology backgrounds with better technology spending and resource-allocation decisions and stronger contribution from the technology function.

In the right context, deep technical experience may be exactly what the organisation needs.

The problem isn't experience. It's assuming that because it worked there, it will work here.

There's an uncomfortable side to experience

Experience gives us pattern recognition. It allows someone to walk into a situation and see things that someone encountering it for the first time simply won't see.

That's incredibly valuable.

But broader management research suggests the relationship between experience and performance is more complicated than "more is better". Closely related experience can amplify both the benefits of expertise and the costs of inflexibility.

There's even broader executive research in which prior CEO experience in the same industry or at similarly sized firms was associated with worse subsequent performance.

Now, that's CEO research, not CIO research. So I'm certainly not suggesting that hiring a CIO from the same industry is a bad idea.

But it does challenge a comfortable assumption:

Similarity doesn't automatically mean lower risk.

What happens when the experience that made someone successful becomes the lens through which they interpret a situation that's actually different?

I've personally seen versions of this throughout my career.

An executive arrives with a playbook. Often it's a very good playbook. It's part of the reason they were hired in the first place.

The problem isn't having a playbook.

It's recognising when you've walked into a different game.

There's another variable we tend to leave off the candidate specification: us

This is perhaps the part of the research I find most interesting.

CIO effectiveness doesn't depend solely on the CIO. Research points towards structural power, organisational support, executive-team involvement and even the technology savviness of the CEO and senior leadership team as part of the system in which CIO performance occurs.

That creates a slightly uncomfortable question for the hiring organisation.

We spend an enormous amount of time asking:

"Is this the right CIO?"

Perhaps we should spend a little more time asking:

"Is this an organisation in which this CIO can actually succeed?"

Because sometimes we think we're comparing the performance of two CIOs when we're really comparing two CIOs operating inside very different systems.

So should we stop hiring people who've done the job before?

Obviously not.

If you need to solve a familiar problem in a familiar environment, someone who's solved that exact problem successfully before may be exactly who you want.

Nor does the research give us licence to swing to the opposite extreme and say:

"Forget experience. Hire for learning agility."

The direct evidence that individual learning agility predicts CIO performance is still limited. Much of the technology-leadership evidence around agility comes from expert consensus, qualitative research and emerging measurement work rather than longitudinal studies showing that assessed learning agility predicts CIO success.

There is good reason to think adaptability is worth assessing. Digital transformation requires technology leaders to continually acquire and combine new technology and business knowledge rather than simply relying on what they already know.

But that's not the same as saying adaptability beats experience.

This isn't experience versus adaptability.

It's experience plus the ability to recognise when that experience does, and doesn't, apply.

Maybe we're asking the wrong question

Before calling someone's experience "relevant", I'd want to understand four things:

1. What did they actually do? Forget the title for a moment. What was the mandate?

2. Under what conditions did they succeed? What strategy, maturity, authority, executive support and technology environment surrounded them?

3. How similar are those conditions to ours?

4. Where they're different, what evidence do we have that this person can recognise the difference and adjust?

   
   

That last one is particularly difficult to assess.

The research doesn't tell us there's a clever interview question that can reliably predict it. But I think it gives us something worth probing.

I'd want to hear about a time when an executive's previous experience turned out not to be the answer. When did they realise it? What told them they were wrong? What did they change? And how quickly?

I'd also ask a hindsight question: what did you get wrong in your last role, and what would you do differently now?

In my experience, the interesting answers aren't usually polished success stories. They're the slightly uncomfortable ones where someone can explain what they initially got wrong and what they did when they realised.

I wouldn't treat that as proof of adaptability. But I'd certainly rather explore it than hear about the fifth transformation they've successfully delivered.

Because the CIO role isn't standing still.

Digital transformation, technological disruption and the increasing strategic importance of technology continue to change what organisations ask of their CIOs. AI is only adding another layer to that complexity.

The person you hire today needs to know what to do. They also need to recognise when what they know no longer applies. So perhaps we should be a little more precise than:

"They've done the job before."

The question that matters is:

Have they done this CIO job before?

And if they haven't, what gives you confidence they can figure it out?