“A horse whisperer is a horse trainer who adopts a sympathetic view of the motives, needs, and desires of the horse, based on natural horsemanship and modern equine psychology,” – so says Wikipedia.

Thus, I could choose to define a board whisperer to be a CIO who personifies a sympathetic and proactive view of the motives, objectives and nuances of the board of directors, based on a clear understanding of the business, its markets and the psychology (politics) of the organisation.

All good so far but how could we accelerate the process to positively influence the outcome, to the ultimate benefit of all parties? Well, I think I may have found a unique angle on this in a story I picked up on the BBC the other day.

An Oklahoma-based skunk (name probably witheld to protect him from the ridicule of his peers) has been freed from an embarrassing and potentially dangerous peanut butter jar incident by a “skunk whisperer”.

Now, that has to be the coolest job title in the world and I am more than a little green with envy. Just imagine the business card and straplines. No, on second thoughts… Stop me, please.

Apparently, our little stripey chum got his head stuck in a peanut butter jar during a session of dumpster diving and was thereafter spotted in some distress by a passer by who called for assistance. Enter the Skunk Whisperer to a loud fanfare of trumpets!? Here it gets really interesting and its where I see real linkage to accelerating the solution to alignment issues in the modern business.

Our whisperer used chloroform – well, deployed would be more accurate in a very technical skunk whispering sense, you understand - to soothe the savage and potentially odiferous breast; much as Congreve would have us believe music will do.

You can almost imagine the conversation: “Pssssst, Flower, sidle over here and cop a waft of this old cloth .... no, no, no, keep looking at me … don’t turn round, for God’s sake.”?

Lets intensify the situation with a little role play. Imagine you’re presenting a business case to the board asking for a huge – let’s say Windows 7 huge – upgrade. You’re in full possession of all the facts, your ROI is incontrovertible and the business unit managing directors are clamouring to underwrite the case on your behalf (I didn’t say it was real, I said it was role play). But you can see the costs and the technical nature of some of the justification are causing the board's eyes to water and glaze over in turn. You sidle over to the aircon unit and surreptitiously introduce a small hit of chloroform to the room. Job done, motion carried, minute noted by semi-nerveless fingers.

Ok, so there a few flaws, like why I am I wearing a gas mask to a board presentation …. but that’s just detail.

I wonder if the chairman likes peanut butter?

I just read a terrific post by Information Week's Bob Evans in his excellent Global CIO blog.

Hallelujah. At last, a verifiable source and precedent that shows the value of remuneration packages that reward the back office in line with its contribution to bottom line and real customer satisfaction.

Boy, is this idea overdue. I really cannot see why businesses don’t get it yet, especially given where we are in the chaos of recession and the absolute necessity to use technology and the creative drive of business-focused technologists as a major component on the pathway to recovery.

I quote: “Last year, CIO Michael Harte earned $2.8m at Commonwealth Bank. This year, 40 per cent of his total compensation—based on $2.8m, that would be $1.12m - will be tied to customer satisfaction.“

Imagine that. A genuine example of skin in the game. Talk about sharpening the focus and the drive to customer satisfaction, ergo better business and better results. That’s alignment in action and due recognition of the influence of technology in the modern organisation.

I quote again, mainly because I cant say it any better: “I think a whole lot more CIOs should pursue similar pay packages that help ‘focus the mind on a daily basis’ because forward-looking chief executives will soon be seeking to clarify the priorities of their chief information officers away from technology operations and management and toward customer-centric growth, performance, and excellence.”

And the bank is extending this new model to include suppliers and whole chain of delivery, wherever it affects the customer. I’ve often thought how good it would be to retain some fairly significant part of supplier payment in a form of escrow delivered or paid on real performance and not have to rely on series of meaningless service-level agreements (SLAs) that really can’t be properly defined in terms of value or consequence. After all, what good is a monthly 99.99 per cent uptime if the .01 per cent downtime occurs during a crucial billing point or customer engagement? Oh, I hate SLAs.
As the article says, we need incentives not penalties.

We need to be inextricably linked to the outcomes of our actions, both good and bad. Failure to meet the terms of the agreement results in loss in exactly the same way that success will beget reward. With 40 per cent of my salary and the salaries for my team in the balance I’m completely sure I can predict upside not downside.

Perhaps Gartner and others of the same ilk should concentrate on defining a formula for performance-linked remuneration for technology and technologists. Preferably a very simple yet comprehensive one that doesn’t use terms such as “information anthropologists” or “social data miners”. Then we may just get chief executives to listen with both ears and we could end the interminable alignment debate.

Good news abounds, or so the world’s media would have us believe. Green shoots everywhere and entire economies lumbering out of recession like gigantic stegosaurs freeing themselves from the clutches of a Jurassic tar pit. Let us all pray that the green is from new buds of growth and not just the early bloom of algae on the cesspit of our financial infrastructure.

You may have gathered that I’m more than a little cynical of the triumphal fanfare that three giant economies are “officially” out of recession, after a mere quarter of miniscule growth. I also lack trust and confidence in the ability of our leaders, globally, to manage us out of it without even more erosion. Especially after the press and government barrage earlier this year that attempted to gloom us into a psychological recession, leaving us in fear that our jobs, our houses and our savings would be subsumed into repaying the debts of the greedy kleptocrats.

This dissonance of message to real experience has left me confused and concerned for both my future and the future of those I care about. It’s going to take tremendous will and some very tangible examples before I take any prognostication at anything more than passing face value. Trust has taken a hammering and its more than just on the surface. It’s deep-seated and embedded in the common psyche.

I remember sitting on a lovely paved deck watching the sun go down on a balmy Greek evening when all of a sudden I noticed the birds had taken flight and within seconds an earthquake shook the entire floor and surrounding buildings. I was left with an almost unearthly feeling of disquiet deep in the very essence of my being, engineered, no doubt, by this sudden lack of safety in the formerly rock solid foundation of the earth. No more could it just be taken for granted and the dissonance created probably lives with me to this day, albeit in a subtle way.

Yes, I am getting to a point soonish…

This cognitive dissonance, this uncomfortable feeling engendered by the disconnection between what’s happening and what you’d imagined to be true from past experience is a very real issue for all management going forward. Mostly, we’re not even aware of it at a conscious level because it’s invisible, insidious and roots deep.

Have you, as an IT leader, taken your department through a series of redundancies in response to the global economic meltdown? If you have then chances are the logical inconsistency of working hard and putting their all into building their IT career with their chosen employer (you) and seeing colleagues fall by the wayside, quite blamelessly, in the attrition of redundancy has probably left your staff feeling fearful and unstable. Unconsciously discomforted and prone to all the behaviours you have laboured so hard to eradicate over the years, as they struggle to come to terms with the new reality.

Is the new leaner IT group faster to turn things round or slower because a climate of distrust has developed? Are you seeing more politics, more rivalry and less transparency between teams than you did before - and I’m not just talking about IT here. Distrust is infectious. And we don’t need sluggish right now, we don’t need more politics and we certainly don’t need an endless negative debate on intent, competence or values.
 
We need to build trust back up again, just as we’ve tried to build the trust between front office and back office over the years. We need speed to market in our ultra-competitive and upside-down world and we won’t achieve that with friction, internecine rivalries and a laager mentality.
 
It is up to us all from the very top to the very bottom to eliminate the “punishers” in our operant conditioning and beget the reinforcing and positive stimuli that will rebuild trust and the behaviours for growth as we prepare for the recovery.
 
It’s worth remembering in our linear and metrics-obsessed world that, as Einstein said: “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted."

Have you harkened to the call of the bugle? Are you falling in neatly beneath the chief executive’s battle standard?

Have you got the message yet that this is war? The global economies as we knew them are crumbling round our ears in a cataclysmic slide that will leave no one untouched on the battlefields of the world’s financial markets. It’s a war you have to participate in, in order to be a winner. Its not a time to attempt neutrality or sit on the fence as a interested observer. Its no time for pacifism or conscientious objection.

 But - and treble but as the Bard would have it - it is NOT a war against your own business and colleagues in the business. You are about to demonstrate your value, valour and indomitable spirit (was stretching for another jingoistic ‘v’ word and, in failing, became impaled on the horns of my own verbosity) to the entire enterprise of which you, as a key IT staff member, are going to demonstrate via guerrilla tactics that your team is absolutely intrinsic to the success and wellbeing of the company you work for.

You will achieve this by proving that information technology is a profit centre not a just a sunk cost.

The internal political shenanigans that will inhibit your road to this acceptance will be as rocky and interminable as you allow it to be. Remember that guerrilla tactics are about mobility, speed of effective response to changing situations and the ability to blend in with your environment. Therefore it is imperative to dress the part, speak the language and intelligently react to any situation that presents itself. Show your mettle and take your true place in the Council of War.

Because as von Clausewitz says: ‘Once barriers - which in a sense only exist in man's ignorance of the possible - are torn down, they are not easily set up again.’