Cloud leadership: the visionary
Why did you embark on your journey to Cloud? What do you hope to find when you get there? How will it change you, your team and your company? What difference will it make to your customers? Answering these questions is the job of the Visionary.
Last week I introduced seven leadership roles essential to Cloud transformation, and promised to explore them in a series of blog posts: this is the first.
Why do you need the Visionary?
There are many ways to adopt Cloud, and they don’t all need the Visionary. If you are a new company figuring out where to deploy your applications, Cloud platforms are the obvious choice: you’re already there. If you are part of an existing company making tactical use of Cloud to make incremental improvements in cost, risk or agility, then you may not need the Visionary (although, you might need the topic of my next blog post, the Champion, to convince your company to let you do it).
But if you want to make a profound transformation in all the ways that Cloud can offer, if you want to reshape your company and your technology team to make use of the best platforms in the world, then you need to create a vision which people can understand and follow. You need someone who can define an ambitious goal, and who can help others feel that it is possible to achieve.
What does the Visionary do?
The most obvious thing that the Visionary does is create the vision. But there is more to it than that. We do not need to imagine that the Visionary is the sole originator of the vision, dreaming dreams that no-one else can imagine. The Visionary may excel in synthesis: bringing together ideas from many others, and distilling them into a clear and compelling goal. However, we should expect that the Visionary can create a vision which is worthy of the name. It is not shallow and incremental, but deep and broad. It is not one dimensional (say, technology only), but rounded and comprehensive. It is not short term and tactical: it creates the future.
The second most obvious thing that the Visionary does is communicate the vision - and to do this in a way which captures the imagination of others. This means that the Visionary must recognise that no one articulation of the vision will work for everybody: it must be expressed in terms which appeal to people in different roles with different goals. The vision must be capable of uniting passion while respecting diversity of motivation.
The third (and slightly less obvious) thing that the Visionary must do is maintain the vision. It is not enough to inspire people when the dream is just a dream - it is necessary to keep inspiring people when dreams become half-formed, messy reality (and to do this in partnership with the Champion).
Where do you find the Visionary?
One of the important things to figure out for all these roles is where you find the people who fulfil them. Can you hire them? Can they come from one of your partners?
I believe that the Visionary should be part of your organisation. You can get advice and inspiration from partners and consultants, but they can only become part of your vision if it is your vision. And if you’re looking for the Visionary and you haven’t found them yet, perhaps you should look closer - it might be you.
