Currently, less than one in three boards and CIOs achieve a level of business alignment where conversations are about building the future rather than just budgets or cyber risk. A recent survey indicated that less than 10% of board-CIO relationships are “future-ready,” with the majority being “outdated,” “focused primarily on today,” or “evolving.” This suggests a significant untapped potential.

The unique opportunity for improvement stems from several factors. 

Firstly, every company is now fundamentally a digital company, with software driving almost every organisational change. This means the ability to harness software for business growth is paramount. 

Secondly, the CIO role has dramatically evolved from a mere support function to a strategic business leader and an “architect of the future version of the company.” 

Given that boards are responsible for governing, guiding, and growing the business, and CIOs are at the centre of these elements, their aligned relationship is more critical than ever before and will only increase in importance.

Several challenges hinder the development of a future-ready board-CIO relationship. Board responsibilities have expanded dramatically due to global turbulence, uncertainty, and the rapid introduction of technologies like AI, alongside geopolitical and trade issues. This broader scope and increased complexity can make the pressure on board members relentless.

Furthermore, many board directors possess deep legacy expertise, which, while valuable, may not be sufficient to navigate today’s rapidly changing technological landscape, creating significant blind spots. The world has simply changed faster than the board-CIO relationship has adapted. The traditional view of IT as a back-office, operational function persists in many organisations, preventing CIOs from being seen as enterprise business leaders. This often leads to transactional interactions focused on past performance (dashboards and reports) rather than strategic, forward-looking discussions about future capabilities and growth.

Future readiness is defined as the capacity of leaders, teams, and boards to consistently anticipate, adapt, and act amidst disruption and uncertainty, crucially, before circumstances force a response. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive.

This is not about predicting the future but preparing for it. It’s a continuous discipline, not a one-time event or a box to check. A future-ready relationship between the board and CIO involves shared understanding, a common language, and collective efforts to spot early signals and trends (anticipate), shift course when the environment changes (adapt), and make timely, decisive moves (act) to drive value creation.

“The Five Leadership Superpowers™” are a practical set of behaviours and mindsets that, when applied together, multiply value and help navigate complex tensions by embracing “both-and” thinking rather than “either-or” choices. They are:

• Present Futurist: Seeing the present clearly while simultaneously scanning the horizon for signals and trends to anticipate what’s coming and inform future decisions.
• Experienced Learner: Balancing the leverage of past relevant experience with continuous learning, curiosity, and inviting diverse perspectives to foster ongoing growth.
• Prepared Risk Taker: Recognising that risk is an inherent part of business and that not acting can be the riskiest option. It involves building resilience and making smart bets through prototyping and piloting before significant investments.
• Strategic Executor: Linking vision and strategy with effective execution. It ensures that strategic plans are operationalised and that operations are guided by a clear direction.
• Accountable Collaborator: Working cross-functionally and with ecosystem partners towards a shared objective, fostering trust, alignment, and shared ownership, where accountability is accepted for collective results.

When both the board and CIO collectively bring these five superpowers to the table, blind spots diminish, agility increases, and value creation accelerates.

To move up the maturity scale and become value creators, CIOs need to make significant shifts in how they engage with the board:

1. Show up with Commercial Acumen: CIOs should present themselves as enterprise business leaders with commercial understanding, demonstrating how technology decisions maximise commercial growth, rather than just proving their technical competence.
2. Bring an Enterprise Lens and Context: CIOs have a unique enterprise-wide view due to their operational and enhancement responsibilities. They must bring this holistic context to board discussions, explaining how broader capabilities interrelate and guiding decisions with a full understanding of the “enterprise machine” and its internal and external supply chains.
3. Focus on Influence, Not Just Information: The goal should be to influence strategic direction rather than merely presenting dashboards and reports (which are table stakes). CIOs, by their cross-functional nature, are natural collaborators and must highlight interdependencies across functions to drive company-wide success. They should aim to define the future, how to achieve it, and how technology enables it, pulling the board forward into future-ready thinking.

Discovery (South African Financial Services Group): Discovery built its success on a technology-driven shared value model, where business strategy and technology are inseparable. When they launched behaviour-based insurance integrating wearables to influence premiums and rewards, they demonstrated The Five Leadership Superpowers™:

• Present Futurists: Spotted the convergence of health, insurance, and digital, embedding wellness into their business model.
• Experienced Learners: Tested behavioural economics and refined algorithms based on market dynamics.
• Prepared Risk Takers: Licensed their platform globally, scaling to over 30 countries.
• Strategic Executors: Integrated strategy and technology inseparably, linking it to business governance.
• Accountable Collaborators: The board, CIO, and partners congregated around a shared purpose. The payoff included healthier customers, stronger partnerships, and above-average shareholder returns.

Toyota Financial Services (TFS): Vipin Gupta, as CIO, transformed TFS from a history of technology project failures into a future-ready organisation. Anticipating industry shifts towards mobility, digitalisation of financial services, and cloud-based software, TFS evolved from a captive finance company to an “auto finance-as-a-service” provider.

• Present Futurists: Envisioned TFS as a mobility and digital “as-a-service” company.
• Experienced Learners: Applied lean manufacturing principles from the automotive industry to software engineering, rapidly building a new ecosystem of over 100 systems.
• Prepared Risk Takers: Built and launched a completely new platform with Mazda Financial Services first, protecting the existing Toyota business, before migrating their core operations.
• Strategic Executors: Had a clear vision and executed it step-by-step.
• Accountable Collaborators: Engaged the entire C-suite, focused on decision inventory (managing decisions, not just tasks) and maintaining a fixed IT budget by reinvesting waste. This led to multiplied operating income and significant asset growth in three years.

Kodak: Kodak, despite inventing digital photography, failed to be future-ready due to hubris and fear of cannibalising their lucrative film business.

• Failed Present Futurists: Saw digital photography as a threat, not the future they had created.
• Failed Experienced Learners: Rejected early signals of disruption and refused to learn more about the emerging digital landscape.
• Failed Prepared Risk Takers: Avoided the risk of disrupting their film profits by embracing digital, allowing competitors to take the lead.
• Failed Accountable Collaborators: Sidelined internal digital voices and lacked board partners for digital initiatives. The result was massive layoffs, community decline, and ultimately, Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Hertz: Hertz’s digital booking modernisation project collapsed due to execution failures and a lack of future-ready practices.

• Failed Present Futurists: Did not fully grasp that digital booking was mission-critical for their future in travel.
• Failed Experienced Learners: Ignored red flags as they emerged, failing to learn from real-time issues during the project.
• Failed Prepared Risk Takers: Mismanaged risk by outsourcing mission-critical functions without proper oversight.
• Failed Strategic Executors: Spent over $30 million without a functional product, failing to execute their strategy.
• Failed Accountable Collaborators: The CIO lacked transparency, the board failed to ask critical questions, and vendors operated without proper oversight. This led to a failed digital transformation, frustrated customers and employees, lowered morale, and eventual bankruptcy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A positive, future-ready board-CIO relationship yields significant benefits:

• Clarity and Direction: Better alignment between the board and executive team, reducing misunderstandings and barriers.
• Stronger Foresight: The ability to see risks ahead and anticipate signals early, enabling proactive action.
• Greater Agility and Adaptability: Becoming a more responsive organisation capable of navigating disruption.
• Accelerated Value Creation: Shrinking blind spots and increasing agility to drive extraordinary value for the organisation and its stakeholders.

Practical actions to build this partnership include:

1. Assess the Relationship: Honestly evaluate the current state of the board-CIO relationship to identify gaps and areas for improvement.
2. Hold Dedicated Learning Sessions: Create space for the board and CIO to learn together, educating each other and aligning on strategy.
3. Use Shared Frameworks and Language: Employ common terms and capabilities, such as the “future readiness” definition and “Five Leadership Superpowers,” to facilitate discussions.
4. Extend Beyond the CIO: Recognise that these principles apply to other C-suite roles (CHROs, CFOs, CMOs) to foster broader collaboration and break down silos across the executive team.
5. Take Small, Consistent Actions: Build the discipline of future readiness through continuous, incremental efforts.

Taking these steps helps move beyond oversight to real value creation, starting with self-assessments, planning calls, and dedicated briefings to foster a proactive, collaborative, and strategically aligned partnership.