Plate-Spinning for Success: CIOs, Embrace your Role Paradoxes!

Today’s CIOs face a host of perplexing and conflicting demands. Learning how to embrace these complex paradoxes is akin to learning the art of spinning plates in opposite directions. Early insights from our interview-based study reveal that CIOs are embracing their role-related paradoxes by developing a “plate-spinning mindset,” i.e., a mindset that helps CIOs spin multiple metaphorical plates in opposite directions. In this paper, we inform practitioners what a plate-spinning mindset entails, and how to develop such a mindset.