Twelve posts. None of them about me. That was deliberate — the failures I was describing weren’t mine to claim, and the mechanism mattered more than the messenger.
Here’s the part I haven’t said. I write like this because I’ve spent thirty-five years unwilling to accept the comfortable version of the truth. I’ve sat in rooms where the decision on the table would outlive everyone sitting in it. I’ve stood in front of executives who’d already decided what they wanted to hear, and told them the other thing instead. It’s the reason I ask the question that stops a meeting closing early, and the reason I’ve walked away from more than one room rather than sign off on something I knew was wrong.
I’ve been told, more than once, that I wasn’t difficult. I was just more serious about the outcome than the room was ready for.
That refusal to accept the polished half-truth is what’s underneath every post in this series — the capability map rated green because nobody wanted to relitigate it, the warning that arrived too late to matter, the sentence that closes two different failures because it was never really about the people in them. I didn’t learn to see that pattern by reading about it. I learned it by being in rooms where the stakes were real, and choosing not to look away from what I saw.
I’ve had people leave rooms I was in and not come back. I’ve also watched a handful I pushed hard go on to run rooms of their own — and every one of them, when we talk now, says the same thing: it was never about being liked. It was about being trusted to tell them the truth before it cost them something bigger.
That’s the only thing I’ve been consistent about the whole way through.
— Signal / unfiltered observations from the field. Fortnightly.
#OrdoAnimi #EnterpriseArchitecture #ArchitectureLeadership #Leadership #TechnologyLeadership #CIO