Most CIOs live inside urgency.
Backlogs are full. Platforms are never finished. Every decision feels consequential. There is always another escalation, another dependency, another “must-have” initiative.
Over time, urgency becomes the water we swim in. It feels normal.
Then something unusual happened to me.
I stepped out of the CIO role for a period of time. Not to disengage, but to reset. And what surprised me was not what I learned about technology. It was what I learned about systems, leadership, and how much of the CIO role exists to compensate for organizational ambiguity.
That distance changed how I see the job permanently.
Distance Doesn’t Reduce Understanding. It Sharpens It.
Earlier in my career, I stepped into running professional services at a software company that was growing quickly. The problems were described as delivery issues: missed timelines, margin pressure, and customer frustration.
But what became clear almost immediately was that services were absorbing ambiguity created elsewhere in the system. Strategy lacked clarity, priorities shifted without warning, and product decisions were made without regard for downstream impact, forcing services to fill the gaps.
Later, in a global strategy and operations role at scale, I saw the same pattern from a different altitude. Autonomy worked beautifully in some areas and failed spectacularly in others.
The difference wasn’t a lack of talent, but a lack of clarity.
At scale, autonomy only works when the system is legible. When decision rights, standards, and intent are clear, teams move fast. When they aren’t, local optimization fragments the enterprise.
By the time I served as interim president (GM) years later, those lessons collided with modern realities: cloud transitions, AI hype, board expectations, and the accelerating pace of change. The CIO role became the focal point for every unresolved tension in the organization.
Stepping out of that role didn’t reduce my understanding of the system. It removed the noise that urgency creates.
The First 30 Days: The Noise Drops
The first thing I noticed was how much activity masquerades as progress.
Inside the role, every day is full, but from the outside, patterns begin to emerge: the same issues cycle through different forums, the same decisions are deferred, and the same tradeoffs are revisited without resolution.
I also saw how often technology teams are expected to solve non-technical problems, as weak strategy reinforcement shifts blame to platforms, unclear priorities turn roadmaps into negotiation tools, and fuzzy decision rights drive ever-expanding governance.
None of that is malicious. It’s structural.
The Next 30 Days: The Realization
The most uncomfortable realization came next.
I began to see how much of senior technology leadership involves translating organizational confusion into technical effort, with CIOs and their teams absorbing ambiguity so the rest of the organization can keep moving by building buffers, creating workarounds, and quietly carrying risk.
While it can look like leadership in the short term, over time it hides the real problem.
Distance made it obvious which decisions actually mattered and which ones simply created motion. Very few decisions truly shape outcomes. Most activity exists to compensate for decisions that were never made clearly in the first place.
The Final 30 Days: What I Would Do Differently
By the end of that reset, a few principles became unavoidable.
First, fewer priorities matter more than better execution plans. If leaders can’t articulate the same three priorities without preparation, the system will fragment no matter how good the teams are.
Second, platforms must be treated as operating models, not just architectures. Shared services, identity, data, and workflow are not technical nice-to-haves. They are how strategy becomes scalable.
Third, decision rights must be explicit. Committees are not alignment. They are often a substitute for ownership. When authority is clear, speed follows.
Finally, AI changes the stakes. Intelligence does not fix broken systems. It accelerates them. If the organization is unclear, AI will move faster in the wrong direction.
Creating a Reset Without Leaving the Role
Most CIOs can’t step away for 90 days. They don’t need to.
What they need is intentional disruption of perspective.
That can look like:
- Temporarily removing yourself from escalation paths.
- Forcing strategy articulation exercises across the leadership team.
- Mapping where decisions actually get made versus where they should.
- Treating platform investments as first-class business decisions.
The real value isn’t the time away, but the disruption of embedded assumptions.
The Lesson
Across very different roles and companies, the lesson has been consistent.
When leaders are embedded in execution, urgency overwhelms clarity. When they gain distance, patterns emerge.
Disruption, when chosen rather than imposed, becomes a powerful diagnostic tool.
The CIO role will only get harder as intelligence accelerates everything around it. The answer isn’t working harder or moving faster. It’s seeing the system clearly enough to decide what actually deserves acceleration.
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