Direction
The discipline of holding back from the solution long enough to understand the business problem.
There is a move that technically excellent people make so automatically they rarely notice they are making it. Someone describes a problem. Before the description is finished, sometimes before it has properly begun, the technical mind has started pattern-matching — not carelessly, instinctively, the way a trained eye sees what an untrained one takes time to find. The problem arrives, and the response follows almost simultaneously, because a career spent solving hard problems has made the response feel like recognition rather than reaction.
In most technical contexts, this is genuinely valuable: the capacity to cut to the answer while others are still mapping the problem. At the enterprise leadership level, it is the first and most consequential expression of Capability Inversion.
The moment a technically excellent person proposes a solution — even informally, even as a thought experiment — the room's attention organises itself around that proposal, not the problem underneath it.
What Direction actually asks for
Direction is not a call for slower thinking or less confidence. It is the discipline of understanding what the business is actually trying to achieve before naming how technology should respond — holding a solution loosely enough that the business problem can still reshape it, rather than presenting the first coherent answer and letting everyone else evaluate alternatives against it.
This includes sequencing investment deliberately (foundational capability before the initiatives that depend on it), building genuine business fluency rather than translating on demand, and treating strategic reflection as protected time rather than a luxury the calendar rarely permits.
Where to start
- Notice the moment before you speak. In your next few meetings, catch the instant a solution forms in your mind, and hold it for one more question before saying it aloud.
- Ask what the business is actually trying to achieve, in its own terms, before naming a technology response. If you can't state it without reaching for a technical concept, you don't have it yet.