Clarity, Constraint, and the Glock Mindset

Modern IT faces a paradox. Automation, observability, and programmatic compliance have reached unprecedented levels, yet fragile systems still ship, large‑scale incidents still occur, and customer impact reaches levels that other industries would never tolerate.

Hero culture is often celebrated as a sign of commitment, resilience, or exceptional talent. Stories of individuals saving the day under pressure circulate proudly inside organisations. Leaders praise dedication. Teams admire sacrifice. Yet hero culture is rarely a virtue. It is a design smell.

There is a persistent myth in software organisations that real engineering means building everything in‑house. Infrastructure, authentication, payments, analytics, experimentation frameworks, internal tools, if it exists, some teams believe they should own it.

Most IT organisations believe strategy runs the company. In practice, behaviour under pressure does.

Richard Branson recently summarised a discipline most organisations quietly abandoned: Sell the problem, not the solution. The statement sounds obvious. Yet, in practice, many companies now operate in reverse.