The Fear to Say No and the Transparency That Might Cure It

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.

All organisations are full of good intent. Most failures do not start with negligence or apathy. They start with people trying to do the right thing. Leaders care. Teams want to deliver. Strategies are crafted with conviction. Language is precise. Purpose sounds clear.

For years, the idea sounded like a slogan from another era. The network is the computer belonged to Sun Microsystems, to ARPANET diagrams, to a time when distributed systems still felt experimental. Then cloud platforms arrived, centralisation won, and the industry quietly moved on.