What the Hunting Licence Reveals About Systems, Tradition, and the Discipline Modern IT Lost

Most people assume that the French hunting licence is a rural formality. In practice, it is one of the most structured and unforgiving examinations available to the public. It merges theory and practice, tradition and regulation, community and ecology. It filters out improvisation and rewards competence. It is a system built on consequences, not opinions.

Engaging with it exposes something modern IT has neglected: systems work only when they are grounded in reality, shaped by historical knowledge, and governed through disciplined stewardship. The licence forces you to operate inside a real and unforgiving environment, where errors have immediate consequences and learning is earned through precision rather than discussion.

The contrast with many contemporary organisations could not be clearer.

Systems Thinking Begins With Reality, Not Abstraction

The curriculum forces you to confront the system as it actually operates. Wildlife behaviour, habitat dynamics, breeding cycles, weather patterns, security constraints, legal obligations, and predator-prey equilibria are not abstractions. They dictate the decisions that hunters, farmers, and conservation workers must take.

You cannot ignore them. If you misjudge a trajectory or misidentify a target, the penalty is immediate. If you misunderstand boar behaviour, the consequences appear in destroyed crops and ecological imbalance. Nature enforces feedback loops that are impossible to negotiate or postpone.

Modern IT has drifted in the opposite direction. Many areas within a company operate in abstraction, disconnected from real system behaviour and insulated from consequences. Narrative replaces evidence. Motion replaces outcomes. Opinion replaces knowledge. Where consequences are absent, craft decays.

The hunting licence cuts through this illusion. You operate with real tools, real constraints, and real risks, to the point where you shoot with live ammunition during the practical exam.

Tradition is not nostalgia. It is embedded intelligence.

Every rule and gesture in the training has a lineage. Safety protocols come from accumulated failures. Handling techniques originate from decades of refinement. Ecological regulations reflect centuries of coexistence between humans, wildlife, and land.

This is tradition in its true form: embedded intelligence that keeps systems stable. The examination structure has been refined over more than fifty years through continuous iteration, long feedback loops, and institutional memory. It is a system hardened by real consequences rather than theoretical intent.

Modern IT often treats tradition as an obstacle. In reality, good traditions are repositories of standards and proven patterns that have prevented catastrophic failures. When companies discard them in favour of fashion, they discard the guardrails that once protected them.

The hunting licence demonstrates how tradition and learning coexist. You preserve what works, improve what does not, and respect the system that existed long before you arrived. Good engineering mirrors this mindset.

Discipline is the gateway to competence

Some parts of the exam, practical or theoretical, are eliminatory. A single incorrect manipulation can disqualify you. A wrong answer to a security question ends the session immediately. The instructors expect precision, clarity, and full situational awareness. The margin for error is narrow by design.

Discipline is not decorative. It is the mechanism that keeps people alive.

In IT, discipline has been reframed as rigidity or unnecessary formality. The industry celebrates speed and the illusion of agility while tolerating technical debt, inconsistent practices, and operational fragility. This avoidance of discipline always returns as instability, but usually too late for the lesson to be absorbed.

The hunting licence reveals a universal truth: discipline is the first expression of respect. Respect for the environment, for the tools, and for the people around you. It also demonstrates that competence without discipline is luck, not mastery. It is enough to know that even the so-called security mechanisms on hunting rifles do not prevent accidental trigger events. Only disciplined handling does.

A Community That Operates in a Shared Reality

The people you meet while preparing for the licence form a distinctive ecosystem: farmers managing crop destruction, autonomists living off-grid, foresters maintaining plantations, and conservation volunteers protecting habitats. They inhabit environments where consequences are immediate, visible, and rarely negotiable.

This community operates under one principle: reality is the only authority. Ecosystems require active management. Responsibilities cannot be delegated. Failures cannot be hidden. Every action has systemic effects, and the outcomes are witnessed directly.

IT, by contrast, often functions behind insulation layers that distort feedback loops. Silos, political incentives, and abstract reporting frameworks create distance between teams and the systems they influence. People can design flawed architectures or ignore operational signals without ever experiencing the consequences.

The hunting world does not permit such illusions. It enforces alignment with reality because reality enforces itself.

Stewardship: the missing value in IT

The licence is not about leisure. It is fundamentally about ecological stewardship. Ecosystems do not self-balance under modern conditions. Some species will overpopulate and cause destruction. Others require strict protection. The system functions only if people intervene with competence and intent.

Stewardship is not sentimental. It is strategic, disciplined, and grounded in systemic understanding. It means accepting responsibility for the long-term health of something larger than oneself.

In IT, stewardship has eroded. Teams speak of ownership but rarely act as stewards. Systems are built and then abandoned. Architectural decisions ignore second-order effects. Operational burdens are pushed downstream. Long-term stability is sacrificed for short-term optics.

The hunting licence makes the principle unmistakable: stewardship is not optional. If nobody performs the work, the system degrades. If everyone avoids responsibility, the ecosystem fails. The same is true for organisations.

The Hard Lesson: Reality Does Not Care About Your Narrative

The sharpest contrast between this experience and modern IT is the presence of uncompromising reality. Hunters cannot lie to themselves. They cannot negotiate with physical systems. They cannot obscure mistakes behind dashboards or communication strategies. Competence is visible, and incompetence is even more visible.

Nature does not care about perceived intent.
Safety rules do not bend for convenience.
Ecosystems do not adjust to human wishes.
Consequences do not wait for alignment meetings.

In IT, narrative often replaces truth. Leaders believe that if a message is repeated, the system will reshape itself around the story. Teams conceal fragility behind frameworks and rituals that offer the illusion of control.

Reality eventually asserts itself shaped as production incidents, architectural failures, security breaches, or customer attrition. But because these consequences arrive late and often disconnected from those who caused them, the organisation rarely internalises the lesson.

The hunting licence restores what IT has lost: direct accountability. Systems thinking begins with confronting reality, respecting constraints, and accepting responsibility for outcomes.

The Unifying Principle: Systems Endure When Tradition, Discipline, and Stewardship Converge

Across all these dimensions, one pattern becomes undeniable. Systems that endure are never the product of isolated brilliance. They emerge when three forces converge: the accumulated intelligence of tradition, the precision of disciplined practice, and the duty of stewardship. Each reinforces the others and compensates for their weaknesses.

Tradition alone can stagnate without refinement. Discipline without stewardship becomes mechanical obedience. Stewardship without tradition or discipline becomes sentimentality without rigour.

The hunting licence embodies this convergence. It is a living system strengthened through decades of iteration, executed through strict practice, and oriented toward the long-term health of the environment. It demonstrates what IT has repeatedly failed to internalise: systems do not thrive by accident. They require care, competence, and continuity.

In the end, the lesson is simple. If we want resilient organisations and reliable technologies, we must rebuild the foundations that hunters, farmers, and system stewards have never abandoned: respect for reality, reverence for proven knowledge, disciplined execution, and the humility to serve something larger than ourselves.