General

A think tank, if you haven’t worked at one, is a company you hire when you need to do a thing but have absolutely no idea how to even begin doing it. You show up with a problem — or sometimes just an ambition — and a team of very smart people figures out the starting point, builds a path, and gets you moving. Contracts typically ran about six months. Six months to crack something the client couldn’t crack on their own.

The irony of what I’m about to tell you is not lost on me.

From an IT perspective, a six month contract cycle meant constant retooling and relentless pressure. If the design team had six months to solve an impossible problem, losing a single day to “the servers are down” wasn’t an inconvenience — it was a crisis. And unlike most organizations, where the technology stack is relatively stable, this place changed everything constantly. Every project brought different requirements, different hardware, different software, different infrastructure demands.

I’ve spent the better part of my career walking into companies that are struggling. Downtime they can’t explain. Security incidents they didn’t see coming. Infrastructure held together with the IT equivalent of duct tape and good intentions. I come in, assess what’s broken, fix it, and show the results in graphs and charts — because people have short memories, and numbers don’t lie.

In almost every one of those engagements, the root cause wasn’t technical. It was a belief.

The belief that IT is a necessary evil — a cost center to be managed down, a department to be tolerated, a line item to be cut when margins get tight. Not a strategic function. Not a risk management discipline. Certainly not something that deserves a seat at the table when the real decisions get made.