The business of not knowing.

Not knowing creates the space that allows us to be curious, to question what seems obvious, to look beyond the established playbook, and to get close enough to a problem to understand what is actually there rather than what experience or muscle memory tells us should be there. It gives us permission to innovate without pretending we already know where we will end up.

After 25 years of technology transformation, one pattern keeps repeating: the technology changes, the terminology changes, but the hardest problems rarely fit neatly into the structures we have built around them. Today, cloud, data, AI, real-time systems, engineering, operations, and strategy increasingly overlap, and many of the old boundaries and playbooks are becoming less useful.

The interesting work tends to happen in those gaps: between technology and people, ambition and execution, innovation and operations, and increasingly between what technology makes possible and how value is created, delivered, and captured. New capabilities do not just change how things are built or operated; they can change the economics around them, where value sits in the chain, what customers are willing to pay for, and ultimately the commercial models themselves.

Experience matters, but perhaps its greatest value is knowing when to rely on it and when to set it aside long enough to see something differently. That is the space where curiosity, systems thinking, and a willingness to challenge assumptions become more valuable than having a ready-made answer. I have come to think of it as the business of not knowing.