The CTO’s Translation Failure

Why being technically correct can cost you your job—and what I wish I’d known about showing complex work simply

I’m sitting across from my CEO and CFO in 2018. The air is thick with excitement. They want to build our own real-time video content distribution network. In-house. From scratch.

The reasoning sounds compelling enough. More flexibility. Better control over costs. No more dependency on third-party platforms. They’ve done the math on paper and the numbers look promising. I can see the enthusiasm spreading across the table like a contagion.

And I open my mouth and say, “That’s a dumb idea.”

I elaborate. Why would we spend eighteen months and millions of dollars rebuilding a platform that has been built over and over again by companies with far more resources than us? Amazon, Akamai, Cloudflare. They’ve poured billions into solving this exact problem. Our competitive advantage isn’t in content distribution. It’s in the product itself. And the product has deficits. Real deficits that customers are complaining about. Deficits that are costing us renewals.

I’m making perfect sense. I’m technically correct. I can see it in their eyes that they know I’m right.

They fire me a few weeks later.

The Chief Translation Officer

I’ve spent years thinking about that meeting. Not because I was wrong. I wasn’t. The company eventually abandoned the CDN project after spending significant resources on it. But I’ve come to understand something that would have saved my job and served my company far better: the CTO’s primary function is not to be right. It’s to translate.

Translate business objectives into technology action. Translate technology progress back to the C-Suite. Translate complexity into clarity. Translate technical reality into business language.

I wasn’t a Chief Technology Officer in that meeting. I was a Chief Correction Officer. And no one wants to be corrected, especially not by someone who reports to them.

According to research from Netskope’s 2024 report “Crucial Conversations,” 39% of CIOs say they are misaligned with their CEO on key decision-making. More troubling, 34% of CIOs report they do not feel empowered to make long-term strategic calls. And 31% are not confident they know what their CEO really wants.

These numbers don’t describe a technical problem. They describe a translation problem.

The 28-Point Collapse

Capgemini has been measuring business-IT alignment for over a decade. In 2012, 65% of senior executives believed business and IT leaders agreed on IT’s role within the organization. By 2024, that number had plummeted to just 37%.

A 28-point collapse in alignment over twelve years.

This collapse happened while organizations poured trillions into technology investments. It happened while “digital transformation” became mandatory vocabulary in every boardroom. It happened while every company claimed that technology was central to their competitive advantage.

The investment went up. The alignment went down.

Why? Because technology leaders kept speaking technology language to business audiences. We kept producing status reports that no one read. We kept explaining complexity instead of showing progress. We kept being technically correct while being strategically invisible.

Showing Complex Work Simply

After years of wrestling with this translation problem, both in my own career and coaching hundreds of CTOs through 7CTOs, I developed what I call the CTO Compass. It’s built on a simple premise: visual indicators work better than text-heavy reports.

The framework uses four domains we call CTO Sentinel: Speed (delivery velocity), Stretch (future capabilities), Shield (organizational protection), and Sales (cross-functional enablement). Every technology initiative maps against all four.

But the real power isn’t in the categories. It’s in the colors.

Green means on track. Yellow means caution. Red means roadblock. Blue means complete.

One glance tells the entire story. No lengthy explanations required. No translation needed. The CEO looks at the grid and understands immediately where things stand.

When I think back to that 2018 meeting, I realize I had no visual language to share. I had opinions. I had arguments. I had technical correctness. But I had no way to show my executives the landscape of technology decisions in a format they could grasp instantly.

If I had been able to show them a grid, here’s where we’re green, here’s where we’re yellow, here’s the red that will turn green if we focus resources here instead of building a CDN, the conversation would have been entirely different.

Transparency Builds Trust

Peter Yared, former CIO/CTO at CBS Interactive, observes: “There’s always been a lack of transparency in IT. As costs start to creep up, that creates a lot of dissatisfaction and then people don’t spend what they should. A lot of this can get fixed with greater transparency.”

The CTO Compass philosophy holds that transparency builds trust. Yellow and red statuses aren’t failures—they’re demonstrations of proactive leadership. They show executives that you see the problems before they become crises. They invite conversation rather than shutting it down.

When I called my CEO’s idea “dumb,” I shut down conversation. I created an adversary instead of a partner. I demonstrated my intelligence while destroying my influence.

A visual framework changes the dynamic entirely. Instead of “your idea is dumb,” it becomes “let me show you how this initiative would affect our other priorities.” Instead of correction, it becomes exploration. Instead of winning an argument, it becomes building understanding.

The Standish Group found that organizations with “high decision latency”, meaning slow, uncertain decisions due to poor strategic alignment, achieve only an 18% project success rate. Organizations where teams understand why their work matters hit 63%.

That 45-percentage-point gap isn’t about technical capability. It’s about shared understanding. It’s about translation.

The Grid That Could Have Saved My Job

Looking back at 2018 with what I know now, I can see exactly what I should have done.

I should have mapped the CDN initiative against the four Sentinels. Under Speed: eighteen months of development before any value delivery. Under Stretch: new capabilities our team would need to build and maintain indefinitely. Under Shield: security and compliance requirements for handling video distribution at scale. Under Sales: zero customer-facing benefit until completion, while existing product deficits continued costing renewals.

Then I should have shown the alternative. Focus those same resources on product improvements. Under Speed: incremental value delivery starting in weeks. Under Stretch: building on existing capabilities. Under Shield: addressing known vulnerabilities in current systems. Under Sales: immediate impact on customer satisfaction and retention.

Same technical analysis. Completely different presentation. Visual. Comparative. Inviting discussion rather than demanding agreement.

Would they have made a different decision? Maybe. Maybe not. But I wouldn’t have been fired for the way I communicated. And I would have built trust for the next difficult conversation instead of destroying it.

The Flight Risk

Russell Reynolds Associates found that 74% of technology officers expressed interest in making a career move in the second half of 2024, up dramatically from 50% in 2022.

Three quarters of technology leaders are looking to leave their positions. The research attributes this to “the growing gap between ambition and organizational readiness.” Technology leaders feel confident leading transformation but face internal barriers including limited cross-functional support and unclear or shifting mandates.

Technology leaders aren’t leaving because they can’t do the work. They’re leaving because they can’t get their organizations to understand the work. They’re leaving because translation has failed.

The CTO Compass addresses this directly. When you can show complex work simplylike when executives can glance at a grid and understand progress, challenges, and dependencies, the gap between ambition and readiness starts to close. You’re no longer fighting for understanding. You’re building it, visually, every month.

Your Monday Morning

If you’re a CTO who has ever been technically correct but strategically ignored, you know the frustration I felt in 2018. You know the helplessness of watching bad decisions get made while your expertise goes unheard.

The answer isn’t to argue more forcefully. It isn’t to produce longer reports or more detailed analyses. The answer is to translate—to show complex work simply, to use visual language that creates immediate comprehension, to build trust through transparency rather than eroding it through confrontation.

I’m running a CTO Compass workshop in January where I’ll walk through exactly how to build this translation capability. How to map your initiatives against the four Sentinels. How to use color-coding to create instant understanding. How to turn your next executive update from a status report into a strategic conversation.

You can register at ctocompass.com/7ctos

I lost my job in 2018 because I confused being right with being understood. They’re not the same thing. They never have been. And the sooner you build the translation skills to bridge that gap, the more valuable you become.

Not just as a technologist, but as a leader.