Big Room, Small Lens

Before We Dive In

Over the past 6 months, I’ve found a skill I just don’t have.

Not rusty. Not out of practice. Flat-out don’t have it.

And not in a fun, have-another-go way either. In a proper oh s*$t, I actually really can’t do this, way. The kind where you realise you can’t quietly figure it out on your own and hope no one notices.

That’s a strange place to land at my stage. Years behind me, the titles that come with them, and something new just outright beats me and leaves me needing lots of help.

Now, I’ve known for a long time that you don’t age out of being a beginner. Not in new walks of life, anyway. But a brutal reminder still makes you question yourself for a moment, that drop where you wonder if you’ve lost something, before the old truth catches back up. Ask for help. You know what you know. You don’t know everything. Nobody does.

The knowing doesn’t stop the wobble. It just shortens it.

The skill (or absence of it to be precise), since you’ll want to know, is talking to a camera when I’m on my own.

Not on stage- I’m fine there. Not being filmed in a room- fine there too. Just me, alone, speaking to a lens with no one else present. That one undoes me. Completely.

Its undone me enough that I had to stop pretending and go and ask someone to teach me from scratch.

The more I’ve sat with why, the more I’ve realised it isn’t really about cameras at all. It’s about something I (and most senior leaders) carry, and almost none of us will say out loud.

The Comfort I Took For Granted

For years I assumed my strength was presence.

Standing up, speaking, carrying an idea over the line live.

I wore that as proof I’d arrived. Look, I can do the ‘scary thing’. The ‘live thing. The ‘there’s no safety net thing’.

But I’d never stopped to ask what was actually holding me up when I did it.

On a stage, you’re never doing it alone. The room is feeding you the whole time. You catch the nod in row three. You feel the energy dip and change pace without deciding to. Someone frowns and you double back before you’ve even registered why.

You’re adjusting a hundred times a minute, and you don’t notice, because it’s instinct now.

The room is doing half the job. You just take the credit.

Take the room away and you find out how much of your ‘presence’ was ever actually yours.

And there’s the first crack in the story I’d told myself. If presence was the skill, it should travel. It doesn’t. Which means it was never quite the skill I thought it was. There was always going to be a setting that exposed that. I just hadn’t met it yet. Everyone has one waiting. Most people are lucky enough to never get cornered into finding it….

Well, the ‘all the gear, literally no idea’ purchases have well and truly cornered me.

The Strange Bit I Can’t Explain Away

The easy answer is “I need an audience”…. Wrong.

If I needed people around to function, my best work wouldn’t happen at night with the house asleep and no one to perform to. But it does. Alone is where a lot of my good thinking lives.

So I’ve had to sit with a harder version. It isn’t the solitude. It’s the solitude plus being on, with nothing coming back.

At night, thinking, there’s no version of me to project- because theres no one else there. So, theres no gap between what I’m doing and how it looks. I’m just thinking. Nobody to land it on, nothing to read, no performance running.

The camera asks for the opposite. Be alone and be on, at the same time. Perform to no one. And get zero signal back telling you whether any of it’s working.

That precise combination is the thing that gets me.

I’ve delivered bad news to angry rooms with no prep and not blinked. Forty takes of one sentence to a phone on a tripod finished me.

Some things you don’t think your way out of. You just learn to move while they’re still true.

Where This Same Gap Shows Up In Leadership

I reflect more than people probably realise. Maybe because the confidence I show most of the time doesn’t look like someone who second-guesses much. But I do. Constantly. My brain doesn’t switch off, and I’ve never fully decided whether that’s a blessing or a punishment. Bit of both, most days, probably.

One thing it does do is reach for parallels- all the time. Everyday things, small comparisons, anything that helps me get a big messy idea across without drowning people in it. Drawing those lines has always been how I translate what’s in my head into something someone else can actually hold.

So, my camera shyness. Where have I seen the equivalent in business I ask myself?

Answer: Everywhere if you look hard enough and that you’ve suffered yourself and can spot it.

I’ve watched brilliant leaders do this for years and never once named it…

• The CFO who runs a flawless board pack and goes grey at a town hall.
• The engineer-turned-director who’ll architect anything but won’t put a single view in public in case it’s wrong.
• The CEO who owns a strategy day and quietly dodges the one conversation that actually matters.

Same shape every time. Fluent in the big bits of their role. Frozen in the small elements sometimes. What I’m still learning is that the smaller things are almost always the ones that would move them forward most.

So what do we do with it? Well, the truth is, sometimes we literally swerve it.

• Delegate it.
• Dress it up as “not my strength” and call that self-awareness.

Sometimes it genuinely is. Often it’s just avoidance or fear.

The dangerous bit was never the fear. It’s how skilled we get at hiding it. You can build a whole career around never once going near the thing that exposes you.

Think about the clarity you feel in your comfortable setting. My stage, say. Be honest about how much of it is really yours, and how much is just the room being on your side.

Because I preach it, but still learning also that the clarity that counts, is the bit still standing when the room’s gone and nothing’s coming back at you!

That’s the bit that leadership actually runs on. The moments that matter rarely come with a friendly room attached to help you.

The Tech Leadership Version Of It

Tech leadership is full of these moments too. We just don’t think of them this way.

• Making a call when there’s no data to back that call yet.
• Putting a technical direction in writing, with your name on it, knowing it might look wrong in six months.
• Standing behind a decision in a boardroom when you’ve got no precedent to point to, no one nodding along, just a set of faces waiting for you to sound certain.

That’s the lens all over again. No one feeding you anything back. Just you, exposed, having to find the conviction from somewhere inside because there’s nowhere else to get it.

AI has made this harder, and fast. So much of the job now is these calls.

Do we trust what this tool spat out. Do we let it near customer data. Do we move now or wait and see.

There’s no settled playbook yet, and not everyone has twenty years of doing it to fall back on.

I wrote about the shadow-AI mess in an earlier piece. A whole department fell in love with a process, right up until it turned out to be quietly sending customer records overseas. It started with people moving fast, because nobody wanted to be the one to stop and look daft asking the obvious question.

That’s the part worth sitting with. The judgement call with nothing coming back isn’t a side bit of the job anymore. It’s becoming the job.

And the leaders who handle it well aren’t the ones who feel no fear when the lens is on them. They’re the ones who’ve made their peace with speaking to it anyway, certain or not.

Doing It Badly, With No One To Read

So, what have I done. Well, I kept filming. Badly. Like, really badly. On purpose (honest).

And I also got the help, which was the part my pride fought hardest. Sitting there watching training videos and also engaging production companies….. being taught the basics, after two decades of being the one telling people the basics.

Someone breaking down where to look, how to start, what to do with my hands, like I was new to all of it. Because I was.

Humbling is a generous word for it.

But the reps did what reps do. Take ten was less grim than take forty. Yes, it felt like we went to forty. Then one came out clean. Then two.

The fear didn’t go away, it just got smaller than the want to do it. Which is really all you ever need. The want only has to beat the fear by a fraction, and you move.

And that’s the truth of how it works. Which I knew, I’d just forgotten, or more than forgotten actually, more the fact that because it was me experiencing it, I couldn’t see it without help.

It isn’t confidence first, then action.

It’s action first, done badly, with nothing coming back, and the belief catches up behind it once it’s finally got something real to stand on.

You don’t think your way to belief. You earn it after the fact.

What The Lens Actually Taught Me

A title is meant to say you’ve arrived. That’s the quiet lie sitting underneath all of it (Trust me, it should be in the promotion letter- its a lie!).

I already knew the truth, the way you know most things that matter but sometimes just cant connect the dots…. Nobody outgrows being a beginner.

You don’t go through it once and come out the other side ‘finished in all things’. However senior you get, however much the expertise stacks up, there’s always something, often small and daft, where you’re back at zero with no clue what you’re doing.

The honest bit, though, is- knowing that doesnt stop it hurting.

And it doesn’t magically go away as you climb. If anything it gets more uncomfortable, because now people expect you not to be a novice, and being one in full view costs more pride than it used to.

I’m not the exception to that. I’m an example of it. Group CTO, founder, years in rooms that would frighten most people, and undone by a damn phone on a tripod that I had to be taught how to use.

So the leadership bit was never being good at everything. No one is. It’s being willing to be seen not being good at something, asking for help, and having a go anyway, while you’re senior enough to feel a bit of an idiot doing it.

The team watches how you handle being a beginner far more closely than they ever watch you handle being an expert.

If you only ever work in the rooms where you already shine, you’ll look strong and quietly stop growing.

The growth is in the exposed thing you keep finding clever reasons not to touch.

Final Thoughts

I’m still not brilliant on my own with a camera- I’m about to start releasing footage soon so I can share so we can laugh together.

I’m just not scared of being bad at it anymore(ish), and not too proud to have been taught.

Which turned out to be the only two things ever really in the way!

The stage didn’t make me a leader. Anyone can get comfortable in the setting that already suits them. What’s actually shaped how I think is the smaller things that challenged me, and being willing to let people watch how I deal with that, openly.

There’s something steadying in that, if you let it be.

There’s a camera lens for everyone. So don’t wait until you need it (like me), go find your lens and record. The thing you’re senior enough to avoid and exposed enough to keep dodging. Go and be rubbish at it. Out in the open.

You know what yours is. You may have been swerving it like me for a while. Ask for help if you need it…. Just, if its about vlogging- don’t ask me! 🙂

Thanks for reading. This one was both traumatic and fun to write, because it meant admitting the bloke who’s fine on stage in front of thousands, and the bloke who needed teaching to talk to a phone on a selfie stick and listen to his own voice…. are the same person.

Also, the camera thing… Its because this is going live with guests. More to come soon..!

#BeyondTheTitle #Leadership #TechLeadership #ExecThinking #TheHumanCTO BCENE | Chris Goor