I have not published an Insight since late May. Regular readers will have noticed the gap, and I want to explain it, because the explanation is more interesting than an apology.
In February I wrote that I had found my voice again. Fifteen years of running a business had ground the creative part of governance work out of me, and the exercise of going back through years of my own writing brought it back. The Insights that followed traced a consistent argument: technology governance is a governance discipline first, and directors already hold the duty for it whether they have named it that way or not.
Then, in May, the writing stopped. Not because the argument ran out. Because every hour that would have gone into another Insight went somewhere else.
The silence was the work
I have spent the past three months building a complete professional development course from the ground up. Four modules, one for each pillar of a framework I will properly introduce in a future Insight. A case study organisation that runs continuously through the entire course, so participants govern the same organisation from the first module to the last and watch their decisions compound, rather than starting fresh with a new hypothetical every session. Scenario exhibits, reference libraries, a structured set of questions directors can use to test whether governance is actually working, not just documented.
Essays are a different discipline to course design. An Insight makes one argument well in a thousand words. A course has to hold an argument for six hours, survive a room full of directors testing it against their own organisations, and still be coherent on the other side. Building that properly does not leave much left over for the blog.
Twenty years, one convergence
This did not come from nowhere. In 2005 I built my first IT governance framework inside one of Australia's banks, when "IT governance" barely existed as a phrase anyone used deliberately. In 2006 I co-founded a firm specifically to build that discipline for companies, well before COBIT was fashionable and long before cyber made any of it feel urgent. For the fifteen years since, I have been developing and delivering director education, including all the cyber governance courses for the AICD.
Two decades of building the frameworks. Fifteen years of teaching the directors who oversee them. What I have been building since May is not a pivot away from either. It is the point where they converge into a single course.
Why Digital Directors
I chose to build and launch this under the Digital Directors banner for two reasons.
The first is that they have already solved half of a problem I care about. Digital Directors has built a genuine community of board ready senior technologists and is fine tuning their corporate governance skills, the supply side of a market that needs more technologist directors on Australian boards. What I saw was the other half: everyday boards and non-technologist directors that want to reach a baseline level of technology governance capability so they recognise what they can do themselves and when a technologist director is actually needed on the board, not as an advisor. Educating the demand side grows the market for the supply side. Building this course inside Digital Directors completes something rather than adding to it.
The second is more practical. Building the course inside that community meant I could draw on the collective experience of people who have sat on both sides of the boardroom conversation, technologists who have watched boards succeed and fail at overseeing their domain. That shaped the course more than any framework I brought to it.
Where this goes next
The Insights will keep coming. But I also wanted you to know what the silence was, because I think the argument I have been making here for months is about to get a much bigger room to make it in.
More on that shortly.
This article reflects the author's own analysis, experience, and professional judgement. AI tools were used during drafting to assist with structure, editing, and refinement. The ideas and positions expressed are entirely the author's own.
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