I used to be the voice people listened to.
Not out of ego, or not only. It was simply the reality of the role. When there were hard decisions to make, difficult conversations to navigate, a direction that needed setting, people looked to me. I had read the room for so long that I was part of the room’s architecture. The cadence of meetings, the shape of escalations, the way a team would settle when someone steady walked in.
Today is my last working day. After 45 years.
Tomorrow I won’t be in the room. And I suspect that’s going to be a stranger sensation than I’m currently allowing myself to imagine.
The Silence
There’s a particular grief nobody quite prepares you for in moments like this. It’s not about missing the work, at least not straightforwardly. It’s about the prospect of silence where resonance used to be. For decades, what I said mattered in a specific, immediate, measurable way. A decision was needed. I made it. Things happened. The loop closed. That kind of agency becomes deeply woven into your sense of self, and you don’t notice how much you’re relying on it until it stops.
I’ve written before about the metrics that disappear when you move into leadership, the dashboard that no longer validates you, the phantom limb of technical output you keep reaching for. This feels like the next chapter of that same story. Because when you leave leadership entirely, the leadership metrics disappear too. No one will need a decision from you. No one will need steadying. No escalation will land in your inbox at 11pm requiring your particular brand of calm.
The strategic conversation will be happening somewhere, in some room. And I won’t be in it.
I’m sitting with that today.
What You Anchor
What I’m only beginning to understand, on this side of it: professional identity isn’t just about what you do. It’s about what you anchor. I’ve been an anchor point for my team, for the organisation, for the people who needed to know that someone was paying attention and would make the call. That function becomes so habituated that you stop noticing it as a separate thing. It just feels like you.
The title goes today. I’m not yet sure what goes with it.
I’ve made this kind of transition before, though. Moving from technical expert to leader meant surrendering the metrics that proved my value. I had to learn to find satisfaction in things I couldn’t see or measure, in culture shaped quietly, in people making better decisions than they would have made a year before, in the absence of problems rather than the solving of them. I didn’t know how to do that at first. Then one day I did.
This is the same territory, just further out.
The transition from leader to what, exactly? I’m not sure yet. Photographer. Composer. Walker. The question beneath it all is the same uncomfortable one: who are you when the role is gone? I don’t have a clean answer. I’m not sure I’m supposed to yet.
58 Degrees North
We’re moving to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.
Not as an escape. Mel and I visited for the first time last April to celebrate our 41st wedding anniversary. We had no particular expectation beyond curiosity. But something settled in us that hadn’t been settled before, and Lewis felt immediately like home in a way that’s hard to articulate without sounding either mystical or slightly mad. So I’ll just say it plainly: we knew.
There’s a Gaelic word, cianalas, a grief-tinged longing for the place your soul considers home. I’m not sure I fully believed in that kind of thing before Lewis.
The house is in Melbost, Borve. The landscape is vast and largely indifferent to human ambition. The Atlantic comes in off thousands of miles of open ocean and doesn’t ask what your job title is. There are no performance reviews, no escalation paths, no quarterly targets. There is, however, extraordinary light. Weather that means it. A community that has been living honestly and creatively in difficult conditions for a very long time. An arts centre in Stornoway that takes music and visual art seriously in a way that quietly rebukes the idea that culture only happens in cities.
I’m planning to make ambient electronic music using field recordings from that landscape, the wind, the sea, the silences between them. I’ll shoot on film. I’ll paint. I’ll walk. None of this produces anything that appears on a dashboard. There are no KPIs for standing in a Hebridean field at dusk with a microphone.
That, I think, is entirely the point. I just haven’t fully felt it yet.
The Harbour Wall
I used to use a nautical metaphor about leadership transitions: ships are safe in harbour, but that’s not what they’re built for. I mean it differently today. The harbour wasn’t just about professional safety. It was the harbour of being needed in a particular, legible way. Of knowing exactly what you were for.
I’m casting off today. The destination is real: Lewis, the light, the field recordings, the long walks in weather that doesn’t care about quarterly targets. A life shaped by what I’m drawn toward rather than what the organisation requires. The move isn’t a retreat from a life that had meaning. It’s an attempt to build one where meaning doesn’t have to be justified to anyone else.
But right now, in this particular moment, I’m still at the harbour wall.
The open water is right there. I can see it.
I’m finding out what comes next.
