LUCCA
LUCCA
As told by a head of engineering at a Series C company in Brooklyn. She wrote one plain sentence where she used to write two defensive bullets. What that was about took eight months. Names and some details changed at her request.
None of these were decisions.What people noticed
My chief of staff said it first, almost in passing: my decks had gotten shorter. A director on the board said I used to answer questions before anyone asked them, and had stopped, and that he preferred it. My partner noticed I no longer rewrote emails on Sunday nights. An engineer who reports to me told me, months later, that disagreeing with me had become possible.
None of these were decisions. I did not resolve to write shorter decks. If you had asked me in the spring what had changed, I would have said I was less tired, which was true and was not the point.
For fifteen years I built things to survive an objection.
Not an objection anyone made. One I could hear. An architecture review rebuilt three times in a week against a question from an engineer who had not worked with me in six years. A hiring plan fortified against a CFO who had never once pushed back on one of mine. Two bullets on slide six of every board deck, pre-empting the one director who always asks, so that by the time he asked I had already answered, and the slide said nothing I actually thought.
I called this rigor. Everyone around me called it rigor. It was the thing I was known for, and it was a defense. Every piece of work was arranged around a critic who was not in the room, and the arrangement left no space for what I believed.
It took most of a year to say whose question I was answering. My therapist asked it plainly one Thursday: whose question slide one was arranged around. Slide one is the title slide. It has my name on it. I said my father's, and we let that sit, because we had been here before by other roads, and arriving again was less a surprise than an admission.
When I was eleven I showed him a science fair board. He looked at it for a long time and asked one question I could not answer, and that was the whole review. I don't remember the question. I remember rebuilding the board that night so that nobody could ask it again. I had been rebuilding it, in one form or another, for thirty years. He has been gone for four. The question had outlived him because I was the one keeping it.
I had mistaken defensibility for rigor, and rigor for being good, and being good for being loved.
“I had mistaken defensibility for rigor, and rigor for being good, and being good for being loved.”What I called rigor
That was the work. Not the realization. The refusal to look away from it.How it moved
What moved was not a technique. I did not learn to write shorter decks. I stopped needing the long ones, which is a different thing, and harder to arrive at, because it required looking directly at what the long ones were for.
They were for him. Not the board, not the CFO, not the engineer. And here is the part that took longest to admit, and which I think is the actual center of this: I had not been carrying the question by accident. I had been keeping it. Answering it was the last place I still had him. As long as every piece of work was built to withstand him, he was in the room, still looking, still unsatisfied, still there. To stop building for the question was to let him be gone.
It is one thing to see that. It is another to keep seeing it after the hour is over, when it would be easier to call it an insight and file it. What I had to do, and kept having to do through that spring, was hold the understanding steady long enough for it to change what my hands did. That was the work. Not the realization. The refusal to look away from it.
After that the work changed shape on its own. A deck built to survive a question and a deck built to say something are different objects, and I could feel the difference before I could explain it. The two bullets on slide six came off not because I decided to be brave but because they were no longer doing anything. The person they were for was never going to read them. That was the thing I had been building, for so long and so carefully, in order not to know.
I still hear the question. It arrives as a tightness in the chest, just before I arrange something around an objection, and it is no longer a bad feeling. It is him. I let him ask it, and then I build the thing anyway, for the people who will actually read it. Last month I rebuilt a one-pager for a new investor four times, and on the Thursday my therapist asked whose question that was built for, and I had the answer before she finished the sentence. The habit remains. What is gone is the mistake about who it was for.
People see the shorter decks. What they do not see is that the decks were never the problem, that the thing beneath them had a name, and that the name was not mine. It was his, and I have set it down.