Confidence, Competence and Crispin Lockwood-Fetch

There are people who quietly solve problems.

And then there's Crispin Lockwood-Fetch.

One of the ideas behind Certified in Sounding Official came from something I suspect most people who have worked in large organisations will recognise: confidence and competence are not necessarily the same thing.

Sometimes the people who understand a problem best are the least interested in performing that understanding for everybody else.

They investigate. They ask awkward questions. They work through the detail. Then, quite often, they quietly fix whatever has gone wrong.

Other people are rather better at the presentation layer.

They have the language. The acronyms. The diagrams. The reassuring ability to turn something complicated into a slide containing three arrows, a maturity model and the word strategic.

Technology and cybersecurity provide particularly fertile ground for this because much of the subject is difficult for people outside it to assess.

If someone speaks confidently enough about resilience, transformation, threat landscapes, governance or risk appetite, how do you know whether they understand what they are talking about?

Usually, eventually, something has to work.

That gap between sounding convincing and actually being useful became part of the starting point for Crispin.

He isn't intended to represent a particular person, and Certified in Sounding Official certainly isn't a disguised account of somewhere I have worked. Most of the events would probably result in considerably more paperwork if they were.

But the behaviours are deliberately recognisable.

Anyone who has spent time around technology, cybersecurity, consultancy or large corporate environments will probably have encountered some version of the meeting where everybody appears to agree despite nobody being quite certain what has been agreed.

Or the presentation that becomes more polished as the underlying problem becomes less clear.

Or the person who can explain, at considerable length, why somebody else is going to fix something.

That familiarity gave me something useful when writing the book.

The situations could become increasingly ridiculous, but they needed to remain just plausible enough that a reader might occasionally wonder whether something similar had actually happened somewhere.

Usually while remembering a meeting they would rather forget.

And that is probably where Crispin works best.

Not because he is completely unbelievable.

Because, occasionally, he isn't unbelievable enough.

An earlier version of this piece was originally shared on LinkedIn.