I wanted to stay with the consequences after the recommendation was accepted.

I joined the fictional Aldermere Strategy Partners in August 1990, two months after completing economics at Veyford School of Economics. I worked in a six-person project team with no direct reports or independent budget. My early task was to understand how a proposal moved from a promising description to an actual organisational undertaking. The difference often lay in a condition that had received less attention than the headline opportunity.

Advisory work exposed me to different kinds of evidence. A customer interview, an expression of interest and a signed undertaking could all be presented as support for the same proposition, although they established different things. I learned to ask what a piece of evidence allowed us to conclude. I did not always apply that lesson well later. The distinction became more important when the people who would carry out a recommendation were no longer the people who had prepared its presentation.

In April 1997 I became an engagement manager. By 2003 my remit covered fourteen colleagues through two direct reports and C$1.4 million in annual engagement-delivery expense. That delegation funded our advisory work; it did not give me authority over a client's investment decisions. I had to make the reasoning usable for those who owned the consequences. A technically tidy comparison was inadequate if it left the client to discover that its preferred options relied on the same scarce management attention.

I moved to Westravell Bank in July 2004 as head of business planning. Joining an institution rather than advising it changed my relationship with a recommendation. I remained present when an assumption proved weak and when a deferred alternative returned to the agenda. The bank served owner-managed businesses, and I wanted its growth proposals to reflect the customer relationships and service responsibilities the institution could actually sustain. My function helped frame choices; it did not replace credit, risk or other professional authorities.

In 2008 I supported a proposition using 240 expressions of interest as stronger evidence of adoption than they justified. A later review found forty-six respondents willing to enter a defined assessment, seventy-four interested but unable to allocate effort, and 120 offering general curiosity without a further commitment. We incurred C$520, 000 in research and proposition rework. I withdrew the unsupported growth assumption. Even the forty-six were not acquired customers, and I needed to say so rather than present a smaller but equally misleading success figure.

From June 2011 I worked as strategy director. The title described an executive function, not a statutory board appointment. An acquisition assessment in 2015 required a different correction: 112 of a proposed advisory business's 180 client relationships already appeared within the bank's customer base. I opposed treating the entire relationship count as new reach. The unmatched sixty-eight were not automatically convertible customers or a valuation. We did not complete the proposed transaction, and the C$740, 000 diligence expense remained part of the decision's cost.

I became CSO in October 2018. My current team comprises forty-two colleagues within a company employing 1240 people. I have worked on the sequence of strategic initiatives, the choice of regional expansion and the obligations retained when the bank stops pursuing new business in a segment. These questions have different evidence and different owners. A strategy function should not turn its coordinating position into an assumption that it controls every lending, customer or operating decision affected by the plan.

I now pay particular attention to what an apparent decision has left unresolved. Selecting two regional teams before two others is incomplete unless the deferred work has an intelligible basis for reconsideration. Ending pursuit of a segment is incomplete unless the existing customer responsibilities remain resourced. The continuing expense is not necessarily evidence that the choice failed; it may be part of making the choice responsibly. I want the account to preserve that distinction without using it to excuse an indefinitely unfinished decision.

I have presented to the board as an executive since October 2018 and have held no statutory directorship. A possible first board appointment would require its own assessment of contribution, preparation, conflicts and time. My career offers material for that discussion, not an automatic qualification. Every person, institution and result described here is invented. The demonstration shows how a strategy leader can explain choices through their consequences while keeping company scale, personal authority and future ambition on their actual fictional basis.