There’s a curve most of us live without naming it. From zero to about forty, we’re building — a title, a reputation, a way of being recognised. We call it a career, but underneath it’s identity construction: ego, pride, a sense of being “someone.” It rises the way any construction project rises — effort in, structure up — until somewhere past the midpoint it stops climbing, plateaus, then declines. Then it ends.
Around forty, something happens to people who are paying attention: they start suspecting the thing they built wasn’t the point. The identity wasn’t the destination — it was scaffolding. Scaffolding exists so you can reach a height you couldn’t reach standing on the ground. Once you’re up there, the scaffolding’s job is done. It was never meant to be lived on.
Executives are especially prone to mistaking scaffolding for the finished building, because executive life is scaffolding-rich.
Take the corporate ladder itself. Nobody climbs a ladder to live on it. The rungs exist to get you to a vantage point — a decision, a body of judgment, a capacity to see the organisation whole. But somewhere in the climbing, the rung starts to feel like the achievement. People defend their position on the ladder the way they’d defend a finished cathedral, when the ladder was only ever there to help them build one.
Take the language of executive presence — what to say in a board meeting, how to phrase a difficult update, the calibrated diplomacy of stakeholder management. That vocabulary is scaffolding too. It exists to help you practise something harder underneath it: actually understanding what the people across the table are carrying, actually caring whether the decision is right and not just defensible. Executives who never look past the scaffolding get very good at sounding considered without ever becoming it.
Take the reporting structure — the status update, the RAG rating, the steering committee pack. It’s scaffolding for control, a proxy that helps a sponsor reach toward the real thing, which is knowing what is actually happening in a program. When people start treating the scaffold as the goal, they optimise the report instead of the reality it was meant to reveal. The deck goes green. The building underneath keeps rotting.
The pattern is the same at every scale. At forty, the scaffold is your identity. At the top of an org chart, the scaffold is your title. In a program, the scaffold is your status report. None of it is false, exactly — you needed it to climb. But mistaking any of it for solid ground is how people end up standing on nothing at the exact moment they thought they’d finally arrived.
What’s the scaffold you’ve been standing on longer than you should have — and what higher ground was it actually built to show you?
