The Trap of “I”
I sat down this morning and mapped where my mind actually goes. Shopping, giving, association, hard work, a fight worth having — different doors, same room. Each one, underneath, is there to make me feel good, important, valued, confident. Draw a circle around all of it and one sentence sits in the middle: the world revolves around me.
Most executives would deny that sentence applies to them. Their calendars are full of other people’s problems. Their decks say “stakeholder value.” But watch what actually gets protected in a steering committee, and the sentence holds up better than the deck does.
Here is where it shows up in a program.
A CEO championed a platform eighteen months ago. The evidence since then is mixed at best. In the room, he doesn’t ask whether the platform is right — he asks how to frame the next milestone so the original call still looks sound. That isn’t program management. That’s ego management, dressed as governance.
A Director of Corporate Services gets a status report with three amber risks in it. She reads it as a comment on her competence, not a comment on the program. So the next report has one amber risk. The one after that has none. Nobody lied. The system just rewarded the version of the truth that let her keep feeling like the person in control.
A sponsor keeps funding a module nobody asked for, because killing it would mean admitting the original business case was wrong, and the business case had his name on it. He calls this “staying the course.” It is actually the noble person justifying every act — dressing self-protection in the language of commitment.
And then there’s the sharper version, the one that’s harder to see: the leader who blames the vendor, loudly, in every meeting. Watch what he’s actually protecting when he does it. It’s not the program. It’s the version of himself that gets to stay the reasonable one, the one who was let down rather than the one who chose badly. The blame is about the vendor. The relief underneath it is about him.
None of this is dishonesty in the ordinary sense. It’s something closer to what happens when the person you’re lying to is yourself — you stop noticing the lie is there.
I don’t think the fix is trying harder to be selfless. I’ve tried that, and it mostly produces a more sophisticated version of the same performance — the noble soul working hard all day to prove it’s noble. That’s still the trap, just wearing better clothes.
The fix is narrower than that. It’s noticing, in the specific moment a status report gets softened or a bad call gets reframed, that the thing being protected is a story about yourself — and then doing the other thing anyway. Reporting the risk that makes you look like you’re not in control. Killing the module with your name on it. Naming the decision that was wrong before someone else names it for you.
The great things in a program — the correction made early, the value actually protected — don’t happen while someone is managing how they look. They happen in the narrow window when a leader steps outside that story long enough to see what’s actually true. Everything before that window is motion. Only what happens inside it is stewardship.
