This is a blog about the residue of working with you! The energy you bring, the clarity you create, and the stories people repeat about you after you’ve left the room (or the call). For those of us in digital, that impression often matters as much as the delivery, our work moves through networks of influence, not neat organisational charts, you can be brilliant and still be exhausting to work with.
Recently an old colleague got in touch to share an academic paper she’d published in Ireland. It reflects on her experience of creating “adaptive space” to develop integrated care, work I was fortunate to be part of. Reading it brought back vivid memories of what we built together, and it also gave me an unexpected mirror for my own practice.
What stayed with me most was the way my colleague described the influence of the CIO involved in that work. She did not care about the job title it was the way he showed up and what that made possible for other people.
I’ve kept her words exactly as written:
“Energy, I learned, travels faster than policy. At this point, we were fortunate to have an exceptionally vibrant Chief Information Officer. His optimism was infectious. His use of visual storytelling was strategic, not decorative. I admired the ease with which he navigated influence through networks rather than hierarchy, and I learned from both his confidence and his generosity. Together, we challenged traditional channels of communication and adopted a more visible and public style of leadership. At times, I operated on instinct more than permission, “seek forgiveness, not approval” quietly becoming a working rule.”
So I want to break that passage down into a few practical traits that digital people can deliberately practise, regardless of whether you’re an engineer, product manager, delivery lead, architect, analyst, designer, or indeed the digital leader.
In my organisation we’ve just completed Performance Review season, so reflection is everywhere. But rather than only asking “what did I deliver?”, I’m trying to ask a more useful digital question: what did working with me make easier for other people? Did I speed up decisions, make complexity feel navigable, create safety for experimentation, or did I add drag?
I keep coming back to phrases like “energy travels faster than policy” and “influence through networks rather than hierarchy”. If we can get that right, we don’t just deliver outcomes we leave behind momentum.
Why “impression” is a delivery skill in digital
Digital people love the language of delivery. Roadmaps. Milestones. Outcomes. Demos.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of what determines whether you succeed is invisible on a plan. It lives in the impression you leave behind in other humans especially the ones you need to say yes, share risk, surface bad news early, or do the hard work when nobody is watching.
In digital teams, your “colleague legacy” isn’t just the thing you shipped. It’s whether people experienced you as a force that made work faster or slower; clearer or murkier; safer or riskier. Do people bring you messy problems because you help make them navigable, or do they avoid you because every conversation feels like a tribunal?
If you want a simple test, borrow this one: after someone meets with you, do they leave with more energy, more clarity, and more options than they arrived with? If not, it doesn’t matter how many problems you resolved you’re adding drag to the system.
“Energy travels faster than policy”: be a source of momentum
“Energy travels faster than policy” is one of those lines you read once and then start seeing everywhere. Policy is important. Governance matters. But policy doesn’t unblock a stuck programme at 4:45pm on a Thursday. People do. The colleague who creates momentum is rarely the loudest person in the room, they’re the one who turns fog into the next small decision.
Momentum isn’t hype. It’s not “good vibes only”, and it’s definitely not pretending everything is fine when it isn’t. It’s calm urgency. It’s doing the emotional labour of making progress feel possible. If your default setting is cynicism, be honest: you’re not being “realistic”, you’re being expensive. Complaints aren’t a plan.
Try this in your next meeting: start with the decision needed, not the backstory. Name constraints early. Summarise in plain language. Close with owners and dates. Then do the follow-through that most people skip: write down what was decided and share it. You’d be amazed how quickly “we’re stuck” becomes “we’ve got a path”.
Think of the last time a delivery felt heavy. Who lightened it? What did they actually do? That’s the skill, learnable, repeatable, and wildly under-rated.
“His optimism was infectious”: model belief without denying reality
Optimism gets a bad reputation in digital because we’ve all met the person who confuses confidence with denial. But “his optimism was infectious” isn’t about ignoring reality. It’s about modelling belief that the next iteration can be better and that the team has agency.
In iterative work, value is discovered as much as it is planned. You don’t get optimism from a Gantt chart. You get it from leaders and peers who treat unknowns as testable, not as proof you’re failing. Teams borrow confidence from the people who can say, “We don’t know yet, and we’re still okay.”
Practically, this looks like speaking in hypotheses (“let’s test”), separating what’s hard from what’s merely unknown, and keeping a visible list of wins so the team’s narrative doesn’t become “everything is broken”. Optimism isn’t a mood, it’s a professional stance. It changes what people attempt.
Pessimism is a decision to shrink. Optimism is a decision to try.
“Visual storytelling… strategic, not decorative”: make complexity legible
“Visual storytelling, strategic, not decorative” should be printed and taped to every digital tam ewall. Because most stakeholders don’t need more words. They need to see what you see: the system, the dependencies, the trade-offs, the sequence.
A one-page architecture sketch. A service blueprint. A simple now/next/later roadmap. A dependency map that tells the truth. A before/after user journey that makes pain visible. These aren’t “nice to haves”. They’re how you stop the same meeting happening five times with different nouns.
If your diagram doesn’t change decisions, it’s decoration. The goal isn’t a beautiful slide, it’s a shared mental model. Build a single “source of truth” visual, narrate the trade-offs, and use it to reduce meeting time, not extend it.
Try this test: could someone outside your domain explain the plan back to you after seeing your visual for two minutes? If not, you’ve built a prop, not a shared model—and you’ll pay for it later in meetings.
And when it’s done well, it has a kind of pull. One of my favourite thoughts about David Bowie is that he was “like a gravitational access point to a different world.” The best visuals do that: they let people step into the system you’re seeing, quickly, and start making better decisions inside it.
There’s a piece of journalism about him that I love: “David is coming in from 10 angles at once; he’s always broadcasting on many frequencies.” That’s what great digital communication looks like too: not one perfect artefact, but the same idea expressed clearly for different audiences; clinicians, ops, finance, security, delivery, leadership. Same truth. Multiple frequencies.
“Influence through networks rather than hierarchy”: build coalitions, not escalations
“Influence through networks rather than hierarchy” is where most digital transformations live or die. If your plan relies on escalation, you don’t have a strategy, you have a threat. And threats are a terrible long-term operating model. If you need a sponsor to force a decision you can’t otherwise earn, the work isn’t stuck because of governance; it’s stuck because trust is missing.
Practically: make your ask clear and timeboxed. Create a lightweight cross-functional rhythm where information moves quickly and nobody is surprised in public.
And if escalation is your default: notice what happens. People stop telling you the truth early. They start managing you instead of the work. Progress slows. Congratulations you’ve successfully “won” a room and lost a network.
“Confidence and generosity”: be the colleague people grow around
Confidence and generosity is an extraordinary combination. Confidence makes decisions. Generosity builds capacity. Put them together and people don’t just deliver around you; they grow around you.
Generosity in digital isn’t just being nice. It’s giving away the thing that creates power: context. It’s sharing the ‘why’ early, handing over a template, writing down the decision rationale, making the introduction, giving credit loudly, and coaching someone through a knotty trade-off instead of guarding it like intellectual property.
Confidence is simpler than people think: state your recommendation, say why, own the outcome, and stay open to dissent without getting prickly. If you can’t tolerate challenge, you don’t have confidence, you have theatre.
Two self-checks I like: do I hoard context? And do people leave me clearer and more capable than before? If the answer is “no”, the fix isn’t another framework. It’s behaviour.
Thelonious Monk said, “Genius is the person who is most like themself.”
That’s a useful bar for digital colleagues too: are you trying to perform “senior”, or are you doing the honest work of becoming unmistakably you, your clear values, consistent behaviour, and the courage to say what you mean? People trust the real thing.
“More visible and public” and “seek forgiveness, not approval”: act in the open, with judgement
“More visible and public” leadership is an underrated superpower. Visibility scales. Decisions travel. Learning compounds. And working in the open stops your organisation paying for the same lesson multiple times.
This can be as simple as a public decision log, a demo culture, sharing drafts early, short weekly updates, and documenting the rationale (not just the result). It’s also a stance: you’re not trying to look clever after the fact, you’re letting people see the work while it’s still changeable.
Now, the spicy bit: “seek forgiveness, not approval.” Used well, it means you remove unnecessary bureaucracy and you bias toward action. Used badly, it’s an excuse to ignore governance. And in regulated environments, that doesn’t make you bold—it makes you a liability.
The way through is judgement: clarify what’s reversible versus irreversible, run small safe-to-try experiments, and inform the right people early even when you don’t need permission. If you’re going to move fast, move responsibly and leave an audit trail that helps others learn.
Choose the impression you want to leave
So yes, ship the thing. Deliver the outcome. But don’t stop there. Ask the sharper question: what did working with me make possible? Did I create pace? Clarity? Courage? Or did I create caution, confusion, and a thousand extra meetings?
If you want to make this real, pick one trait for the next 10 days: momentum, optimism, visual clarity, network influence, generosity, or visible leadership. Tell a trusted colleague what you’re practising and ask them for one sentence of feedback at the end. Not a score. One sentence.
Because in digital, your legacy isn’t only the thing you built. It’s the pace, clarity, and confidence you left behind in the people who build after you.
On the anniversary of Prince’s passing, his ethos is a good reminder: a strong identity isn’t a costume; it’s a practice shaped by what you do in ordinary interactions every day.
That’s what colleagues remember, not your title, not your slide deck. Your pattern for delivery, their delivery not yours!
Reference
The paper referenced above can be read in full here: