Liquid
When I walked into my role as CTO at ACE in 2020, I thought I had it all figured out. I'd been coaching CTOs for years through 7CTOs, had successfully exited a company as CTO, and had developed frameworks I was confident would solve any challenge.
I was wrong.
Liquid: How CEOs & CTOs Unlock Flow and Momentum in Complex Systems
Liquid invites you to see your business differently. Not as a collection of teams and tasks, but as a complex adaptive system. One that’s constantly shifting, often in ways you can’t see or predict. Beneath every team dynamic, delivery delay, or organizational bottleneck is a hidden world shaping outcomes. And unless you can see that world, you’re destined to repeat the same frustrating patterns, over and over again, as you grow.
Within months, I was drowning. Despite all my experience and expertise, the company was in chaos, features were late, and nothing I tried seemed to work. The frameworks I'd relied on felt like square pegs being hammered into round holes. Eventually, I had to do something I never expected: I quit.
That failure changed everything for me.
In the months that followed, I sat with a blank piece of paper and asked myself the hardest question of my career: What was I missing? That afternoon of introspection led to a breakthrough that would eventually become the CTO Sentinel framework and, later, this book.
I realized I'd been focused on the work of being a CTO—the tactics, the processes, the technologies—when what I should have been seeing was the invisible system operating beneath it all. Every company has a hidden complex adaptive system quietly shaping outcomes, and most of us are completely blind to it. We can't see why things really slow down, why teams get stuck, or why the same problems keep recurring no matter how hard we work.
Liquid is the book I wish I'd had before walking into ACE.
Written with my colleagues Scott Graves and Kathy Keating—two brilliant technology leaders who've been on similar journeys—this book reveals the secret world of complex systems within technology organizations. We show you how to see the patterns that govern success and failure, how to recognize when your company is "boiling" in chaos or "frozen" in rigidity, and most importantly, how to guide it toward a state of productive flow.
Throughout the book, we follow Alice and Bob as they build their startup from scratch, encountering the same challenges you're likely facing: the codebase that suddenly becomes unmanageable, the team that stops shipping fast, the growing pains that threaten to tear the company apart. Their story isn't fictional—it's a composite of the real struggles we've all experienced and witnessed.
This isn't just theory. We give you practical frameworks like the Four Sentinels (Speed, Stretch, Shield, and Sales) that help you measure the health of your technology organization. We show you how to use signals, boundaries, and patterns to influence your system without trying to control it. And we help you become the catalyst your company needs—someone who can see the complexity and guide the organization through it.
If you've ever felt like you're working incredibly hard but not getting the results you expect, if you've wondered why your team slows down as you grow, or if you sense there's something deeper going on beneath the surface of your daily firefighting, this book is for you.
The system is always there, whether you see it or not. The question is: are you ready to open your eyes?