I asked a room full of CTOs to agree with something before they saw it.

About 37% raised their hands. The rest stared at me like I'd just asked them to deploy to production on a Friday afternoon.

Then I showed them the slide: The role of CTO is not technical.

The room went silent. That beautiful, uncomfortable silence that means someone just said something true that nobody wants to be true.

Here's what happened next.

When Simple Becomes Chaos (A 10-Minute Journey)

I made them write a story. Bob and Alice start a company to compete with Twitter. One sentence describing their five-year journey. Easy.

Then I told them to find a partner and combine stories. A little awkward, but manageable.

Then pair up with another pair. Four people, one story. Things got messy.

Then find another group of four. Eight people trying to reconcile eight different narratives about Bob and Alice's startup.

I watched it happen in real-time. The standing up. The negotiations. Someone taking charge while others tried to protect their version. Contradictions emerging. One story had an IPO, another had a flameout.

When I asked how it went, someone yelled "chaos." Another said "complex."

I gave that second person $35 on the spot. Because they nailed it.

What Bob and Alice Taught Us About Your Company

That exercise wasn't about storytelling. It was about watching a simple system become a complex system right in front of your eyes.

You started with elements (your individual stories). Those elements entered into relationships (pairing up). New levels of organization emerged that you didn't predict (the chaos of eight people arguing about Bob and Alice's exit strategy).

That's a complex system. And your company is a complex system on steroids.

Complex systems are:

• Multi-dimensional (different scales, different sizes, all interacting)
• Self-organizing (things happen without central control)
• Nonlinear (1+1 doesn't equal 2, it equals "we just lost our best engineer and now three projects are blocked")
• Full of feedback loops (small changes flip entire behaviors)
• Constantly adapting

Sound familiar?

Acquisitions. Layoffs. Tech stack changes. Leadership changes. Market shifts. Your company is perpetually cycling through entropy and reorganization, and you're supposed to... what? Just manage the Kubernetes cluster?

What a CTO Actually Does (The Definition Nobody Asked For But Everyone Needs)

I spent way too much time on this sentence, so you're going to read it:

The CTO brings elements into relationships that self-organize into systems that are interdependent with other systems that all interact with an environment which demands new levels of organization as more components are put together.

Read it again. I'll wait.

This is why the person you are today can't be the person you are six months from now. The system demands new levels of organization. You have to evolve with it or become the bottleneck.

And here's the kicker: the biggest complexity drivers aren't technical. They're dollars and people.

Technical debt? Architectural bottlenecks? Integration nightmares? Sure, they're real. But I've never seen anything add complexity to a system faster than adding money, adding people, removing money, or removing people.

Your biggest scaling challenge isn't your tech stack. It's understanding how humans behave when you put them together with resources and pressure and competing incentives.

The Triangle: What You're Actually Managing

Revenue targets → Dollars → People → Technology

That's it. That's the triangle.

Your job is to understand where the company needs to go (revenue targets), allocate the budget (dollars), find the right humans (people), and eventually they build the thing (technology).

Technology is the output, not the input.

During the Q&A, someone asked if CTOs really control the budget. Great question. In big corporations, often no. P&L heads control it, and you have to persuade them to invest in things that might hurt their current revenue stream to buy a future.

That's exactly my point. The role requires persuasion, influence, long-term thinking, and navigating competing interests. Not technical. Human.

The Square: How You Actually Do It

Four things. Speed, Stretch, Shield, Sales.

Speed: How fast can you deliver? This looks different at every stage. Early on, it's trunk-based development and feature flags. Later, it's incentive programs to keep creativity inside your company instead of bleeding out to side projects.

Stretch: Organizational design. Vacancy management. Budget allocation. Hiring. You're stretching the organization's capacity.

Shield: Protecting the org from future threats, current threats, internal threats, external threats. You're the immune system.

Sales: Yeah, you read that right. The best CTOs understand and can articulate how the technology creates business value. They're involved in selling the product or service.

Notice what's missing from that square? "Write really good code."

The Question That Broke My Brain

Someone asked about the CTO/CPO combo role.

I love CTOs who have a passion for product. Early stage? Beautiful. But combining the roles later often happens for the wrong reasons—saving money, assuming things will move faster with a "technical person" leading product.

Here's why that scares me: funding your own product removes the natural tension that creates better outcomes. When there's separation, you have to have conversations, negotiations, trade-offs. You have to practice persuasion and empathy.

When it's all one person? That conversational muscle atrophies. And guess what skills you need most as a CTO? Conversation. Negotiation. Empathy.

The very skills that make you effective at managing complex human systems are the ones that get thrown out when we collapse roles for convenience.

What This Means for You Tomorrow Morning

Look at your calendar. How much of it is technical versus human?

If you're spending more time debugging code than debugging organizations, you're doing someone else's job. Probably the job you loved, the one that got you promoted. But it's not the job you have now.

Your company is a complex system that needs you to bring elements into relationships, shepherd them through self-organization, and evolve as the environment demands new levels of organization.

That's not a technical challenge. That's a human one.

And if that makes you uncomfortable? Good. That uncomfortable feeling is where your next level of growth lives.

The question isn't whether the CTO role is technical. The question is: are you ready to lead the complex system you're actually in, or are you going to keep pretending you're just managing the technology?

Want to figure out what level you're actually operating at versus what level your company needs? The CTO Levels™ framework maps this out from $100K budgets to $50M. Because wherever you are today, you won't be there in six months. The system won't let you.