Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Introduction Most professions reward expertise and this generally plays as exactly what you’d expect for the profession to be effective. Patients deserve physicians who recognize subtle diagnoses. Aircraft deserve engineers who understand failure modes. Organizations benefit when accountants know the subtleties of tax law, software developers understand minute...
Category Archives: Long Form
The Second Apprenticeship
Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Introduction Organizations love promoting experts. It makes intuitive sense. The engineer who designed the breakthrough product becomes the engineering manager. The scientist who built the most successful laboratory becomes department chair. The professor with the strongest research portfolio becomes dean. The physician with the broadest clinical, educational, and...
Leadership By Design
Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Author’s Note This article was originally written for Forge magazine. It became the catalyst for a broader series exploring how highly accomplished technical professionals transition into leadership. If you’re beginning here, you’re in the right place. Introduction It would be hard to find an organization that says it wants anything...
Imprecision in Thought: Capstone “I Didn’t Make This Up, Kid”
Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Introduction There’s something about the calendar turning toward July 4th that makes this feel a little less abstract. Maybe it’s being a bicentennial baby. Maybe it’s twenty years in uniform. Maybe it’s just the cumulative effect of watching the quality of our public conversations degrade while the volume...
Imprecision in Thought Part 4 Comfort, Complexity, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves
Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Introduction In the last post, we walked through how thinking breaks—how overusing shortcuts, collapsing distinctions, and grabbing onto explanations that are a little too clean pulls us away from reality while giving us the comforting sense that we’ve finally made sense of it. None of that is particularly...
Imprecision in Thought Part 3 Not the Same Thing: Where Thinking Actually Breaks
Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Introduction In part 2 of this series, we talked about the discipline required to avoid becoming the problem you’re trying to fix—slowing down, defining terms, showing your work, and resisting the very natural urge to react before you actually understand what you’re reacting to. All of that matters....
Imprecision in Thought — Part 2 The Discipline of Not Being Part of the Problem
Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Introduction In the last post, we talked about that moment when something sounds wrong—the face scrunch, the irritation, the immediate certainty that what you’re reading or hearing doesn’t hold up. The problem doesn’t stop with what you’re reacting to. It includes what you’re about to become if you...
Imprecision in Thought Part 1 When Something Sounds Wrong—But You Can’t Explain Why
Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Introduction Don’t ya just love those moments where you start out certain you know what to do, and then a quick pause to check that all systems are “go” gives you some unexpected clarity—and you realize you’re about to make a colossal blunder? Picture this—I’m wiling away a...
You’re Part of the System Now: Burnout and Responsibility
Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Some Final Thoughts on Burnout There’s a point in many high-stakes professional systems where the questions quietly shift. Early on, they tend to be personal:Why does this feel so hard? What’s happening to me? How do I get through this without losing something I can’t get back? That’s...
When Burnout Isn’t About Stress or Recovery
Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Alignment, Identity, and the Limits of Fixing What Doesn’t Fit In the last installment, we followed burnout past the point where it could reasonably be treated as a private problem. Once responsibility for others enters the picture, the effects are no longer contained. They show up in judgment,...