The most important security control in the room may be the person who feels safe enough to say, “I think we missed something.” Over two days last week, I had the privilege of supporting a Xebia security workshop led by Yianna Paris. Yianna guided participants through social engineering, pipeline security, credential theft, vulnerable dependencies, data poisoning, prompt injection, model attacks, guardrails, and hands-on labs. Her expertise was visible not only in what she kne

A system can pass every test we gave it and still fail the reality we forgot to question Everything passed. The code compiled. The tests ran. The result was green. The AI reviewed its own work and found no problem. There is something deeply reassuring about a row of green checks. Green tells us the work is complete. Green tells us the system behaved as expected. Green gives us permission to stop looking, make the next decision, and move on. But green can only tell us that the

When recording everything becomes more important than deciding what matters A vulnerability is discovered. Create a ticket. A customer requests a feature. Create a ticket. A meeting produces an idea. A monitoring tool detects an anomaly. An audit recommends an improvement. AI analyzes the organization and identifies 147 opportunities. Create 150 more tickets. We have designed organizations in which creating work is easier than deciding whether the work matters. That was alrea

How leaders can take AI risk seriously without turning uncertainty into prophecy This week, I heard that artificial intelligence would destroy humanity within ten years. Not might. Not could. Would. The statement arrived with the force of a dragon’s roar. It was frightening, absolute, and almost impossible to hold at a healthy distance, especially after listening to The Daily describe AI systems apparently outsmarting the people who created them. But when a dragon sounds the

When measurement replaces meaning, leaders can make perfectly defensible, and deeply damaging, decisions A vulnerability receives a severity score of 9.6. Another receives a score of 6.1. Which one should be fixed first? The answer appears obvious. Fix the 9.6. It is the higher number. The greater danger. The decision that can be defended in a meeting, justified in an audit, and summarized neatly on a dashboard. But then we add the missing context. 💚 The 9.6 exists inside an

Why silence is not healing, good intentions are not repair, and “moving forward” can be an act of leadership avoidance One of leadership’s favorite lies is: “That happened a long time ago.” As if time itself repairs trust. As if a new strategy can overwrite an old betrayal. As if people stop carrying an experience simply because leadership has stopped mentioning it. They do not. Teams remember. Not only in meeting notes, engagement surveys, or the lessons-learned document nob

And leadership can fix it —> if we stop rewarding speed while treating engineering discipline as optional I am going to start with the controversial part. AI did not break software security. Leadership did. We keep pointing at AI as if it is the dragon at the gate. But the fire was already inside the castle. Old code. Neglected maintenance. Weak security practices. Years of rewarding more features while treating the care of what we had already built as secondary work. AI did

🇮🇹🇨🇭🇩🇪🇦🇹 I’m officially on vacation. ☀️🌊📚 For the next couple of weeks I’ll be trading workshops, whiteboards, and strategy sessions for beaches, mountains, good food, and hopefully finishing a few books. But before I disappear… 💚 I want to give something back. When I created The Leadership Landing, I didn’t want another leadership course full of theories and pre-recorded videos. I wanted the kind of experience I wish I’d had earlier in my own leadership journey. A

Over the past few weeks, I attended Xebia’s AI Leadership & Strategy training with Sander. Today was the final day. The funny thing is that somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking about AI. I started thinking about dating. Not because the course was bad. Actually, quite the opposite. The more we explored strategy, stakeholder management, business cases, communication, resistance, adoption, and organizational change, the more I found myself asking: “Why does this all feel

There is a strange ritual that happens inside organizations every few years. New boxes appear. Names move. Teams merge. Departments split. Fresh slides are created. Someone presents a shiny new structure. And then … hundreds of humans quietly enter survival mode. Because underneath every reorganization, a thousand invisible questions suddenly wake up. You can almost hear them. The clicking of keyboards updating profiles. The nervous laughter in meetings. The pause before som

Today was the first day of Xebia’s AI Strategy & Leadership course, facilitated by Sander Dur. Going in, I expected to spend most of the day discussing AI. Models. Agents. Automation. Use cases. Technology. Instead, I found myself thinking about Agile…. That may sound strange. After all, Agile and AI seem like completely different conversations. One emerged from software development and product thinking. The other is rapidly transforming how knowledge work is performed. Yet a

On Sunday, I wrote about something that stayed with me after the Rejekts conference: systems are growing faster than meaning That lens focused on architecture, layers, and cognitive load. But I like stepping into the same room twice. Looking again. Seeing what reveals itself from a different angle. Saturday was Rejekts. A full day of talks on Kubernetes, AI, platform engineering, and observability. Layer upon layer of capability. Abstraction. Power. Monday was something

(What Rejekts revealed when you listen between the talks) I went to the Rejekts conference for the talks. Kubernetes. AI. Platform engineering. Observability. But the real story wasn’t in any single talk. It was in what they all had in common. The Red Line, We Keep Adding Layers to Avoid Facing the Same Problem Every talk, in a different way, was solving this: “How do we manage the complexity we already created?” Not reduce it. Not question it. Manage it . Sveltos → Manage cl

Tonight I went to a meetup hosted by Tergos: Cloud DevOps Meet AI. Damn, what a great meetup! Great food, great conversations! And a engaging knowledgeable speaker who will soon be moving to the Australia! “We stepped of the plane and my daughter said in the first moment, we have to live here” “It is like the USA in the 1990s” On the surface, it was a technical evening. Cloud. DevOps. AI. Infrastructure. Models. Automation. Incident response. Deployment gates. Chaos engin

Stop Measuring Performance. Start Measuring Value. There is a reason metrics feel dangerous. It’s not because numbers are bad. It’s because most leaders measure the wrong thing, and measure it for the wrong reason. Metrics were never meant to prove competence. They were meant to test hypotheses. And somewhere along the way, we forgot that. Scientists Don’t Prove Themselves Right Before I moved fully into computer engineering, I studied chemical engineering. The most powerful

Why most teams optimize themselves into exhaustion There’s a moment in many conversations where I feel those in the room lean forward, not because something complex was said, but because something simple finally named what everyone has been living. In this conversation, that moment came when I reached for a metaphor I often use to explain the difference between single loop and double loop learning. Not because it’s clever. But because it’s uncomfortable. The toothbrush moment

Why most leaders mistake “fairness” for truth There is a moment in leadership that doesn’t show up on LinkedIn. It doesn’t come with applause. And it rarely gets written about honestly. It’s the moment when you realize: If I hadn’t slowed down, I would have made the wrong call, and destroyed trust in the process. Michel named that moment without defensiveness. And what makes his story uncomfortable is this: his instincts weren’t malicious. They were standard. The leadership l

As we peeled back the layers, Anca discovered that even when she felt stuck or powerless, the source of impact was already within her, grounded in values, courage, and purpose. 👉 Watch and read her full journey here: https://www.avagasso.com/post/anca-grigoras-from-imposter-to-integrated-leader

Last week, I shared a glimpse into the first ten pages of The Leadership Leap - the journey, the mindset shifts, and the call to step...

🔥 You didn’t sign up for this - the endless decisions, the weight of responsibility, the system that feels too broken to change. But...