When your voice is heard, and the great ideas you’ve dreamed and written about crawl into a glimmer of daylight, a spark of adrenaline ignites. The work expands. Brilliant developers listen, and the next day there are working prototypes. We’re debating reasoning, correcting ideas and perspectives, designing controls—financial, regulatory, business, and more—in a new world of live testing. Chess games on defense, positions exposed in the wilderness. Ramp. NetSuite. Credit Foundations. New opportunities. Relocation searches. Board meetings. Convergence.

Nothing drops. Pure adrenaline. A lesson is brewing. Thrilling anticipation of what it might be, but no time to ponder now. Triage reigns. The foundation so long imagined is taking shape, warts and all. Don’t stop now. Strike while the opportunity is hot. No time for introspection or perfection. Perfect is the enemy of good, as they say. Heads down, focused on the moment. The more universal implications will have to wait.

So contemplative writing stops. Ideaphoria makes way for today’s work. We’ll write tomorrow, once it all sits in the rearview mirror. Prior lessons inform today’s reactionary chaos. The lessons of now will have to be written later. The blog will have to pause. And that is good.

Then, welcome, sleepless night. Adrenaline is great for work. Not so much for rest. The loose ends follow me home. We’re designing internal controls for a superhighway. The old handheld signs and crossing guards in fluorescent belts no longer suffice. How will this work? What have we missed?

Maybe the writing hasn’t gone away. Maybe it is circling around the work.

I keep coming back to narrative versus facts. Maybe they aren’t mutually exclusive. We tell ourselves we remember a past event faithfully, but memory is shaped by perspective. Snippets from different times and places get stitched together into a story that makes sense. It feels like what happened. But is it the path we actually took, or the path we assembled afterward?

We watch an elite athlete and learn. The athlete learns too. The runner talks about a high. The three-point shooter describes a zone. Muscle memory takes over. Ask the athlete what worked and why. Then ask the observer who recorded the physical movements. The answers may be different. The athlete knows what it felt like from the inside. The observer sees the movements from the outside. We need both, but neither account tells us everything.

We can mistake listening to the performer, the person working though the exercise, for understanding the performance. We can study the observer’s record and mistake it for an explanation. A coach advises, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Sage advice? It depends. The words may reflect hard-won knowledge. The behavior may reveal something else. Either way, there is something to question.

So what does that have to do with business transformation?

Take a small piece as the microcosm. Reengineering the chart of accounts. Surely a simple task. A core task in moving from one ERP to another. But the work isn’t just setting up a list of numbers. It’s the back and forth with leaders of related entities about structure. Modeling future growth in a numbering scheme that stays meaningful and avoids clashes as clients, industries, and the business itself shift.

The foundation has to be firm, yet allow for change. That takes time and effort. Yes, sweat. You review scenarios, risks, and friction. You think about controls around millions of transactions and AI interactions producing activity at a scale the manual processes of the past could never accommodate. After all that, the finished chart may look simple. Like seeing a magnificent building and admiring the facade. What did it really take to build? Who can you ask?

The builder was too busy building to report every choice. The observer may have recorded some steps. Later, the account comes from memory, and memory arranges what it has into a story. How many perspectives do we need? How many camera angles? Even then, how much will we know about the motions, motivations, and decisions behind the result?

Then we come full circle to AI. Why? Because now some of the work happens in a conversation we can revisit. We move faster along development paths, debating reasoning, correcting ideas, trying again. Along the way, we leave a trail. We fear AI building AI. Meanwhile, I’m finding value in something less spectacular. A record of what we tried, what we questioned, what we changed. The tidier written narrative, with its error-free grammar and recognizable em dash style, may leave out the very missteps worth examining. My new friend keeps those too. Biases and all.

But even that is a record of the conversation, not of all reality. It can’t record what wasn’t said or what was happening outside the session. The back and forth can become its own story, shaped by what we thought to ask. AI can be a critical partner, sometimes a hallucinating one. It can challenge us if we ask. If we don’t, it can be too agreeable, confirming the narrative we already have. It can help us examine more accounts and perspectives than we can hold on our own. But those are still perspectives.

Isn’t it humbling to imagine we are only estimating reality, even with our new friend?

Then again, close enough is good enough in many cases. We accountants have no pi. Dollars and cents. Two decimals. Carry more precision through the calculation if you need it, but eventually tell me what you rounded and how. We need enough precision for the decision at hand. And enough of the path to understand how we got there.

It’s the old math teacher’s admonition to show your work. You might have the wrong answer and still earn partial credit, sometimes nearly all of it, if your path showed you understood the lesson. The path exposed the mistake. Where the reasoning slipped. Where the thinking changed. We learn from mistakes, sometimes more than from success. We marvel at the world-record performance and overlook the runners-up. What might their attempts teach us? The winning result alone cannot explain the paths that failed, the adjustments that worked, or the effort that made the performance possible.

There is value in the stream itself and in recording the thought process. Not because the record is objective truth, but because it gives us something to examine. What did we try? What did we miss? What did we accept too quickly? When did we change our minds? Then we can question the record too.

So I thought I could not write while I triage. We’re so busy, moving so fast right now. But perhaps this is the writing. Another trail through the work, incomplete and a little untidy. Tomorrow I may see where it was going.