I sponsor the SCO. I hold a corporate box. I go to almost every home game.
For years I thought I understood football. I had opinions about the referee. Loud ones, sometimes. Like every executive who has opinions about their IS without having looked at it.
Then I spent an evening with Pierre Chevreux — 13 years as a Ligue 1 assistant referee, now running a café in Angers. He dismantled something I’d been doing professionally for twenty-five years without knowing it.
300 decisions. Per match. With incomplete information.
300 decisions per match. One every 18 seconds. Some clusters of ten decisions in under a minute. No pause, no rewind, no committee, no “let’s schedule a follow-up.”
Pierre described a Bordeaux-PSG where the keeper picks up a backpass because Ibrahimovic is charging. Obvious foul. Pierre sees it clearly from his position on the line, signals it. The central referee doesn’t follow. And in a trio, you trust each other. You don’t override each other publicly. Pierre swallows it. The decision holds. The match moves on.
What struck me wasn’t the injustice. It was the architecture.
Each official has a zone, a role, an angle of vision. The system only works if everyone accepts its constraints. The moment one person starts overriding another’s zone, the whole structure collapses. What looks like a wrong call from the stands is often the correct application of a governance model the crowd doesn’t know exists.
The executives in that room had been spectators
Everyone in that room — including me — had spent years building confident opinions about referee quality. From sixty meters away. At a sprint. Under floodlights. With thirty thousand people shouting in our ears.
We had never seriously considered what the role actually requires.
This is the exact cognitive posture most executives bring to their information system. They’ve watched it from the stands. They have opinions. The system is slow. The team doesn’t deliver. The CTO doesn’t communicate. The architecture is outdated.
All of that might be true. But it’s spectator analysis. Built from what reaches the dining room, not from what happens in the kitchen. Built from the output, not from understanding the constraints that produced it.
I’ve sat across from CEOs who were completely convinced their architecture problem was a people problem. Three months into the engagement, it turned out their “slow team” was navigating an undocumented maze of dependencies that took me two weeks to fully map. The team wasn’t slow. They were doing the equivalent of refereeing with one eye, one arm, and a rulebook written in a language nobody remembered having learned.
The CEO had watched the match. He hadn’t looked at the referee’s operating conditions.
Not deciding is also a decision
The part that stopped me cold: Pierre said, not saying anything is also a decision.
A referee’s silence has consequences exactly like his whistle. Except we never replay the abstentions after the match. We only analyze the interventions. The non-calls, the moments where play was allowed to continue — nobody reviews those.
I think about this in every COMEX I’ve observed where a technical decision was avoided for months. The call to replace a brittle architecture. The call to exit a vendor relationship that costs more than it produces. The call to tell the board that the product roadmap assumes a technical capacity the team doesn’t have.
Silence is not neutrality. Silence is a decision with deferred consequences. And the deferred consequences in tech are almost always more expensive than the call would have been, because technical debt compounds exactly like financial debt — with interest.
The organizations I’ve seen handle this well have one thing in common: someone with the actual authority to make a call and have it hold. Not just the title. Not the meeting organizer. The person whose whistle the rest of the organization respects without relitigating it.
Most companies don’t know who the referee is
Here’s the question I now ask at the start of every engagement, and it’s rarely answered cleanly:
In your organization, who has the actual authority to make a technical call and have it hold?
Not who has the title. Not who calls the meetings. Who, when they blow the whistle, has the rest of the organization move forward without negotiating the call?
The most common answer: the CEO thinks it’s the CTO. The CTO thinks he needs buy-in from the CFO. The CFO thinks it’s a product question. Nobody whistles. The play continues. The foul compounds. And eighteen months later, you’re looking at a bill that represents the accumulated cost of decisions that were never made when they should have been.
Pierre Chevreux made 300 calls per match. He had authority within his zone. He trusted the system. He delivered clean results under conditions most executive teams would find unworkable.
Your organization makes fewer decisions than a Ligue 1 referee. It takes longer. And the authority structure is less clear.
That’s not a football problem.
On a related note: the same executives who can’t name their referee are often the same ones who pre-write the verdict before commissioning the audit. Prescribing Without Examining goes into that.
