Rian J Butcher

“To transform today’s dreams into tomorrow’s reality, so that we improve the lives of many, whilst at the same time enriching our own.”

I have spent most of my working life in Valladolid, which is not where anyone expects a British career to happen.

I took charge of my first team at twenty-three and I have led one every day of the forty years since. I built a technology business here and it was bought, and then bought again. Twice almost everything changed overnight, the name, the systems, the reporting lines, and twice the team held, not on the structure, which had gone, but on what it had committed to and said out loud. The one thing that survived both upheavals was the one thing we had ever troubled to write down.

That business became part of Thirdera, and Thirdera part of Cognizant, where I finished as a Senior Vice President leading the ServiceNow practice globally, more than two and a half thousand people across three continents, recognised in my final year in charge as the best of its kind in the world.

For six of those years I was also President of Club de Rugby El Salvador, and the same lesson arrived from the opposite direction, because nobody in a volunteer organisation has to do a single thing you say. In my final season we became the first club to be Spanish national champions in both men’s and women’s senior rugby in the same season. Along the way we put players with and without disabilities in the same dressing room, and we took the game inside the prison at Villanubla with Caritas. None of it held because I asked for it. It held because enough people had agreed what the club was for.

A global practice and a rugby club could not look less alike, and they taught me the same thing. Every team runs on a map of what is true and a rule for what it will do, and almost nobody writes either down.

That is the work now. Constitutional Leadership is a programme for executive teams and boards on those two things, so that a team holds when the leader leaves the room. Alongside it I write about AI Governance, because companies are handing real work to software, and almost none of them have written down what it may do, who decides, and what it may never do.

The first pieces are in My Writing, and the letters go out fortnightly. If any of it is useful, that is the whole point of putting it somewhere permanent.