Transition & Consolidation

A Town Hall I Cannot Date

I do not remember the day. What I remember is the mechanism: a department town hall, a new team created and called Strategic Planning and Projects, the position of the Architect moved into it, and me named the new Architect.

That is how it arrived. Not a conversation I was called into, not something I applied for. An organizational chart changed shape in a room full of people, and my name was inside the new shape.

What the Move Actually Was

It was a restructuring by the company that year, and it was not happening in isolation. Most of the oil companies in the country and in the world were laying off a lot of people around then. Part of the restructuring was to move me to that position.

I want to be precise about that, because it would be easy to tell it the other way round. I was not promoted for something I had won. I was moved, inside a reorganization, in a year when the industry was mostly moving people out.

Anxiety, Not Relief

From the outside that probably reads as a good year. From the inside it was anxiety, because my goal was to move to a role in security, and I felt I was not fitted for the role I had been given.

Those two things sat together all year: the new title, and the quiet certainty that it was not the direction I had been walking in.

Lost for Some Time

The feeling was not vague. I knew very few things about the role. It was a skill gap, plainly. Another teammate had wanted the position too. And the person who created the team left the company during this time, so the one person who might have told me what the role was for was gone.

I was lost for some time because of that. It was hard for me to find the goal, for me, of the role. That stretch did not end in December. It ran on for years.

2018 in one sentence: I was given the title in September and spent a long time afterwards trying to find out what it was.