In 2011, I was sitting in a NATO headquarters, planning coalition operations in Afghanistan.

It was not the threat of IEDs or ambushes that occupied my thinking that day. It was something quieter, and in some ways more alarming. The future of conflict was shifting. Intelligence, information control, digital infrastructure - these were becoming the new battlespace. I had spent years managing physical risk in some of the world's most dangerous environments. But I could see that the threat landscape was changing shape, and that the skills which had kept people alive in the field were about to matter in an entirely different arena.

When I left the military, moving into cybersecurity was not a career pivot. It was the only logical next step.

What I did not expect was the pattern I would keep seeing.

Over the following decade – working at KPMG, scaling a cybersecurity company from a handful of people to seventy, working as CEO and COO of listed companies - I watched the same scene play out again and again. A CISO would present to the board. Executives would nod. Then, afterwards, someone would pull me aside: "What should I actually be worried about?"

These were sharp, experienced leaders. They could pull apart a P&L, spot a bad acquisition, read a room. But on cyber, they were flying blind. Not because they were not capable, but because nobody was translating the risk into language they could act on. The industry had, somewhere along the way, built an entire profession that struggled to communicate upward. And executives were left making multi-million pound decisions based on hope rather than understanding.

That is the problem I founded SJ Strategy to fix.

I do not turn executives into technical experts. That is not the point.

My job is to give you the business-level fluency to govern effectively. To ask the right questions. To know when you are being told what you need to hear and when you are not. To walk out of a board presentation feeling informed rather than relieved it is over.

I have seen what happens when defences fail, in combat and in business. I want fewer leaders to experience that. Not through better technology, but through better decisions.

That is the work.