What Crispy Pork Belly, Continuous Learning and the Future CIO 100 Have in Common

# Leadership Insights

# Professional Growth

# ITIL

On curiosity, continuous learning and a squiggly path to digital leadership.

August 24, 2026

Paul Farrow

What Crispy Pork Belly, Continuous Learning and the Future CIO 100 Have in Common

The past weekend, I nearly set the house on fire making crispy pork belly.

The flames climbed alarmingly high from the pan, the smoke alarms began screaming, and my youngest son sat watching the whole thing with a wonderful combination of concern and excitement. Anyone with children will recognise the look. Half convinced disaster is imminent, half hoping it will be.

Fortunately, the situation never escalated beyond embarrassment. I turned off the heat and the fire quickly died down. The pork belly survived, as did the kitchen. My standing as a cook remains the subject of some debate. Not entirely sure the pan is going to make it.

What stayed with me afterwards wasn't the near miss itself, but how instinctive the response had felt. There was no moment of panic and no need to work out what to do next. Remove the source of heat. Stop the problem getting worse. Escalate to the fire brigade if necessary. I'd seen enough major incidents in a professional context to recognise the pattern.

Only later did it occur to me that I had effectively followed an incident playbook.

I was recently fortunate enough to be recognised in the HotTopics Future CIO 100, a programme that recognises emerging technology leaders and sits alongside communities such as the CIO 100, CDO 100, CISO 100 and Future CISO 100. The awards recognise leadership, innovation, team development and contribution to the wider profession.

Like many forms of professional recognition, the award prompted reflection. Not because it felt like an arrival point, but because it encouraged me to think about the experiences, habits and decisions that accumulate over a career. I still don't know who nominated me and, truthfully, I prefer it that way. There is something reassuring about the idea that somebody noticed value in work that often felt quite ordinary.

One of the questions I've been asked since receiving the award is whether becoming a Chief Information Officer is part of the plan. The honest answer is I’m not sure. I've had what I would describe as a fairly squiggly career. Much of it has been driven less by a fixed destination and more by curiosity about the next challenge, the next problem to solve, or the next opportunity to learn something new.

Even now, I'm not entirely sure what I want to do when I grow up.

I'm fortunate to be in a role that continues to stretch me and expose me to new perspectives. CIO feels like a natural future progression, but experience has taught me to be cautious about predicting where curiosity might lead.

I've come to believe that careers are often shaped less by rigid plans and more by a willingness to keep learning, keep contributing and remain open to opportunities you couldn't have anticipated a few years earlier.

Most of us don't spend our days doing things that feel award-worthy. My own role, as Head of Digital Services at HM Treasury, involves much the same mix of opportunities and challenges that many digital leaders will recognise. Some days are spent looking at operational performance and service resilience. Others involve product thinking, governance, capability development or supplier relationships. Increasingly, many conversations revolve around artificial intelligence: where it can genuinely create value, how it should be governed, and how organisations can balance transformation with the reality that today's services still need to be delivered tomorrow morning.

None of those challenges are unique. In fact, one of the most useful lessons I've learned through professional communities is how rarely our problems are as distinctive as we believe them to be. Organisations change. Context changes. Sometimes the acronyms change. The underlying tensions usually don't.

Perhaps that's one reason I've always been drawn to learning.

Not because I particularly enjoy collecting qualifications, although I will admit there's a certain satisfaction in passing an exam. Rather, because I've long been curious about how different disciplines explain the same problem.

Early in my career, I approached professional development in much the same way many people do. Learn more about your specialism. Become more competent. Build expertise.

There is real value in that. Every profession depends upon people who know their craft deeply.

What surprised me over time was that some of the most valuable insights came not from going deeper, but from venturing sideways.

I started from a customer focused service management background, and ITIL gave me a way of understanding organisations through services, outcomes and value. It helped me see technology not as an end in itself, but as part of a system designed to help people achieve something meaningful.

As my career developed, curiosity kept pulling me into neighbouring disciplines.

PRINCE2 offered a different perspective, centred on governance, accountability and decision-making. Management of Risk (MoR) encouraged me to think more carefully about uncertainty and the conditions that give rise to it. DevOps introduced ideas around flow, feedback and continual learning. User-centred design brought another perspective again, reminding me that many of the problems we describe as technical are often rooted in a poor understanding of people's needs and experiences.

For a while, these felt like separate worlds.

Service management.

Project management.

Risk management.

Delivery.

Product thinking.

User-centred design.

Over time, though, the boundaries became harder to see.

A service issue might have its roots in organisational design. A project struggling to deliver outcomes might actually be wrestling with unmet user needs. A risk might emerge because incentives and operating models are pulling people in different directions. A technology challenge might, at heart, be a people challenge.

The more I learned, the more connected everything seemed.

Perhaps that's why I've always liked the idea of T-shaped, Pi-shaped and comb-shaped professionals. Each offers a useful reminder that breadth and depth matter. Deep expertise remains invaluable. But the thing that sits underneath those models, at least for me, is curiosity.

The people who have influenced me most are rarely the people who know everything. They're the people who remain interested. They continue learning long after they have enough experience not to. They ask questions that sit between disciplines. They wander into unfamiliar territory and return with ideas that connect things the rest of us assumed were unrelated.

I suspect that's why learning never quite feels finished. The questions keep changing. New technologies emerge. Familiar disciplines evolve. Staying curious has become less about collecting knowledge and more about continuously updating how I see the world. At the time of writing, one of my own next steps is taking ITIL's new AI Governance module, not because I expect it to provide all the answers, but because AI is rapidly becoming part of the environment in which all of us operate. Understanding how governance, risk, value and human outcomes intersect in that space feels like a worthwhile next step in the journey.

Over the years, I've found myself increasingly drawn to systems thinking for exactly that reason. It encourages you to look beyond individual events and search for relationships. To look beyond symptoms and understand causes. To recognise that what appears to be a technology issue may also be a governance issue, a people issue, a process issue or all three at once.

That way of thinking has shaped not only how I approach digital leadership, but also how I think about professional development. Qualifications have provided frameworks, language and structure. Their greatest value, however, has been helping me connect ideas across disciplines and see familiar problems through different lenses.

Looking back, the most valuable things I've learned have often come from unexpected places. Sometimes from qualifications. Sometimes from colleagues. Sometimes from books. Occasionally from mistakes.

And occasionally from nearly setting fire to dinner.

Professional recognition is a wonderful thing. So are qualifications. So are the communities that sit around them. But their greatest value may be that they reinforce a habit of learning that continues long after the certificate has been framed or the award has been announced.

The award nomination arrived this year. The learning behind it has been accumulating for much longer.

If there is a theme running through any of this, it is probably not about awards at all. It's about staying curious enough to keep learning, even when nobody is asking you to, and even when you're not entirely sure where that learning might lead.

After all, the most useful things we learn are often the things we don't realise we're learning at the time.

Sometimes they help us lead change.

Sometimes they help us navigate complexity.

And every now and then, they help us avoid setting the kitchen on fire.

A Brief Note on Recognising Others

One final thought.

The HotTopics Future CIO 100 sits alongside programmes such as the CIO 100, CDO 100 and CISO 100 and Future CISO 100, recognising leadership, innovation, team development and contribution to the wider profession.

If reading this has brought somebody to mind, consider nominating them when the opportunity arises.

In my experience, the people making the biggest difference are often too busy doing the work to seek recognition themselves.

Sometimes all that's required is for somebody else to notice.

Paul Farrow is Head of Digital Services at HM Treasury. He writes here in a personal capacity and the views expressed are his own.

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