Most careers in technology follow a trajectory that appears both logical and rewarding. You begin as an engineer, you deepen your expertise, you become senior, and eventually you take responsibility for teams, systems, and increasingly complex architectures. Over time, you learn how to design for scale, how to optimize performance, how to manage constraints and trade-offs within highly structured environments.
From a technical standpoint, this is real progress. It reflects discipline, intelligence, and the ability to operate within systems that demand precision.
Yet, alongside this progression, something less visible begins to take shape.
As technical fluency increases, the ability to communicate outside that domain often weakens. Not because of a lack of capability, but because the entire environment in which engineers operate trains them in a very specific language. It is a language built on abstractions, metrics, optimization, and formal constraints. It rewards clarity within well-defined boundaries.
The world outside those systems, however, does not function in the same way. It is shaped by ambiguity, perception, incomplete information, and decisions that cannot always be reduced to models or logic. What emerges, over time, is not a lack of understanding, but a growing misalignment between two fundamentally different ways of interpreting reality.
This gap is rarely acknowledged explicitly, yet it becomes evident in everyday interactions: in meetings where explanations remain technically correct but fail to resonate, in discussions where stakeholders speak about impact while engineers respond with architecture, in situations where both sides use the same words but attach entirely different meanings to them.
At the same time, another dynamic unfolds within organizations. Many professionals spend years, sometimes entire careers, within the same company. These organizations provide stability, compensation, and a structured path for growth. They offer tangible benefits and a sense of continuity that is increasingly rare.
In exchange, however, they also shape the boundaries within which thinking occurs.
This is not enforced through explicit rules, but through alignment mechanisms that are deeply embedded in how organizations operate. Priorities are defined through forecasts, direction is influenced by sales, and relevance is continuously reframed by quarterly targets. Over time, this does not simply guide action; it subtly influences how problems are framed and how solutions are imagined.
What gradually emerges is not a loss of intelligence or competence, but a form of cognitive alignment. Thinking becomes consistent with the system, efficient within it, and increasingly dependent on it.
This is not a critique of individuals. It is a structural characteristic of modern organizations. Engineering disciplines optimize for precision and reliability, while organizations optimize for predictability and control. The external world, however, is neither fully predictable nor precisely defined.
In this context, the central challenge is no longer purely technical.
It becomes a matter of cognitive translation.
The ability to move between different domains of understanding, to explain complexity without relying on specialized language, to engage with perspectives that are not system-driven, and, perhaps most importantly, to recognize when the frame itself needs to be questioned.
In an environment increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, where systems are capable of handling growing levels of technical complexity, the differentiating factor shifts. Technical excellence remains necessary, but it is no longer sufficient.
What begins to matter is the ability to connect worlds that do not naturally align.
Berto would have recognized this not in formal settings, but in ordinary moments.
Sitting in a bar in Milan, listening to a conversation unfold, he would notice how two people could speak at length without truly understanding each other. One would carefully explain how a system works, while the other would try to grasp why it matters.
The words would appear aligned, yet the meanings would diverge.
Berto never focused on the correctness of explanations. He paid attention to reactions, to pauses, to subtle shifts in tone. For him, the real signal was not in what was said, but in what failed to connect.
Because the issue was never the technology itself.
It was the distance between those who build it and those who must live with its consequences.
And unlike any system, that distance does not resolve automatically. It requires deliberate effort, every time, to be understood and, ultimately, to be bridged.
