The Chief Uncharted Officer

Last week, I had my regular catch up with a founder in resilience engineering.

He has a habit of being confronting in the most useful way: asking the question that cuts through the comfortable version of a story.

I told him that the Uncharted podcast was getting off the ground—how an idea I had held onto for a while found its moment and how Deniz and I came together as co-hosts.

The idea of Uncharted started about a year and a half ago with questions that kept showing up at the intersection of innovation, risk and security.

• What happens when the pressure to innovate overwhelms the discipline to think through consequences?
• When caution becomes its own constraint on progress?
• When leaders are asked to make decisions about technology, customers and risk without a clear map?

Those questions have only become more urgent. And they have become bigger than the original idea for a podcast.

From there, we started talking about Eudai and the work we are doing there. He mentioned that many marketing agencies are struggling right now — headcount cuts, retainers giving way to project work, and holding-company revenue falling while ad spend grows. Some read it as a structural reset rather than a cycle.

That has not been our experience.

We are seeing an abundance of opportunity—although much of it may not be classically understood as marketing studio work.

The need is rarely just for a campaign, a new website or a better content plan. Organizations are trying to make sense of a changing market, evolving customer expectations, new technologies and internal misalignment. They are asking questions that sit between marketing, product, sales, strategy and operations.

I admitted that I have never quite identified with the title “fractional chief marketing officer.” It implies a certain distance from the work: senior guidance delivered from above, with somebody else carrying the work forward.

That is not how we work.

We are close to the question and close to the making. We help find the right opportunity, build the proof, make the strategic choices and turn them into something a team can carry forward. Positioning, brand, product story, go-to-market and growth all matter—but they are often the visible outputs of deeper work.

So what do you call it?

He thought for a moment. “You’re the glue between a lot of things,” he said.

Then: “Maybe you’re the Chief Uncharted Officer.”

I laughed. But it has stayed with me.

The phrase captures something real. Not a job title, necessarily, but a kind of work: helping teams navigate territory where the answer has not yet been decided. Connecting what they know about their customers, what they can credibly deliver, what the market is beginning to value, and what they can actually execute.

It means making tradeoffs visible before they become expensive. Separating evidence from internal certainty. Giving people enough shared language to make a difficult decision—and enough momentum to act on it.

That is also why Uncharted has become much bigger than an extension of Eudai.

It is a home for the wider conversations behind the work we collectively do in security and innovation: with people thinking seriously about innovation, risk, security and consequential decisions. It asks where our assumptions are too comfortable, where incentives are distorting judgment, and what we might be missing while we chase the obvious answer.

Eudai helps teams turn uncertainty into focused action. Uncharted creates room to examine the uncertainty before we rush past it.

Both are, in their own way, uncharted work.

Uncharted is taking guest pitches and has one partner slot open for season one.