85: From Firefighting to Flow: How CTOs Build Teams That Learn Fast
From The CTO Playbook by Adam Horner
March 3, 2026 · 48 min · Episode 85
About this episode
This episode explores how CTOs can shift their focus from urgency to disciplined learning in complex technical environments.
What if speed as a CTO has less to do with urgency and more to do with discipline? Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. In this episode, I sit down with Bastien Duret, CTO at a French-American company building web-based products in the clinical trials space, to unpack what “moving fast” really means in complex technical environments. As CTOs, we’re taught to value urgency. But when you’re debugging memory leaks across fragmented Android devices or responding to a vendor outage that brings your entire service down, speed starts to look different. The real question becomes when to stem the bleeding and when to slow down long enough to actually learn. We get into what that shift looks like in practice, how leadership changes when problems become learning opportunities, how postmortems build long-term velocity, and why incident response reveals the true operating system of your team. If you’re responsible for uptime, technical strategy, and building resilient teams, this episode will challenge how you…
People in this episode
Host: Adam Horner
Guest: Bastien Duret
Topics covered
- CTO leadership
- team building
- learning from failure
- technical strategy
- incident response
Keywords
- CTO
- team velocity
- incident response
- learning opportunities
- technical strategy
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: theCTOplaybook.com, French-American company
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