Terms coined or given precise meaning by Anthony S. Jackson in Structural CTO™.
Every term below rests on one idea, so it belongs at the top rather than buried in an entry.
A Structural Bearing™ is a permanent tension between two legitimate systems, neither of which can be removed without breaking something the business needs. What the situation requires is legitimate. What the people in the room can absorb is legitimate. Both stay.
This is a claim about geometry, not about strength. A bearing is not a rating of how much a thing can hold. It is the joint that lets two structures move against each other without either one tearing. Engineers put bearings under bridges for exactly this reason: the deck expands in July and contracts in January, the piers move far less and never in step with it, and that difference has to go somewhere. The bearing is where it goes. It does not remove the difference; it carries the load while permitting the movement, and the bridge stands because the movement was designed for rather than fought.
The term's canonical definition, identical to the one printed in The Edge Case, sits at technicalleader.coach/concepts#structural-bearing. The wording here is the Structural CTO™ reading of the same idea.
The market reads the space between two legitimate systems as a strength problem and answers it with a stronger person, or with more hours from the person already there. That answer fails on a schedule. The variable is distance, and distance is managed rather than closed.
Most of what follows is an instrument for reading a distance of that kind: how far a company has climbed, how far a seat's demands sit from its occupant's capacity, how far a leader reaches with nothing underneath. The rest names what to do once the reading is in hand. Naming the pattern is the first condition for telling your own work apart from everyone else's.
One note on the word, because engineering uses it twice. A structural bearing is a component and a place: the joint above, and the surface where load passes between two members. Bearing capacity is a soil rating: the load the ground will carry. The two are unrelated in the discipline, and both appear below. Structural Bearing™ and The First Load Curve Bearing take the first sense. Bearing capacity takes the second.
Listed roughly in order of appearance in the book.
The shape of a company's need for CTO-level structural decision-making as it grows. Named after the load-deflection curve, which plots an applied load against how a structure actually responds to it. The curve matters because it is not a straight line. A structure absorbs load predictably up to a point, and then its behavior changes character: the same increment that produced a millimeter starts producing a hand's width. Engineers care about that point far more than about the slope leading up to it. Two companies at identical revenue can sit at opposite points on this curve, and company size alone will never tell you which one actually needs a Structural CTO™ right now. What The Load Curve™ rejects is not the existence of a threshold. It is the practice of setting the threshold by revenue or funding stage, which index how big a company is rather than how entangled it is. The threshold is real, it is specific to the company, and locating it is the work. The First Load Curve Bearing is that point named.
Anthony S. Jackson, Structural CTO™, Chapter 1.
The earliest point on the Load Curve™, where a company's need for structural technical thinking has already outgrown what a working technical lead can absorb alongside their existing job, but hasn't yet grown enough to justify a full-time hire. The most commonly missed bearing on the curve, because it gets absorbed as unpaid overtime by whoever is standing closest to the problem instead of being named and engaged directly. Recognizable in a discovery conversation before the prospect has language for their own situation: a single person as the last word on every cross-cutting technical decision, architecture decisions that exist only as institutional memory, "we should really document this" surfacing as a running joke instead of an owned task.
Anthony S. Jackson, Structural CTO™, Chapter 2.
The title this book replaces "Fractional CTO" with. Fractional CTO describes an employment arrangement: hours, duration, contract structure. Structural CTO™ describes a method: reading a company's position on the Load Curve™, naming a First Load Curve Bearing where one exists, and building the structural decisions the company's actual situation requires. The hours a Structural CTO™ works are a consequence of the diagnosis, not the service itself.
Anthony S. Jackson, Structural CTO™, Chapter 4.
Paired with Design Load. What a specific person can actually carry: their strength as a decision-maker or executor, tested against real situations rather than inferred from a title. Borrowed from geotechnical engineering, where bearing capacity is the load the ground itself will carry, established by testing the soil before anyone decides what to build on it. The borrow carries one correction, and the correction is the useful half. Bearing capacity is not a single number a site owns forever. It varies with the width and the depth of the footing set into it; the same ground rates differently under a narrow footing than under a wide one. So capacity belongs to the person, and it is drawn out or suppressed by the shape of the seat they are set into. A leader who reads as under-capacity in one seat is often the same leader who carried far more in a seat built on a wider base. Test the ground before you blame it.
Anthony S. Jackson, Structural CTO™, Chapter 5.
Paired with Bearing Capacity. What a specific seat actually demands, derived again for the work in front of it. A design load is the number on the drawings, and it goes stale the way a job description does: when a building's use changes, engineers do not trust the old number, they derive a new one for the new occupancy and check every member against it. The job description written two reorgs ago is the old number, and the work is deriving the new one. The diagnostic question that matters is whether a person's Bearing Capacity matches their seat's Design Load. Mismatch runs two directions and looks almost nothing alike from the outside: over-capacity shows up as quiet disengagement that ends in a resignation nobody saw coming, under-capacity shows up as decisions arriving late and the same category of fire recurring every quarter, handled competently and never actually prevented.
Anthony S. Jackson, Structural CTO™, Chapter 5.
Paired with Design Load. What a specific seat was engineered to hit: the outcome the role exists to move, as distinct from the specialty it exercises in order to move it. Borrowed from the engineering distinction between a load's magnitude and its direction, which statics calls its line of action. A load is a vector, and a member carries only the part of it running along the axis the member was sized for. Turn the same load ninety degrees and the member holds a fraction of its rating, while the rest of the load still travels, into a path built out of members nobody sized for it. The seat keeps working. The load arrives somewhere else. Design Load asks how much this seat must carry. Design Aim asks what it was built to hit. Runs two directions, both of which produce excellent craft output: the aim was never set, so the seat was constituted around its specialty and nobody is in error; or the aim was set and is not held, and the occupant works to the craft's internal standards instead. Most commonly missed because a seat aimed at the craft, held by someone excellent at the craft, produces exactly the evidence that confirms the aim was right. The aim belongs to the seat and never to the occupant; the possessive form has no valid use.
Anthony S. Jackson, Structural CTO™, Chapter 5.
The distance a leader personally carries load across between two rooms, most commonly their own team and the peer leadership room above or alongside them, with no support point in between. Named after the engineering span: the distance a structural member carries load between two supports, where sag grows with the fourth power of the distance regardless of the material's strength. Measurable without an org chart: watch what happens when the leader takes a real vacation, watch what the team says about what happens above their leader, watch whether the leader can ever be sick, travel, or step back from a meeting without creating a visible gap. Fixed the way an engineer fixes an over-spanned beam, with a support point in the middle rather than a stronger person: a deputy, a documented channel, a standing forum. Halve the span and the sag drops to a sixteenth. Span of control counts the people reporting to a leader. The Primary Span measures the distance a leader covers with nothing underneath, which is why it reads without an org chart.
Anthony S. Jackson, Structural CTO™, Chapter 6.
Architecting to the next band's Design Load. Paired with Sleeving: Camber Architecture™ answers what to build ahead of the load, Sleeving answers how it gets funded. Named after the manufactured beam, which is made with a deliberate upward curve calibrated so that when the dead load arrives, it deflects to level; the deviation is built in advance, sized to a load that does not yet exist. The word is chosen over plainer alternatives because it also answers the objection this work always draws. A cambered beam looks wrong before it is loaded. It looks like a mistake. Building for a band a company has not reached looks identical, and it looks that way to the people paying for it. Camber is the word that explains why the appearance is correct. Runs on two placements rather than one: the revenue band is where the money says the company is, a lookup rather than a verdict, and the structural band is where the practices actually are. The distance between the two is the finding.
Anthony S. Jackson, Structural CTO™, Chapter 7.
Casting capacity for the next band's load into work the current band is already paying for. Paired with Camber Architecture™: Camber Architecture™ answers what to build ahead of the load, Sleeving answers how it gets funded, since no organization approves budget to prepare for a load that has not arrived yet. Named after the construction sleeve, a void cast into a concrete pour so a pipe or conduit can pass through later, placed during a pour that was happening anyway because coring the slab afterward costs many times more and weakens what is already built. Not concealment: the sanctioned work is delivered visibly and on schedule, specified one layer more carefully than its own mandate required, so the capability it carries is waiting the moment a route to the next band opens. Recognizable only in hindsight, as a gap that turned out to be small when everyone expected it to be large.
Anthony S. Jackson, Structural CTO™, Chapter 7.
What a Structural CTO™ is, and why the role exists, is explained at structuralcto.com. The Load Curve™ has its own home at theloadcurve.com, where current market ranges for every stage are kept.